PETER, Laszlo - Forbidden Football in Ceausescu Romania

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FORBIDDEN
FOOTBALL IN
CEAUSESCU’S
ROMANIA
László Péter
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László Péter
Forbidden Football
in Ceausescu’s Romania
László Péter
Babes-Bolyai University
Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Global Culture and Sport Series

ISBN 978-3-319-70708-2 ISBN 978-3-319-70709-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70709-9
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Preface
This book discusses the ethnographic description and the sociological

interpretation of the “football gatherings” that evolved in the central part
of Romania. In the eighties, the Romanian public television (TVR), as the
only TV channel in Romania, did not broadcast football mega-events
(European Championships, World Championships, international competi-
tions such as UEFA, or the European Champion Clubs’ Cup, the prede-
cessor of the Champions’ League) for economic and political reasons. The
mass media was appropriated by the Ceaușescu family for propagandistic
purposes. As a consequence, the large public living in the inner regions of
the country (the Szeklerland, Cluj and its vicinity, Southern-Transylvania)
being interested in football matches sought to and, by a collective effort,
succeeded to develop an alternative method to watch the games. They
went out in large numbers to the higher hills and mountains in the vicinity
of their homes, in order to “catch” the broadcast of the TV channels from
the neighbouring countries, with the technical tools at their disposal, or
by domestically fabricated ones, following the games in poor quality, yet
defying the will of the political power.
The research based on interviews focuses on finding answers to three
simple, yet important questions: How was this phenomenon organised and
how did it work? What kind of community role did it fulfil? And what fur-
ther social consequences had the symbolic extensions attached to the phenome-
non by the actors?
According to the central thesis of the book, football gatherings point
beyond the simple practice of media and sports consumption and, mainly
after 1982, deep extensions are attached to it. The phenomenon, by
v
vi PREFACE
r eaching mass proportions, grew into a social institution of a penetrating

force: it produced an alternative social space that—even if only for a short
time—succeeded to slide out from the direct control of the authorities. In
other words: the activities and dissident public formed on the occasions of
the common events on the hills and mountains can also be seen as collec-
tive manifestations of silent resistance, exit or escape and protest, besides
their role of strengthening the community, ethnic identity and solidarity,
respectively their alternative role of entertainment. The case studies in the
book flash a light on the weak points of dictatorship, and underline the
role of foreign information against the oppressive power.
Fobidden Football in Ceaușescu’s Romania provides an insight into the
everyday life under the pressure of dictatorship in Romania in the eighties
and, through the special patterns of sports consumption, it tells the social
(his)story of one of the Eastern European countries with the most closed
communist system, alongside “small individual stories” related to football
and subjective experiences/events, and first-hand observations.
Cluj-Napoca, Romania László Péter

Acknowledgements
Many people deserve credit for this book. In addition to the publisher and
the kind editors, I am exceptionally grateful for Professor Jarmo Valkola in
Tallinn, who came up with the idea at University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
The advice received from Professor Miklós Hadas was extremely useful, as
were the professional observations of my colleagues Zsombor Csata,
István Horváth and Nándor László Magyari.
I owe a debt of gratitude to all the participants of the research: the
subjects, interlocutors, helpers, and to my enthusiastic, ingenious research
assistant Sarolta Veress, as well as to other experts, and friends, with whom
I had the chance to carry out constructive and inspiring conversations and
productive debates. Thanks are due to the inspiring sociologist colleagues
from whom I received important guidance and directives after my presen-
tation at the EASS conference in Copenhagen (2016) and also in the pro-
cess of writing this book.
The support of my friend, Emőd Farkas, was again priceless.
This book could never have been written without the self-denying assis-
tance, constructive criticism, professional support and encouragement of
Gyöngyi Pásztor.
Cluj/Kolozsvár/Klausenburg
August 2017
vii
Contents
1 Introduction to the Ethnography and Research

of Football Gatherings in Romania 1
2 Ciumani: The Sport Takes the Community

to the Mountains 19
3 Bălan: Angry Men in The Night 47
4 Cluj: Big City Versions of the Football Gatherings 61
5 Southern-Transylvania—Further Faces of the Extended

Phenomenon 85
6 The Social and Political Significance of Football

Gatherings: Escape to Freedom 93
7 Lessons and Conclusions 123
ix
x Contents
Football Gatherings in Eastern-Transylvania, Romania

“
during the Eighties.” Photos taken by Árpád Kémenes 131
References 153
Index 159
CHAPTER 1
Introduction to the Ethnography
and Research of Football Gatherings
in Romania
Abstract The first, introductory, chapter identifies the central questions

of the book and lays the foundations to answer them, putting the issue in
context. Romania had turned into a closed country by the eighties; those
in power attempted to restrict and control all the information coming
from abroad. Everyday life influenced by neo-Stalinist policy was charac-
terised by generalised poverty, fear, control and coldness. As the national
public television was under complete political control and exclusively
served the purposes of propaganda and personality cult, it did not broad-
cast international football events. Thus, a specific phenomenon unfolds in
the Romania of the eighties: inside the country people walk to the moun-
tains to watch the matches, which results in the practice of football gather-
ings. The chapter introduces the parameters of multi-sited ethnographic
research, and alongside the introductory case study from Cluj it demon-
strates that because of its mass character, watching the games turned into
a form of silent resistance. The opening chapter sets out the organization
of the book.
Keywords Romania • Football • Football gathering • Propaganda •

Resistance
© The Author(s) 2018 1

L. Péter, Forbidden Football in Ceausescu’s Romania, Global Culture
and Sport Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70709-9_1
2 L. PÉTER
FC Steaua Plays Up in the Mountains—1987

