Topophilia or Topoporno? Patriotic Place Attachment in International Football Derbies

A football team is dominantly regarded as an icon and a representation of a certain place. Especially when it concerns the national team, in which the best players of a nation are selected, the identification with the team results in striking imaginations and discourses on ‘us and them' and ‘here and there In international games, it is felt that the honour, the esteem, and the image of a nation is at stake. In order to understand the blatant and often extravagant identification of people with a national team, in this contribution we make an attempt to analyse and understand the production and reproduction of spatial competition of identities as uttered in derbies, that is, interurban or international football games between two neighbouring places. The analysis in this paper is particularly focused on why and how the tension between two neighbouring national football teams is constructed and how places are represented, symbolised, and flagged in these derbies. The argument is illustrated by a close scrutiny of the production of nationalism and conflicting identities in the derbies of the Netherlands vs. Belgium and the Netherlands vs. Germany.