This paper was originally delivered at the eass (European Association for Sociology of Sport) Conference in Münster, Germany (2007), and is the first to examine the territoriality of football clubs as an alternative way of understanding European political boundaries. Bottazzi focuses on European football’s ‘G14’, a group of clubs modelled on the G8 group of economies. An examination of G14’s rules for membership, together with bibliographical research and a series of interviews with the spatial sociologist and sports journalist Pippo Russo, helped in the development of a new kind of territorial analysis. This contrasts two spatial notions: the island, an almost primitive spatial figure, and on the other, the rhetoric of flows and connections which informs most contemporary theoretical discussion on territories.
Bottazzi’s paper is a polemical comparison between a definition of the European territory as imagined by theoreticians versus an empirical analysis of what is really happening. The research fills a gap in the work of Bottazzi’s contemporaries: Stefano Boeri, who, through the architectural research group Multiplicity, explores issues of identity, politics, and geography in Europe; Giorgio Agamben, who has examined the concept of the paradigm in his book on method, The Signature of All Things (2009), and Professor Keller Easterling, who, in writings such as Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (2005), researches familiar spatial types in precarious political situations around the world.
From Bottazzi’s original publication came an invitation to submit the paper to a website hosted by the Network Architecture Lab, Columbia University in a joint venture with Domus Web. It was published online in 2010 (http://testbed2.audc.org/projects/publish/islands_spatial_politics_soccer), and has formed the basis of subsequent research in a project called ‘Molecular City’ (2010–12).