Several dozen mostly young and middle-aged men walk in small groups
close to each other. They pace softly, in silence, but firmly; one can see that
they know very well where they are heading. As they move, it is clear that
they know the way. They have just left behind the central railway station,
built at the turn of the century, and now they are passing the cobbled
streets of the residential suburb behind it. Sometimes they cynically or
morosely exchange a manly, vulgar remark or two. They talk confidentially
among themselves, it is clear that they know very well the ones with whom
they are walking in the same group. As they leave the houses behind, it
seems that their conversations become livelier, too. They start speaking
more loudly and look more relaxed and more open in expressing their dis-
satisfaction. Most of them are Romanians, but there are also quite a num-
ber of ethnic Hungarians among them.
Faded, uniform-like attires are characteristic; many of the men come
directly from the factories, where their shifts have just ended, as they say
in workman slang. There are younger boys, too, among them, with sec-
ondary school age/teenage faces, joining the constantly growing, not-so-
jolly company after the usual agricultural “patriotic work”. School had just
started the previous day; the academic year was officially declared open by
the dictator and his wife three days before, on the 13th of September, the
Romanian Firefighters’ Day, right here, in Cluj. It happened at a rally, of
course, where all pupils and students, and many workers were obliged to
partake and shout “with enthusiasm”. Yet the pupils did not arrive from
the school benches, but from one of the fruit gardens around the city,
where in the next two weeks they will regularly go to pick apples, pears
and plums. Learning can wait; in this system the studying youth must also
diligently participate in the harvesting of the produce. Students cannot be
exempted from this compulsory “volunteer” activity.
From time to time the walking groups are left behind by overcrowded
cars, only intensifying the irritated atmosphere. Those driving will get
there more quickly and occupy the best spots, while the walkers will have
to look hard for the places with a good “signal”. Friends, neighbours and
colleagues in the smaller groups take turns in carrying the small portable
TV sets and their heavy batteries. Reaching the cowsheds of the agricul-
tural cooperative at the edge of the town the equipment changes carriers
more frequently because of the steeper roads. Everyone takes good care of
the “treasures”; without them the “excursion” today would have no point
INTRODUCTION TO THE ETHNOGRAPHY AND RESEARCH OF FOOTBALL… 3
at all. Perhaps they could join another group with an already installed TV
set, but they could surely not see too much from the last row.
Climbing on the side of the hill called Lomb, people become more and
more relaxed and louder, and occasionally swear like sailors as they reach
the top. They make unambiguous and plain remarks about their misera-
ble situation… they say things they would not say so openly elsewhere.
From up here there is a good view on the city down below, stretching
along the valley of the Someș River. It is Cluj, the historic capital of
Transylvania, to which the name of Napoca, meant to evoke the times of
the Roman Empire, was attached by the dictator visiting here exactly
10 years previously.
Nick is also here with his group of friends; in this multitude of people,
he is also eager to watch the match. If he is lucky and “the signal comes
in” (intră semnalul), he will be able to see the opening game of the
1987/1988 season of the European Champion Clubs’ Cup. Steaua
București will play against the champion of the Hungarian football league,
MTK. As an ethnic Hungarian and a Hungarian-hearted person, Nick will
not have an easy task rooting in this particular match. He now cannot sup-
port Steaua, the football team of the army, the quasi-national team of
Romania, yet cannot manifest his real feelings in this group of mainly
Romanians, either. There are many others like him in the crowd. He is
impatiently waiting for the match, just like at every previous match he had
seen on the hills surrounding the city in the past years, together with many
other people. The good many members of the group express their indig-
nation more and more loudly for having been forced to come out here to
watch a football match: it can be heard quite clearly—as Nick vividly
recalls—that they openly criticise the system, saying that “It’s such a shame
that we are playing at home and yet we must come out in the fields to fol-
low the game!” (In original Romanian: “Este o rușine, că jucăm acasă și noi
trebuie să vedem meciul pe câmp!”).
It is the 16th of September, 1987, a few minutes before five o’clock in
the afternoon. The sun shines beautifully—Nick remembers—which is not
necessarily good news. According to experienced “movie masters” and
those “with antennas”, overcast but not yet rainy weather is the most
adequate for the TV waves coming from the neighbouring country to
produce the best possible image quality. Viewers are of course convinced,
more or less with reason, that the authorities also “jam” (bruieaza) the
programme. Most of them are not here for the first time; they come out
frequently to take part in “football gatherings”. The location is widely
4 L. PÉTER
known as one of the most suitable places to watch the games. From here
on, in a crow’s flight westward, there is an unobstructed strip towards
Hungary, which makes a relatively large area suitable for enjoyable recep-
tion. That’s why there are so many people here, at least 150–190 in num-
ber, with at least 30 cars parked, because one can be “almost certain” here
to come through with the antennas and amplifiers made at home from
components stolen from the factory. This is never sure, of course, and an
unexpected blast of wind can sweep the signal away for minutes, destroy-
ing the image, with the result that the viewers are unable to see anything.
This September football game watching is a strange one from many
perspectives. It is not accidental that a dissident audience (Mustat ̦ă 2015),
which was vexed and irascible anyway, started to curse state leadership
much more loudly than usual. On the one hand, RTV, the state-owned
public television gave up its good habit, and in spite of the expectations of
the optimistic rooters, decided not to broadcast the match with MTK. Until
now they transmitted at least the decisive matches in which a Romanian
team was playing. Now the authorities decided that this was not a decisive
game, and a smooth victory could be expected. With this argument they
now “forbade” (ne-au interzis) the match of the Romanian star team from
being broadcast. Apparently, the former state of rarity became a state of
lacking in the fall of 1987. The account of Dumitru Graur (2010)—a later
leader of the sports department of the television—given in connection
with the Romanian championship in an interview after the change of the
political system, is expressive. After 1985, the TV staff had regularly gone
out to the local stadiums with the broadcasting van, and had waited at the
location for the telephone approval of the Central Committee of the Party
to start live transmission, but later on they gave up this pointless practice.
FC Steaua won the European Champion Clubs’ Cup in 1986 in Seville,
against FC Barcelona. Steaua was exclusively the showcase team of the
system, and was formally under the direct supervision of the army.
However, its true leader was Valentin Ceaușescu, who was the elder son of
the dictator. He had a degree in physics and was a person who carefully
shunned publicity. As a recognition of the European success in 1986, on
the 12th of May, the dictator himself awarded the members of the heroic
team the highest state decoration of the Romania, the Star of the Romanian
Socialist Republic First Class, as they had contributed to the glory of the
country and the international success of Romanian sports.
The match that day started at 16:00 CET (Central European Time), as
the stadium of Steaua did not have a system of illumination necessary for
evening matches. The usual TV programme had already been narrowed

