An entertaining talk about the world’s football statues,
by Dr Chris Stride, Sporting Statues Project, University of Sheffield
Pelé has eleven - though one had its arms cut off. Sheffield United have three... Wednesday have none (yet). Sven Goran Eriksson has one in his local swimming pool. China’s 2002 World Cup Squad of 2002 were honoured with a statue each - and then lost all three matches!
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of football statues, of which there are now over 560 located around the globe, across 69 nations, 95% of them erected in the past two decades. I’ll be explaining why football clubs, fans and local authorities have acquired a taste for these populist, traditional and often kitsch sculptures, using eight examples that include detours into sports marketing, art history, civic identity, mourning, and fan activism. A statue can tell us as much about the society that erects it as it can about its subject – so what do these bronze ballplayers say about the nations, clubs and fans who erect them?
Thursday 19th October 2017, 5.45pm - 6.45pm,
at DINA, Cambridge Street, Sheffield City Centre.
FREE admission, no advance tickets - just turn up after work!
** Part of the Off The Shelf Literary Festival 2017 **
Dr Chris Stride is an applied statistician and peripatetic statistics trainer/consultant with a sideline in sport history, who is based at the University of Sheffield. For the past 6 years he has researched the development of monuments of sports people under the guise of the Sporting Statues Project, resulting in a sprawling online database, several academic papers, magazine articles and a strange array of press coverage, ranging from the New York Times to The Cricket Statistician. Chris and collaborator Ffion Thomas recently completed the project’s final phase, collecting information on statues of footballers from around the world.
