FREE · Football Research in an Enlarged Europe: Identity dynamics, perception patterns and cultural change in Europe’s most prominent form of popular culture

The FREE project aims at understanding the impact of the most popular and most widely shared of all expressions of popular culture - football - on identity dynamics in an enlarged Europe.In a truly interdisciplinary perspective FREE seeks to explore an apparently non-political, but fully existing sub-cultural European public space of communication: the European football scene in the largest sense.FREE will bring together different approaches to this European public space:a) it will study how collective memories of popular culture have emerged during the history of European football, what trace they have left in mutual perception patterns across the continent and to what extent cultural commonality may grow out of historically grown diversity in the field of everyday culture;b) it will carry out multi-dimensional empirical research work that is innovative both in design and scope, in order to produce new insight into the complex identity dynamics resulting from processes of Europeanisation of football and strongly increased mobility over the last two decades;c) it will attempt to shed light on the issues raised by the growing feminisation of the game such as gender construction and attitudes toward traditional patterns of identification;d) it will provide an in-depth analysis of changing perceptions of European approaches to football governance as a legitimacy-enhancing project and produce strategic recommendations for policy-makers and other stakeholders in this field.Through an ambitious dissemination strategy the FREE project aims at increasing awareness among citizens, stakeholders and policy-makers about the issue of cultural diversity and commonality in the field of popular culture and its often underestimated impact on the political, economic and social dimensions of the European integration process.