down to two hours after January 1985 (Matei 2013), and the match was
90 minutes anyway. It seems that this extra programme was not authorised
by the party leadership. That is why the few minutes’ presentation video
about the match available on YouTube has no voice, because the uploaders
took off the Hungarian language commentary from the Hungarian public
TV. The same video can also be viewed elsewhere in its original form, with
the voice of the Hungarian sports commentator. The match was not
included in the TV programme of that day, either.
It is quite understandable that this made the rooters feel indignant and
humiliated, and forced them to rely on their own creativity to overreach
the system and sort out the issue of game watching. As always, they went
out again to watch the match on the higher hills around the city, where the
programme of the Hungarian Television permeated, albeit jammed. The
lethargic statement, “It’s such a shame that we are playing at home and yet
we must come out in the fields to follow the game” is expressive in many
respects, and it is clearly indicative of the mood of the general public in
eighties Romania. It conveys well the climate and the general atmosphere
spread among the masses forced to survive under worsening and economi-
cally straitened conditions and the political rhetoric and discourse charac-
teristic for national communism. In the given situation—as many of the
rooters in the hills could well sense—it was not unimportant that the
“unbeatable” Steaua, which slowly became the sole source of pride for the
nation, would play against the champion of Hungary MTK Budapest in
mid-September 1987. To understand this, one must know that during this
period, the total dictatorship (which at least seemed to be total from the
inside), facing acute problems of legitimacy, tried to strengthen its power
and influence among others by intensifying the image of an internal and
external enemy. The reform processes started in the neighbouring country
and the official statements and counter-statements with reference to the
publication in 1986 in Hungary of a treatise on the history of Transylvania
(Köpeczi 1986), served as an excellent base to identify the entire Hungarian
minority in Romania as an internal enemy, and Hungary as an external
enemy in the eyes of the regime (Boia 2016). By this scapegoating proce-
dure, the system wanted to create a diversion to distract the attention from
rapidly worsening living standards (Burakowski 2016), and also to rhetori-
cally intensify national feelings and, naturally, to slow down the erosion of
its legitimacy. The nationalistic, or even openly chauvinistic, and neo-
Stalinist political discourse became official (Tismăneanu 2014) and
6 L. PÉTER
its effects were felt on people’s everyday lives. Part of the population in

great straits was indeed afraid of the “Hungarian danger”, which was usu-
ally connected by the silent suggestion of the power to revisionism, irre-
dentism and the phantasmagoria of losing Transylvania.
A Romanian–Hungarian football match with ethnic bearing was an
excellent opportunity for the feelings to become harder on both sides,
especially in a large city with an ethnically mixed setting and bearing so
many symbolic historical and social meanings as Cluj. We know that foot-
ball always has significance beyond itself; it strengthens, and at the same
time expresses, collective identities (Giulianotti 2004; Péter 2016). Some
of the Romanian rooters of the Steaua–MTK match thought that a victory
might, at least temporarily, balance the known economic and standard of
living superiority of Hungary in a Romanian–Hungarian relationship, and
could strengthen the national pride as cultivated and exacerbated by the
Romanian communist system—against all the terrible financial circum-
stances. After all, the magnificent Steaua will play against the ancient
“enemy”, as the propaganda so frequently described it.
Cluj had already been declared a “closed city” by then: it was only pos-
sible to move to the city with a special permit that was quite difficult to
obtain, food had long been rationalised and it could be only bought with
ration coupons (bon), public lighting was scarce in the city in the evenings,
public transportation sporadic and poor, there was hardly enough heating
and hot water in the concrete blocks of flats, and shops stood mainly
empty. This situation was not unique to Cluj; it was also pretty similar
elsewhere in Romania. Discontentment and social tension could be felt
everywhere (Tismăneanu 2006). Just two months later (on the 15th of
November 1987) rebellion broke out in Brașov (Deletant 2012).
Getting back to our story, a part of the Romanian rooters undoubtedly
related to the match against the MTK along these ethnic categories and
feelings. At the same time, they also had to face an irresolvable contradic-
tion, as the match was not broadcast precisely by the TVR, the organ of
the nationalist-communist propaganda, even though Steaua was playing
“at home” (acasă). In a larger interethnic context, this acasă does not only
mean the home ground of Steaua (which, just like all of Romania, was
poor and did not have a lighting system that could have permitted an eve-
ning transmission), but also “endangered” Transylvania. The quoted “we
are playing at home” (we, the Romanians) also denoted that “home” (i.e.
Transylvania) was rightfully owned by the domestic party (the Romanian
nation). The term “shame” gains its meaning in connection with the
revention of this feeling of ownership, and bizarrely becomes an anti-

