We called workers, but people came who played football. Sport, immigration and integration in France and Western Germany in the long 1960s

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Studies of immigration history as well as sports history have gained a lot of academic prestige in recent years, although they are certainly separated from each other and hardly ever intertwined. For the long 1960s, empirical studies in contemporary history linking the two fields are nearly inexistent, especially when taking transnational aspects into consideration. The project tries to fill this gap and examines the relevance of sports for the integration of southern European immigrants, specifically the role of amateur soccer in France and the Federal Republic of Germany. The analysis will mainly focus on case studies of soccer playing immigrants who either played in already existing German or French club structures or in self organized clubs. Of particular importance will be the experiences they made, the strategies and scopes of action they had in local contexts. For both countries, this perspective allows a critical questioning of the then common thinking in determined patterns of assimilation and integration as well as a questioning of dominant discourses of federations and policy-makers proclaiming sports as the ideal instrument of integration. The project aims at facing such assertions with the concrete cultural contacts and practices of soccer in the 1960s. Taking on a transnational perspective, interests lie in similarities, differences as well as cross-border franco-german interdependencies and especially in the question of whether the athletic team spirit and rivalry and their respective representations raised more analogies than structural divergencies between France and Western Germany in traditions of immigration, in opportunity structures and in framings of political culture might suggest. Another question would be to what extent immigrant soccer can work as a sensor and cipher for the degree of liberalization achieved in both societies during the 1960s. And what roles do debates, controversies and activities dealing with sports and migration play in providing deeper insights into everyday interaction with otherness in times of "Wirtschaftswunder" and "trente glorieuses"?