Cluj: Big City Versions of the Football Gatherings

The fourth chapter presents the big city versions of the football gatherings in the eighties. The Cluj ethnographic case study shows the widespread consumption of forbidden football. As in Eastern-Transylvania, the dissident football consumption became a mass phenomenon, a significant community event, and a powerful social institution. The chapter deals with the case of one of the largest cities in Inner-Transylvania, and argues that the football gatherings functioned depending on the local and rapidly changing complex social relationships. It was primarily embedded into the workplace relations of the first-generation working class moving to the residential districts during forced socialist industrialisation and urbanisation. The chapter highlights that older neighbours’ relationships also played a major role in the development of football gatherings. The phenomenon, which was related to the local sports life and leisure activities, showed several variants as follows: the commercialised/marketed version; the closed version of nomenclature; the workplace version; and the mass version of open air match-viewing on the surrounding hills. The latter reached large scale in 1982 and was constantly developing throughout the eighties. The chapter also focuses on the influence of the inter-ethnic environment, but concludes that the nature of the phenomenon showed very strong universal features, leaving behind the Romanian-Hungarian ethic differences. The chapter concludes that the need and constant curiosity concerning the forbidden football matches also brought to life a phenomenon far beyond itself: it became a means of escape from socialist realities and a form of social resistance.