The football turn in contemporary art: how the game became an artistic language

Authors

  • Emanuele Rinaldo Meschini Università di Bologna

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6093/2611-6693/13465

Abstract

The article explores the “football turn” in contemporary art, analysing how football has progressively become a legitimate cultural object within the artistic field. Drawing on the model of cultural diamond developed by Wendy Griswold the study examines the intersections between football and contemporary art, focusing on the practices, institutions, and symbolic processes that have enabled their convergence. Through UK-based case studies ranging from the 1953 exhibition Football and the Fine Arts to recent initiatives such as OOF Gallery and Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, the article reconstructs the historical and sociological conditions that have transformed football from a site of mass alienation into a space for artistic dialogue and experimentation. By intersecting art and football, the analysis highlights how these two systems, once considered irreconcilable, overlap in the neoliberal order of images, generating a hybrid cultural ecosystem where symbolic logics are shared, reconfigured, reproduced and contested.

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Author Biography

Emanuele Rinaldo Meschini, Università di Bologna

Emanuele Rinaldo Meschini is Researcher in Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes at the University of Bologna (RTDA). His research explores the relationship between artistic practices, social movements and urban participation. In 2016 he founded the collective Autopalo, through which he explores forms of participation at the intersection of artistic practices, football, and organised fandom. He has taught as an adjunct lecturer at IUAV University of Venice, where he also conducted research on culture-led urban regeneration. He published his PhD thesis in 2021, devoted to Italian artistic practices in urban space and to the history of the earliest socially engaged art projects in the United States. In 2023 he published Come leggere il monumento o la sua rimozione (Postmedia), a study on the relationship between history, identity construction and the visual arts. He has published in academic journals such as Comunicazioni Sociali, Piano B, Tracce Urbane, Connessioni Remote and FIELD. He is currently conducting research on the role of Cultural Departments within Argentine sport clubs, with a particular focus on the city of Buenos Aires.

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Published

2026-04-10

How to Cite

Meschini, Emanuele Rinaldo. 2026. “The Football Turn in Contemporary Art: How the Game Became an Artistic Language”. Eracle. Journal of Sport and Social Sciences 9 (1):67-84. https://doi.org/10.6093/2611-6693/13465.

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 1 (2026): Miscellany

Section

Articles