p
system expression of a penetrating force. Absurdly enough, it is the system
itself that makes living with generated patriotism impossible, particularly
against a Hungarian team (declared as an enemy). And to make it even
more shameful for them, the rooters forced to become dissident TV view-
ers hope, as they walk up the hill of Lomb, that the TV signal of the
“Hungarians will come in” (intră ungurii) and they will be able to follow
the match on Hungarian public TV, listening to the Hungarian commen-
tator. Whilst the official state propaganda continues to spread alarm that
Hungary, having stepped on the path of reforms, is planning the sneaking
separation of Transylvania! That they “come in”, just like they did in
1940! This indeed could have created a controversial state of mind that
had only one way of release: making responsible the system that simulta-
neously exacerbates national feelings and then prevents their living out.
Probably this is why Nick remembers so clearly every sentence uttered
there, besides the curses and anti-system remarks!
Furthermore, the term “on the field” (pe câmp) is also expressive. By
1987 Cluj grew to become one of the largest cities in Romania as a result
of the forced urbanisation and industrialisation policies of the seventies
and the eighties (Ronnas 1984). A significant part of the population is first
generation townsfolk, most of them having moved into the city from the
villages nearby to work in the quickly multiplying factories (Csedő et al.
2004). Several large housing projects were developed in the seventies, and
a proportion of the new citizens of Cluj experienced that as upward social
mobility, and as an increase in their living standards (Pásztor 2013).
Official rhetoric referred to it as “progress”, something that until the
beginning of the eighties was more or less also proven by living standards.
Moving into the city, just like switching from “work in the fields” (munca
pe câmp) to work in a factory was perceived as a positive change in life at
that time. Not surprising that being forced to watch the match in a field
(Lomb is not even a true field, but rather an uneven pasture area on a hill)
activated this association, yet in a reversed sense. “Field” (câmp) as a loca-
tion was also spontaneously seen, not knowingly reflected upon, yet very
pertinently and validly perceived as a metaphor of regression of the gener-
alised scarcity of the eighties and of the worsening living standards. Let’s
not forget that a considerable number of the dissident watchers are first
generation townspeople; factory workers, regardless of their ethnic back-
grounds. By the end of the game, as Nick recalls, ethnic tensions auto-
matically eased. For the gathered watchers, it was a cementing force and
8 L. PÉTER
joint feeling of success that they could watch the game together, in spite
of the “interdiction”.
While the characters of the story above—and many others like them in
Cluj, on Feleacul hill or the Făget, and other football fans in Central-
Transylvania—were able to eventually watch the match on Hungarian TV,
mostly in similar conditions, Steaua defeated MTK by 4-0 in Bucharest, in
front of 30,000 viewers, thanks to the ethnic Hungarian László Bölöni,
the Aromanian Gheorghe Hagi (two goals), and Marius Lacătus, who is of
a Csángó origin…(both Aromania and Csángó are ethnic subgroups living
in Romania).
Looking back, this was just the beginning. Steaua qualified for the semi-
finals in that season. Of the matches played abroad in the 1987/1988 season
of the European Champion Clubs’ Cup none were broadcast by the TVR
(the ones played at home were transmitted only in the later rounds). The
evening news programme relayed the results in just three minutes, showing
only the most important, decisive moments of the matches. I vividly remem-
ber the return match of the semi-finals on the 20th of April 1988, between
Benfica Lisbon and Steaua to which I listened on a SOLO 100 pocket radio,
received as a gift. The match ended with a 2-0 victory of the Portuguese and
resulted in the qualification of Benfica to the next round. I would have liked
to see it, but it was not possible. I was angry, too…
But if I were to define precisely, I must underline that the event taking
place in connection with the Steaua match was not the beginning of some-
thing, but rather the logical consequence and extension of the similar ear-
lier “forbiddance” of football, something that reached domestic club
teams in 1987. By no means was that the beginning. Cases like this and
other, similar ones occurred regularly after the seventies, completely inde-
pendently from each other, spontaneously, organised voluntarily and
freely. Romanians watched media contents from neighbouring countries
en masse, particularly sports programmes, and especially football matches.
The luckier ones, who happened to stay closer to the edge of the country,
could, from their homes, watch the TV programmes broadcast across the
borders (Mustat ̦ă 2015), but those residing in the interior of the country
had to fight for the opportunities to watch at least part of the games. This
was a situation born from constraint, yet resulting in unintended but very
important social implications and consequences.
According to the results of the research, the social practice of collective
football match watching was born out of constraint, and it became an
unequivocal mass phenomenon after 1982, when the football World
Championship organised in Spain was not broadcast by state television.

The official argument for that was that the Romanian national team did
not play in the championship. Looking back, the various forms and set-
tings of the practices that I call football gatherings explosively unfolded
in 1982, depending on their cultural embeddedness defined by specific
local conditions and built on already existing formations. And most
probably, this was the time when it also slid out of the control of the
authorities! That’s why I use the metaphor “forbidden football” for this
phenomenon.
This book is about a phenomenon that has not been explored. It is
about “forbidden football” in Ceaușescu’s Romania. It draws a particular
picture of the social history of the eighties in Romania from “below”,
through the prism of football consumption in peculiar circumstances, the
experiences of average people. Therefore, the aim of the book is to recon-
struct the patterns of the gatherings that became a mass phenomenon in
the eighties in inner Transylvania, to draw its sociological formations, and
to provide a valid interpretation for them. Based on empirical data, I argue
that because of the large number and social relevance of those involved,
the phenomenon grew into a social institution of penetrating force. I do
not only present the concrete forms of appearance of this widespread phe-
nomenon with an explorative intention, but also reflect upon the social
role it undertook. I present the forms of appearance and the factors behind
placed in a local context, while I also make an attempt to explain it from
“above”, that is, embedded in the macro-level political and social pro-
cesses characteristic of the eighties.
I affirm that under the conditions of “shortage” (Balla 2001) and
“media void”, in the difficult and essentially eventless everyday life, inven-
tive, skilled, and not least, courageous, football-loving people created an
important social institution. This institution was not only simultaneously
suitable to permit the consumption of football in a community framework
and for purposes of entertainment, but also to strengthen and express the
ethnic-collective identity of individuals belonging to minority groups and,
not least, it de facto went against the dictatorship of the time. It created a
novel form of resistance that put even the oppressive machinery into an
insecure and bewildered position.
I assert that the phenomenon of football gatherings functioning in a
community framework, pointed beyond itself: by this phenomenon an
alternative social space was produced that, even if only for short times, slid
out from the direct control of the authorities. In other words: the activities
10 L. PÉTER
and dissident publics formed on the occasions of the common events on

the hills and mountains can also be seen as collective manifestations of
silent resistance, exit or escape and protest.
In conclusion, I say nothing less than that the practices of gatherings
were one of the causes, and at the same time a consequence. of the cracks
in the structure of the Romanian totalitarian political system. They were
able to erode the power-enforcement machinery, make the actors in the
secret services become accomplices, and eventually to hasten the fall of
the oppressing regime. They illustrate the important role that informa-
tion has or can have, and how powerful it is, or can be, against oppressive
systems.
Epistemological and Methodological Aspects

