Making Refereeing Global? How FIFA’s International Courses for Referees Helped Lay the Groundwork for Football’s Commercialization, 1948–1976

Abstract

In the late 1940s, international football refereeing courses originated, and they established a new, proactive, and highly practical regime in driving the global spread and standardization of refereeing knowledge. The contribution illuminates the extent to which the courses’ organizers and participants might be described as ‘agents of globalization’, in the particular context of the courses’ primary goal of generating binding worldwide standards regarding the interpretation and application of the Laws of the Game governing international football. In this light, the courses can be read as ‘media of interconnection’ – as meetings whose chief outcome was the creation of networks and communications among referees and the standardization and alignment of their knowledge and practices. The courses thus became one of the instruments of the emergence of ‘world football’ as a transnational interactional space. The standardizing effects of the refereeing courses constituted a necessary precondition for the worldwide standardization of the game, so that ‘world football’ could act on its subsequent expansion. From a more theoretical and inductively derived point of view, it can be argued that this enabled in turn football’s step-by-step transformation into an entity amenable to commodification – or: a product marketed globally by FIFA.