In recent years there has been a clear growth in academic interest towards the world of sports, as well as an increase in audiovisual and media production focused on its main characters, stories and places. On that note, the Spanish case is specially complex and rich, given that throughout the 20th century, sports and particularly football, have generated an ecosystem of communicative processes, public figures and visual motifs with deep liaisons in the structures of political, economic and civil powers in the country. The reinforcement of such system goes back to the use of sport and media under Francoism, that is, the imagery that Manuel Vázquez-Montalbán and Julián García-Candau labeled nacionalfutbolismo. That concept encompasses an extremely pregnant corpus of cinematic fictions, newsreels and graphic press coverage, where big sporting stars performed as actors in films while they appeared in the NO-DO and on the covers of newspapers and magazines, thus creating a series of historical, political, sociological and cultural ramifications with no equivalent in other national cinematographies of the period, blending propaganda, banal nationalism and celebrity culture.

The goal of our research project is to critically identify, analyse and document the main themes and forms of visual representation of football in Spain during Francoism, focusing on three aspects:

  1. Class discourses
  2. Gender roles and biases
  3. National construction

To do so, a process of comparative historiographical documentation is being developed within the project, juxtaposing materials from:

  • Fiction films [30-35 features]
  • Documentary newsreels [700 h NO-DO]
  • Photojournalism [20,000 pages]

within the 1939-1975 period and its pre/post junctures.

 

In dialogue with leading researches in the fields of sport sociology, iconology, star studies, gender studies and critical theory, the project studies the patterns of visual representation and performance of footballers both in fictional works and in reality, in order to expose the relations between football, power and the establishment, and foster critical thinking about this key topic in our society. Throughout the analysis of images and historical documents, the research configues a list of key themes, figures and visual motifs of nacionalfutbolismo that stand as the iconographic node of the project. Textual analysis, from the triple perspective of class, gender and national construction, is being complemented with methodologies of parametric quantification, mapping and data visualization, along with audiovisual re-editing tools and reappropriation.

The project assumes the hypothesis that the visual motifs, themes and figures of the Francoist period may have iconographic echoes in subsequent historical periods, and particularly, in the contemporary one, due to the exponential growth of audiovisual products centered on football. Therefore, the research outcomes are not only shared in key academic impact forums, but also, through outreach transference and cultural actions, such as screenings, artistic reappropriations and professional workshops, with the aim of underlining the connections between images of the past and images of the present. The reason for focusing on Francoism is above all the rich documental depth of the period, as well as the will to create methodological and theoretical tools that allow for the interpretation of contemporary images, figures and social issues by articulating a historic-critical documentation of the 20th century visual archive.