The empiric foundation of the research was created by the method of car-
rying out in-depth interviews. The pieces of information come from infor-
mants that actively participated in gatherings at the end of the seventies
and during the eighties; in other words, they attended such gatherings
more frequently than just once or twice—they were regular participants.
In order to explore the phenomenon, the large area of inner Transylvania
had to be covered, places where stray television signals from the neigh-
bouring countries could not easily reach. The distance from state borders
imposed numerous difficulties for the audiences interested in watching the
matches. For instance, unlike in Southern Romania, or the Banat (where
Bulgarian, Serbian, or Hungarian transmission could be received without
problems at home with a simple antenna), the population living in the
central regions of the country were not lucky enough to benefit from pri-
vate, “comfortable home-viewing”. They are the people this story relates
to. I am writing about those people living in the central regions of
Romania, who could only find the locations to receive the transmission
from another country by common organising, financial input, timely
efforts and opportunities at hand. The research topic is the practice of
football gatherings that I wanted to reconstruct based on the telling and
narratives of the participants that I had tracked down, using my own
methodological considerations and tools, in order to hand them over to
the interested reader audience. Where it was justified, I also built in the
original Romanian terms, language elements, attributes, metaphors and
ways of arguments of the recollections into the analysis.
The phenomenon was characteristic over a large area, in various loca-

tions of the internal region of Romania (central Transylvania). This raises
an epistemological problem with methodological consequences to be
sorted out. The justified question that appears is the following: in what
empirical circle, and by which data the analysed topic is circumscribed?
Who and how will define the boundaries of the context (at first the inter-
nal, direct or local community context and later on, the wider, national
context), to which the ethnographic descriptions relate? In addition to the
emic and/or ethic option, in an ethnographic context it also remains to be
determined whether the theme and its relevance are described by the sub-
jects of the research or the researcher himself (based on epistemological
and methodological considerations). Because the examined events
occurred in the past, a classical emic, which is a totally participative obser-
vation done by the researcher in the field, cannot be carried out (in spite
of the fact that the writer had the chance to directly partake in the phe-
nomenon in 1982 and 1986).
As we are talking about the explorative, first investigation of the matter,
I tried to make sure that “participant” approaches also appeared to the
extent it was possible, something that I want to demonstrate primarily by
the reconstruction of the cases and the events that occurred with the relat-
ers, through the prism of the experiences of the time. Thus, case studies
are primarily useful to show the phenomenon “from the perspective of the
internal narrator” and illustrate its variations in space and society. In the
interpretive logic set up by Geertz (1973) a capital role is played on the
one hand by the experience of the informant, and on the other, by the
expressivity of the scientific text telling about the cases, the persuasive
power that reproduces the essence of things. In other words, “the depict-
ing capacity” is the key to the power of the ethnographic text. The (post)
modern ethnographic text is allegoric (Clifford 1986), and the (illustrat-
ing) role of the text depends on its “depicting capacity”. Taking all this
into account, during the fieldwork, when possible, I visited the former
locations of the events (occasionally in the company of the interviewees
themselves) so that I could “place myself” into the specific situations and
venues.
My aim in the first round is to reveal the phenomenon itself and its
manifestations by way of expressive case studies, and then provide their
sociological interpretation, but by this I also had to make it clear that it
needed a multi-sited ethnographic research strategy (Marcus 1995). Most
of our subjects watching the matches lived far away from each other at the
12 L. PÉTER
examined time, never got in touch with each other, were embedded in
different micro-community cultures, and structures of local relationships,
and contexts were also different. In short, the field and the site(s) of the
research did not coincide, and the subjects lived in different locations and
watched the games in quite numerous geographical-physical locations—
albeit all in central Transylvania. The solution for the problem during the
research process was a continuous reflexivity upon site and field, as well as
subjects and themes. What do I mean by that?
In his study, Marcus (1995) establishes that the objective conditions of
classical anthropology and, I add, those of ethnographic field studies had
radically changed by the eighties. The wide-ranging variety of (post)mod-
ern social reality and the complexity of its functioning does not make it
possible any more for a field researcher to carry out research on a well-
delimited site, studying a highly conscious and relevant issue in the lives of
the people living there, as had happened in earlier times. In the classical
setup—opines Marcus (1995)—research site and research field are the
same, subjects can be clearly and unequivocally delimited, and the exam-
ined questions are the ones the subjects consider relevant, upon which
they are spontaneously highly reflexive in their everyday lives. The rela-
tionship between researcher and researched is unambiguous: the subjects
are at home; the local context of the research is given. The subjects them-
selves mark its boundaries, as the researcher examines something that is
unknown to him/her, whereas the subjects are totally aware of it. To put
it simply, all this means that for the researcher carrying out field research
these elements (subjects–site–theme) are given facts, and together they
form the objective reality of the field, upon which even (critical) reflection
is unnecessary, by no means do they have to be “constructed”, defined, or
clarified according to previously determined theoretical and methodologi-
cal points of view. In other words, everything “becomes clear in the field”.
In my present case, the “fuzzy field” problem, namely, the issue of
“where do we examine?” as raised by Marcus (1995) or Nadai and Maeder
(2005) is valid. The theme of the research (football gatherings) cannot be
localised at a certain site (albeit it can be said that the location is Inner-
Transylvania, but Inner-Transylvania is big, its boundaries are not clearly
defined as it does not constitute a legal administrative entity, and it is
characterised by important internal differences and variations). Several
sites together make up the field (multi-site), but these sites have already
been chosen during the research, according to theoretical and social-
historical aspects. The field is not given by itself, but must rather be
esignated by the researcher (Nadai and Maeder 2005). In this case the
d
following sites of Inner-Transylvania were chosen during the research:
Szeklerland (Gheorgheni-Basin, Bălan); Region of Cluj (and its surround-
ing areas); and Southern-Transylvania (Alba Iulia and the surroundings,
Deva). These sites have been delimited by myself, or I have “constructed”
them according to my own theoretical-conceptual and practical consider-
ations. Obviously, not each and every single locality of Inner-Transylvania,
completely covering it geographically, could be researched.
Thus, the above sites all together give the research field, whereas the
researched subject is implicitly fragmented in space (i.e. cannot be found
at a concrete location, being dispersed in space). According to Marcus
(1995), under such circumstance, the researcher must argue as to why
he/she started his/her research at a certain location rather than in con-
nection with the above, in addition to personal experience and preliminary
information elsewhere. When defining the research strategy, I took social-
historical, cultural and demographic aspects into consideration. The
Szeklerland (in the eastern part of Transylvania) appears as a standalone
cultural region culturally and mentally, as well as in the Romanian political
discourse. A considerable number of the ethnic Hungarian minority live
here and the majority of them self-identify as Szekler/Székely (Csata and
Marácz 2016). From a social-history perspective, it can be said that the
Szeklers had been free people in premodern society (to which an idea of
self-reliance, a high level of adaptability and the talent for survival are
attached, in addition to wit and pride). Hungarians form a majority in the
two main counties that form the region. Cluj is the economic and cultural
capital of Transylvania, a region with a Romanian majority, yet multicul-
tural. Cluj is the largest locality of Inner-Transylvania, and it has always
been an important urban centre. Southern-Transylvania, with Alba Iulia as
its centre was a region with heavy industry and a large working class (espe-
cially in the eighties) far from the state borders. Naturally, in all three
regions the practice of gatherings was extensive. When planning the design
of the research I thought it was important that none of these different
regions, yet connected by the subject of the research, be left out of the
analysis. The selection of the sites within the regions was done according
to the viewpoints of the research. They are sites where either the phenom-
enon was known to be very widespread, or several subjects recommended
during the research process to be included as strongly linked to the spatial-
ity of their personal networks and also appeared on the maps of collective
remembering.
14 L. PÉTER
Transylvania, one of the three historical regions of Romania, consists

