UEFA at the movies: producing space in the 21st century football film

Abstract

This article focuses on the Goal! series of films (2005-2008), with a particular focus on the first two instalments arguing for the role they perform in football’s shaping of space and identity in the early twenty-first century. Focussing especially on the importance of the UEFA Champions League competition to these films, I argue that the films serve as part of the competition’s wider status as a sports-media ‘mega-event’. I show in turn how, like the Champions League itself, the films are part of an economic and mediatic project central to the European Union project during this same period, and the importance of specific cities and clubs within these terms. The article concludes with some reflections on how the Goal! series both anticipates and helps usher in the more recent emergence of ‘global cities’ within the European, and indeed world, football ecology.