Rituals and Practices of Memorial Culture in Football

At first sight, death and sports seem to be part of two completely different worlds that never meet. Death has no place ‘in sports events … it is situated near the borders of sports’ (Gebauer, 1986, p. 277). This is not only true for sport as contest, but also as regards the location of sports competitions. Whenever stadia or gymnasia function as a place of death, it is either a case of artistic fiction (Herzog, 2005, p. 183) or concerns unusual exceptions, such as the Nuremberg Trials, at the end of which the main culprits died hanging from the gallows erected in a sports hall. Similarly, sports grounds may turn into places of death in military dictatorships, when opponents of the regime are imprisoned, tortured, executed or murdered, as for example in 1973 after Augusto Pinochet’s military coup in Chile (Marschik, 2006, pp. 81–82). Nor should it be forgotten that the ‘revolutionary icon’ Che Guevara initiated show trials for the benefit of thousands of ‘fans’ against alleged ‘losers’ and ‘dissenters’, to be played out before revolutionary tribunals in a sports palace which had been erected under Fulgencio Batista. The trials were broadcast as a kind of reality TV series and culminated in random death sentences (Koenen, 2008, p. 191).