of Maramures, Crişana, Banat, Saxonland and Transylvania. Inner-
Transylvania, located in the centre of the country, represents one quarter
of Romania’s territory and about one-fifth of the country’s population.
According to the 1977 census Romania’s population has exceeded
21.5 million, a third of it living in Transylvania. The Inner-Transylvania’s
population was that time 4.4 million, 20.3 per cent of the country’s total
population, and 61.6 per cent of the total population of Transylvania.
The structure of the population of Transylvania is diverse. The percent-
age of Romanians in the Inner-Transylvania counties in 1977 was 68.4 per
cent, Hungarians were 25.5 per cent, and other ethnic groups totalled 6.1
per cent. Szeklerland (briefly Mureş, Harghita and Covasna counties) is
mostly Hungarian; their percentage was 62.1 per cent and that of the
Romanians 33.7 per cent. Southern-Transylvania (Alba and Hunedoara
counties) is mostly Romanian, where the percentage of Romanians in
1977 was 89.3 per cent, Hungarians 7.1 per cent and other ethnicities 3.6
per cent. Cluj county can be considered rather ethnically mixed, where the
Hungarian population represented 24 per cent and other ethnic groups
1.6 per cent.
The eighties in Ceauşescu’s Romania was a period of significant demo-
graphic change due to pronatalist policies and homogenization. Between
1977 and 1992, the country’s population increased by more than
1.2 million people and ethnic proportions changed: while the Romanian
population grew by 1.4 million people, ethnic Hungarians declined by
about 90,000 and the other ethnicities by 70,000. Thus, the ethnic pro-
portions of Inner-Transylvania have also changed, more strongly the
Romanian majority has shifted. In 1992 the percentage of the Romanian
population was 72.2, Hungarians were 23.9 per cent, and other ethnic
groups 3.9 per cent.
When choosing interview subjects (the issue of “who do we examine?”)
I chose from several starting points. I presumed that personal systems of
relations among the actors were very important in the functioning of the
phenomenon. Thus, a socially heterogeneous population could be identi-
fied finally. Interviews were made predominantly with men from a wide
social-professional palette. There are factory workers, entrepreneurs, engi-
neers, doctors, technical professionals, politicians, viticulturists, agricul-
turists, teachers, forest rangers, church employees, clergymen, army
officers, insurance agents, a former high ranking secret service officer, TV
repairmen, and Romanians and Hungarians alike. Two groups can be
s eparated according to age: middle-aged people, who were in their teens

in the examined period, and the elder generation, who formed the core of
the regular audience.
In the research process and when planning the design, at the prelimi-
nary specification of the object of the study (the issue of “what do we
examine?”) theoretical and conceptual aspects prevailed. The research
topic formulated, based on previous experience, is the collective viewing of
football matches in football gatherings, usually on hilltops, widespread in the
eighties. Within that three punctual questions were formulated: How was
this phenomenon organised and how did it work? What kind of community
role did it fulfil? and What further social consequences had the symbolic
extensions attached to the phenomenon by the actors? To reiterate: the aim of
the investigation is to reconstruct the events related to the phenomenon
and to present the findings to the general reading public.
Being aware of the complexity of the problem, and based on my pre-
liminary experience related to the phenomenon, I conceptualised and
operationalised the subject in the following way: the direct and perceived
causes of the practice; the appearance of the need and its awareness; the
issues of organisation, logistics and technicalities; the role of professional
knowledge and of the experts; the social situations in which the events
occur: sites, actors, activities; norms; trust; language codes and normative
behavioural patterns; and the relationship with power, external and inter-
nal conflicts. Taking all these points into consideration, I asked the sub-
jects of the interviews to tell their stories in relation to the organisation
and the division of labour, the activities, the sites and the actors and in
light of the relationship with power. Seventy-two interviews and over a
hundred further informal discussions were conducted. As usual with eth-
nographic research, several follow-up interviews were made when the text
was written, in order to clarify and resolve the contradictions of interpreta-
tion. The field research has been carried out in compliance with profes-
sional ethical rules, and the subjects of interviews expressed their consent
for participation. Names in this text were anonymised. My previous expe-
rience rooted in personal observations also played a role.
The Organization of the Book

