Football and Ethnicity in Hungarian Fiume-Rijeka: Sports, Nationalisation and Multilingualism at the Dawn of the 20th Century

In the late decades of its Hungarian rule, the city of Fiume/Rijeka and its vicinity hosted a variety of football teams and clubs through which players and local fans developed their specific cultural patterns of identification and belonging, along and beyond national identities. Engagement in sports, and particularly in football, both from the perspective of players and of followers reflected the cultural and political divides of this territory, but also reproduced its multilingualism and social melding. The scope of this article thus conveys how football and other sports responded to Hungarian, Italian and Croatian nationalist calls to strengthen ethnic bonds and boundaries, and expressed the strength of distinct national communities in a linguistically mixed urban fishpond in the multinational Habsburg state, coupled with how the passion for this sport and the trans-ethnic attitudes of urban life complicated the ideal picture of a society naturally divided into fixed national identities and ethnically coherent circles of socialisation and cultural mobilisation.