Since the advent of satellite television, football has grown to become not just the most-watched sport in the world, but arguably the closest thing our globalised age has to a universal popular culture. This increasing cultural heft has prompted the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa), the game’s governing body, to open a new museum near its headquarters in Zürich.
The exhibition space stretches across 3,000 sq m and has lots of interactives. As well as the inevitable cafe, shop and sports bar, the museum has a substantial library and it has also taken control of the organisation’s documentation centre.
In just three years – and comfortably ahead of the multi-media bonanza that will be the 2018 World Cup in Russia – Fifa has built up an impressive collection from scratch, with the aim of developing a series of successful exhibitions that can tour internationally.
Why a Fifa museum?
It’s very simple: if you look at football – world football – it touches the lives of around 1.6 billion people. It’s one of the biggest phenomena in the world, so it’s about time that it should be rewarded with a museum to really show what effect it has had.
Did you have a model?
Plenty. Obviously, we looked at the Manchester United Museum, the UK’s National Football Museum. We also examined individual club museums, but a lot of them just glorify their own club, the trophies, and whatever other paraphernalia that comes with it. So we also looked at museums outside the sports sector, including the Smithsonian, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Abba Museum, the Olympic Museum, and Museum of Modern Art , among others. We’ve done a lot of benchmarking.
What are you aiming to achieve with the museum?
The first and most important objective is for people to leave the museum with smiles on their faces, and to come out and say: “Now I understand why this game is so fascinating. Now I understand how it’s actually much more than a game.” In terms of numbers we hope to eventually get to about 250,000 visitors a year. We want it to be a vibrant place, with conferences, debates and events. We want to be a centre of learning about football, because the in-depth history of football has not really been properly explored.
So research is important?
We have a research centre, a library of 4,000 books and we are digitising documents from the history of Fifa. As we’re going along we’re looking at how Fifa developed and grew. While going through the archives of Fifa, we’ve found all sorts, from documents on the development of the laws of the game, to those considering ideas about the World Cup – we’re finding a lot of fascinating stuff. The history of football and the history of Fifa are not always the same thing. Is that an issue for the museum?
We are not about football’s anthropological origins, the versions of the game played by Mayans, Chinese and lots of other cultures. We begin telling the story in 1863 with the foundation of the English organisation, the Football Association, or FA. Somebody said: “Let’s organise this game; let’s give it rules, a structure, contracts.” Fifa only came together in 1904, and we begin the story from before that.
How has the museum dealt with the recent corruption controversies surrounding Fifa?
Last year was not a simple year for Fifa. Last May we were asking ourselves: “What do we do now? Is the organisation surviving? What will happen, what does it mean, and how do we depict that?” Interestingly, the crisis made us stronger. We came to the conclusion that the museum is needed even more, to talk about the beautiful game and its importance on a global scale. We also delved into the archives and saw that it was not the first crisis in Fifa’s history.
So it’s more than a corporate museum?
A lot of corporate museums talk about their products and have logos everywhere, but you will find very few Fifa logos, hardly any, in the museum. Before we opened, people thought it would be full of statues of Sepp Blatter and there would be lots of self-glorification, but that’s not the case at all. We are showing the result of the work of Fifa, the member associations, everybody. How football touches everybody’s lives and what football does to the world.
Scott Anthony is a journalist and fellow in public history at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Cost 140m Swiss Francs (£98m)
Main funder Fédération Internationale de Football Association
Architect SAM Architekten und Partner AG, Zürich
Exhibition design TRIAD Berlin Projektgesellschaft mbH
Admission Adult CHF24 (£17)
The exhibition space stretches across 3,000 sq m and has lots of interactives. As well as the inevitable cafe, shop and sports bar, the museum has a substantial library and it has also taken control of the organisation’s documentation centre.
In just three years – and comfortably ahead of the multi-media bonanza that will be the 2018 World Cup in Russia – Fifa has built up an impressive collection from scratch, with the aim of developing a series of successful exhibitions that can tour internationally.
Why a Fifa museum?
It’s very simple: if you look at football – world football – it touches the lives of around 1.6 billion people. It’s one of the biggest phenomena in the world, so it’s about time that it should be rewarded with a museum to really show what effect it has had.
Did you have a model?
Plenty. Obviously, we looked at the Manchester United Museum, the UK’s National Football Museum. We also examined individual club museums, but a lot of them just glorify their own club, the trophies, and whatever other paraphernalia that comes with it. So we also looked at museums outside the sports sector, including the Smithsonian, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Abba Museum, the Olympic Museum, and Museum of Modern Art , among others. We’ve done a lot of benchmarking.
What are you aiming to achieve with the museum?
The first and most important objective is for people to leave the museum with smiles on their faces, and to come out and say: “Now I understand why this game is so fascinating. Now I understand how it’s actually much more than a game.” In terms of numbers we hope to eventually get to about 250,000 visitors a year. We want it to be a vibrant place, with conferences, debates and events. We want to be a centre of learning about football, because the in-depth history of football has not really been properly explored.
So research is important?
We have a research centre, a library of 4,000 books and we are digitising documents from the history of Fifa. As we’re going along we’re looking at how Fifa developed and grew. While going through the archives of Fifa, we’ve found all sorts, from documents on the development of the laws of the game, to those considering ideas about the World Cup – we’re finding a lot of fascinating stuff. The history of football and the history of Fifa are not always the same thing. Is that an issue for the museum?
We are not about football’s anthropological origins, the versions of the game played by Mayans, Chinese and lots of other cultures. We begin telling the story in 1863 with the foundation of the English organisation, the Football Association, or FA. Somebody said: “Let’s organise this game; let’s give it rules, a structure, contracts.” Fifa only came together in 1904, and we begin the story from before that.
How has the museum dealt with the recent corruption controversies surrounding Fifa?
Last year was not a simple year for Fifa. Last May we were asking ourselves: “What do we do now? Is the organisation surviving? What will happen, what does it mean, and how do we depict that?” Interestingly, the crisis made us stronger. We came to the conclusion that the museum is needed even more, to talk about the beautiful game and its importance on a global scale. We also delved into the archives and saw that it was not the first crisis in Fifa’s history.
So it’s more than a corporate museum?
A lot of corporate museums talk about their products and have logos everywhere, but you will find very few Fifa logos, hardly any, in the museum. Before we opened, people thought it would be full of statues of Sepp Blatter and there would be lots of self-glorification, but that’s not the case at all. We are showing the result of the work of Fifa, the member associations, everybody. How football touches everybody’s lives and what football does to the world.
Scott Anthony is a journalist and fellow in public history at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Project data
Cost 140m Swiss Francs (£98m)
Main funder Fédération Internationale de Football Association
Architect SAM Architekten und Partner AG, Zürich
Exhibition design TRIAD Berlin Projektgesellschaft mbH
Admission Adult CHF24 (£17)