Chapter 1 provides the key to the inventory of factors that define the prac-
tice of football gatherings, and the deeper understanding of the analysis
and the interpretation.
16 L. PÉTER
Chapters 2–5 present relevant case studies. I am focusing on the natural

history (Blumer 1975) of the collective “consumption” of forbidden foot-
ball. The cases are described, revealing the similarities and differences
across Inner-Transylvania. In consequence, the chapters give an overall
picture with an explorative character of gatherings from the perspective of
personal stories.
Chapter 6 steps forward from the ethnographic description, and it dis-
cusses from the perspective of larger social processes located “above”. It
provides the definition of football gatherings: it unfolds the sociological
theory of dissident match watching along the dimensions of media con-
sumption, ethnic identity and resistance. All these are placed into the con-
text of “big histories”; in other words, into the political and economic
context of former Romanian context.
The last chapter of the book, Chap. 7, raises further question with
a summarising character, regarding the role of dissident publics, and
respectively discusses the possible emancipation and instrumental role of
football.
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CHAPTER 2
Ciumani: The Sport Takes the Community

to the Mountains
Abstract The second chapter presents the natural history of football

gatherings in a typical Szekler community in Eastern-Transylvania where
the dissident football consumption developed into a mass phenomenon.
This took place in several successive steps as follows: in the first period of
spontaneous pattern consumption the local elite in Cluj assimilated the
way in which forbidden football could be consumed; then the local specta-
tors commuted back to Cluj and nearby cities closer to the Hungarian
border to watch the televised matches. During the third period, the era of
local mass football gatherings, these gatherings became a large local phe-
nomenon and communitarian institution due to the technical expertise,
which made it possible to watch the beautiful game at the sites. At the end
of the eighties the football gatherings reached their peak, evolving into
regional and mega mass level. The chapter exemplifies that the local sports
movement greatly contributed to the strengthening of the collective local-
ethnic identity of the community, because by making use of the sports
opportunities of the seventies and eighties, it employed them for the ben-
efit of its own identity and the strengthening of its community capital and
co-operation patterns. The Ciumani ethnographic description illustrates
that football-gathering practices were organically built on the organisa-
tional infrastructure of the ice hockey movement, becoming some kind of
a freer extension and replacement for it in the late eighties. The chapter

20 L. PÉTER
concludes that the examined phenomenon grew into a social institution of

a penetrating force, in which the protest character was also expressed.
Keywords Szeklerland • Sport movement • Community capital • Trust

• Football consumption • Ethnic identity • Football consumption
• Resistance
Men and women dressed for autumn weather are standing beside Dacia
1300 vehicles, the hardy, people’s cars of the era, respectively a few Skoda
S120s, Lada 1200s and rare Moskvitches. Not long ago they had climbed
a poor surfaced road to reach the clearing. Some are already pounding
pine stakes into the ground, suitable for securing antennas, or taking out
smaller-sized TV sets from the boots of the cars. Others move portable TV
sets into the previously mounted tents. A few people seem to have arrived
with the intention to stay for several days, a number of tents are erected, a
shepherd shows up to pry… everything is tangibly centred on and around
the sets. The people gathering near a white Lada car placed their TV on an
improvised bracing, leading the cables of at least two batteries to the TV
set packed in plastic bags, with only its small screen visible. Just to be on
the safe side, they may have thought, to protect it from rain. They put the
simpler antenna on the top of the car, which gives an “official” look to the
Soviet-made vehicle. Although it is still afternoon and the clearing is not
yet full either, they are watching the television with great interest, appar-
ently there is some programme on. The matches will begin towards eve-
ning. Further on, a professionally looking multi-element antenna is just
placed on the ground under a TV set with a white plastic frame. Later on,
a large company will follow the football match on this, too.
There are some people eating with relish, a lady offers around food
brought from home, further on meat is barbecued. A hairy guy wearing
jeans, most likely one of the organisers, is smiling contentedly, just like his
companion; they are visibly satisfied and happily looking forward to seeing
“the event”. They are rightfully proud; they are here, “they could make
it”. Watching the cars from afar, they are quite numerous already, and
there will be even more before the match begins.
On one side of the trough-shaped clearing, on the Pângărat ̦i-peak, the
highest of the Giurgeu Mountains (1256 m) about 45–50 cars are parked.
On the eastern side the Red Lake and one of the most visited tourist spots
of Romania, the Bicaz-Gorge can be seen, whereas in the south-east the
CIUMANI: THE SPORT TAKES THE COMMUNITY TO THE MOUNTAINS 21
river heads of two of the longest rivers of the country, Olt and Mureș, and
the mountain range of the Hășmașul-Mare is distinctly visible. The
Giurgeului-Basin is situated to the west. Those present came from here,
but by no means are they tourists. As the evening sets in, they will watch
a football match. On the higher side of the saddle-back, people gathered
around TV sets placed near cars or tents will try to see as much as possible
of the transmission. The football gathering is about to start soon; until
then they talk to each other, tell jokes, consider the prospects of the game,
or lament over everyday difficulties. The atmosphere is sensibly intimate;
they know each other well. They could not be here without one another,
without the power of the community. A long and complicated road led up
here. The European Championship organised in 1988 in Germany was
also watched from here, the Pângărat ̦i-peak, by the football lovers of the
Giurgeului-Basin with the inhabitants of Ciumani among them, just as the
1986 World Cup (based on the photographs by Árpád Kémenes).
In the case study I shall point out the community embeddedness of
gatherings. I draw attention to the conditions and changes of the gather-
ings formed along the lines of civic-voluntary sport (Hallmann and Petry
2013), built on the cooperation patterns of the community, organised
quasi-autonomously. I argue that the initiating and innovating role of the
critical elites is unquestionable in the formation of the mass phenomenon,
but the contribution of technical experts to the creation of technical con-
ditions was capital. Furthermore, the community capital and the trust and
network background, created and multiplied in the seventies by the mass
sports movement, were indispensable factors. After the sketch of the local-
ity I shall depict the preconditions, and the evolution of community
watching, and the dynamics of their turning into a mass phenomenon.
Twenty-four interviews were made in the field and I carried out spontane-
ous conversations with a further 32 members of the community. Data
registration took place in July 2015, during a fieldwork that lasted two
weeks on site.
Ciumani as “Field”
Ciumani is situated in the centre of Romania, in the Eastern-Carpathians,
in Harghita. The locality lays on the bank of the Mureș River, at a distance
of 50 km from Miercurea-Ciuc, the county capital. Until 1989 many of
its inhabitants commuted to the factories in Gheorgheni, while others
worked on the collective farms, in the units of consumer cooperatives.
22 L. PÉTER
The population is homogeneous from an ethnic and religious perspective:

