New Books In Sports

Today we are joined by Richard Mills, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of East Anglia, and the author of The Politics of Football in Yugoslavia: Sport, Nationalism and the State (I. B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of football in Yugoslavia, the missed possibilities for postwar Yugoslav unity through sport, and football’s role in the disintegration of the Yugoslav state in the 1990s. In The Politics of Football in Yugoslavia, Mills investigates the rise and fall of Yugoslavia through the lens of sport. His work proceeds chronologically, beginning in the early Twentieth Century with the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. He traces the politicization of sport as the Kingdom integrated imported sporting codes and local Sokol organisations into their state building program. He continues into the Second World War and the Liberation, showing how football served the forces of collaboration and resistance. Tito’s Yugoslavia mobilized football across the co