Book review: Memorial culture in football: media, rituals and practices of remembering, remembrance and forgetting

Mike Huggins, University of Cumbria, reviews the book 'Memorial culture in football - media, rituals and practices of remembering, remembrance and forgetting' (title in German: 'Memorialkultur im Fussballsport: Medien, Rituale and Praticken des Erinnerns, Gedenkens und Vergessens'), edited by Markwart Herzog (W. Kohlhammer GmbH, 2012).

Some years ago, when I presented an ISHPES keynote speech at Stirling on sporting death, it was a subject to which sports sociologists and historians of sport had paid little attention. Indeed, it was initially rather my interest in the cultural, visual and material sources of sport that had led me to explore the ways in which death was marked, and I subsequently wrote a number of papers exploring the commemorative aspects of sport stars' death. In recent years, the memorialisation and commemoration of aspects of sporting culture more generally have attracted the attention of a growing number of scholars across the English-speaking world, including, for example, Gary Osmond, Murray Phillips, Dave Russell and Maureen Smith, and the research base is now growing rapidly. Its links to heritage, nostalgia and changing perceptions of the past are also being examined, amidst growing concern for, and conflicts over the loss of football's architectural cultural heritage, as a number of essays in the recent collection edited by Jeff Hill, Kevin Moore and Jason Wood, Sport, History and Heritage: Studies in Public Representation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), have illustrated.