The FIFA Museum will take part in an exciting on-stage talk to mark the five year anniversary of FC Zurich's Museum. 'Why collect football?' is a free public event that will take place Monday, 4 April 2016, at 7pm inside the FCZ-Museum. It is part of a programme of events at the Swiss club's museum as part of a temporary exhibition there called 'Collecting football: How is football collected as a cultural asset in Switzerland?'
The FIFA World Football Museum's Collections Manager, Moritz Ansorge, will be one of the guests taking part in the group discussion. Moderated by Saro Pepe, head of the FCZ-Museum, Ansorge will be joined by Andreas Wittner, an archivist at FC Bayern München and member of staff at the club’s museum ‘FC Bayern Erlebniswelt’, and Christian Koller, head of the Swiss Social Archives and a renowned sports historian.
"Why has football become so obsessed by history?" asked Christoph Biermann in 2014 in the introduction of his award-winning book 'When we dream of football'. Biermann analyses this question and outlines how he believes that a new "culture of memorising" and "mythologisation" has started to capture the imagination of many within the world of football.
In Germany, more and more clubs have opened their own museums in the past few years, starting to make more deliberate efforts to store objects, documents and photographs from their past. These items can be seen as forming part of the fabric of the club, illustrating its history. This developing trend of celebrating the past, so to speak, started even earlier in England, with the National Football Museum opening its doors in 2001.
Does football deserve a place among the great and good of the world's cultural collections and museums? If it does, then which football objects are worth being preserved? And which objects should be laid to waste? How valuable are these individual artefacts from so-called "big players" and "big matches"? And who benefits from the preserving and curating football history? All these questions and more will be debated at the event.
The public event will take place Monday, 4 April 2016, at 7pm at FCZ-Museum (Werdstrasse 21, 8004 Zurich). Entrance is for everyone for free.