Stadiums are never just places where football matches happen. They are architectural statements; places for business and entertainment (equipped with smart tech, and marketed as “entertainment hubs”); and spaces for loud assemblies where fans sing, chant, and sometimes smuggle in their politics. Stadiums, large and small, can feel like sacred shrines or provide the comfort of home in a crowd of strangers. They can even be great equalizers: spaces where the elites in luxurious suites and ordinary people behind the goalposts watch poor boys from immigrant neighborhoods in Europe or signed from marginal clubs in South America and Africa outshine academy graduates and pay-to-play prospects under the same floodlights. The anthropologist Christian Bromberger described the stadium as “one of the few spaces where a modern urban society can offer itself a material image of its unity and its differences.” 

There are legendary stadiums. Diego Maradona called Boca Juniors’ La Bombonera in Buenos Aires “a temple of football,” a place where visiting stars lost their nerve. He transformed Napoli’s Stadio Maradona into a fortress, adored FNB Stadium in Johannesburg, and revered monumental arenas like Rio’s Maracanã, London’s Wembley Stadium, Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca, Barcelona’s Camp Nou, Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu, and Liverpool’s Anfield - where the anthemic “You’ll Never Walk Alone” rises like a wall of sound.

Stadiums can be treacherous spaces. In Spain and Italy, and other nations, they sometimes turn into cauldrons of racist hatred, with vile chants aimed at Black players, foreign and domestic. Among die-hard ultras groups of European and South American clubs - and even national teams like Argentina - bigots often feel emboldened in their racism and xenophobia, many seeking the thrill of violent confrontation with enemy fans and the police. Stadiums can also serve as stages for the expression of political protests or dissent.  In Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Egypt, for example, supporters mock their governments’ complicity with the West and lip service on Palestine while tolerating Israel’s oppression. The terraces sometimes become megaphones for trenchant critiques and, occasionally, political mobilization.