ABSTRACT

To depict a national community as a football team points to some key positions regarding nationalism and sport. In paraphrasing Benedict Anderson, who entitled his most influential book on nationalism ‘Imagined Communities’, and by using the words ‘more real’ and ‘team’, Eric Hobsbawm delves into well-known images and challenges of nationalism and sport relationships. The quotation has been cited repeatedly in academic and popular writings on the subject.2