99 per cent are Hungarian Roman Catholics. The number of inhabitants
of the village in 1977 was 5910, in 1992 there were 4808, in 2002 the
number was 4495, and in 2011 the number had dropped to 4334 (INS
2017). It is a typical locality of the Hungarian Szeklerland. Self-reliance
and nature are defining values in everyday speech and public life dis-
courses. Because of the severe natural and meteorological conditions, sur-
vival and adaptability (the attitude of “we can always make do”), as well
as wittiness and ingenuity have important roles to play in the world out-
look of the locals.
Under the tight hold of power before 1989, resistance and ethnic iden-
tity had but a few scenes left. Apart from school, family and church institu-
tions were the only ones to reproduce traditions and values. As the former
school principal relates, “By the unpleasant eighties, parents and school,
but in fact everyone, held together for survival, for the community to
continue to exist.” The school catalysed the joining of the forces, yet its
terrain became the location for community sports and connected football
gatherings. By the eighties, the ice hockey movement and the mountain
gatherings, as ways of “sports consumption”, created public and alterna-
tive spaces, where the state power could not enforce its will and the com-
munity could display its identity and system of values. I argue that the
watching of matches was built on the community infrastructure of the ice
hockey movement and changed therewith.
Sports Movement Producing Community Capital

The political liberalisation of the end of the sixties also brought changes
into the life of Ciumani. As a consequence of Law 2/1968 on Administrative
Division, adopted on the 16th of February 1968, Ciumani was incorpo-
rated into Harghita County. As part of the huge political concessions given
for the benefit of the Hungarian ethnic community (Tismăneanu 2006),
infrastructural and economic development projects started in the region.
Young intellectuals and technicians arrived in Ciumani during this period.
Many came directly from the benches of the university. We are talking
about doctors, veterinarians, agricultural engineers, professors, and tech-
nicians. Most of them had studied in Târgu-Mureș and Cluj, and main-
tained contacts with their colleagues placed out in other localities of the
Szeklerland. The well-trained and ready-to-act professional elite built
connections with the self-conscious and cooperative local community.

Most of my interviewees belong to this layer. The “infusion of compe-

tence” produced visible results. Sports life, more precisely the community
ice hockey movement, began to flourish. This quickly stepped out of the
framework of the school and grew to become a “common cause” of the
village, in which other institutions also took a defining role.
Sports means ice hockey in the Szeklerland. The attention of the pro-
fessionals arriving here also turned towards ice hockey: they intuitively
apprehended the recreational, leisure time, socialisation, and respective
cultural and hidden ethno-political opportunities inherent in ice hockey.
Active leisure time activities inferring physical exercise were also supported
by the power. It stimulated mass sports, because it saw these as political,
legitimate, and biopolitical instruments (Petracovschi and Terret 2013).
Thus, the pursuing of ice hockey within the framework of the local school
could be considered as a legitimate initiative. It turned out from the inter-
views that the initiators were sports loving young people looking for
engagement, also wanting to achieve local recognition, beyond simply try-
ing to do something useful for the community.
A handful of people obtaining the support of the teachers built an
improvised ice hockey rink behind the school in 1969, which was trans-
formed in 1970 into a standard-sized regular rink surrounded with boards.
The same year they furnished it with lighting equipment made at the tech-
nical circle in the school. Moreover, a year later they built a stand of 500
seats attached to the rink. The construction of the stand—as later team
physician, Sean, and the school principal at the time, recounted—emerged
from the outset as a common cause. The construction of the rink, stand
and changing lockers were officially authorised and financed by the peo-
ple’s council. Yet the building of the sports establishment could not have
been done so quickly and on such a large scale without the financial sup-
port and the volunteer investment in work done by the community. As a
consequence of the financial donations granted during the initial con-
structions and the later developments, more and more people got involved.
With the participation of the newer ice hockey performing kids, the gym
teachers and trainers, parents and relatives, private donors, the increasing
number of supporters and outsider patrons, ice hockey developed into a
regular community movement. A prominent cause of the adult male soci-
ety of Ciumani, their main leisure time activity in wintertime and later on
their community mission, finally it became one of the last remaining
repositories of the local and ethnic identity of the settlement.
24 L. PÉTER
The activities organised around ice hockey gradually pointed beyond

the inner practice of sports taken in a strict sense and, as a result of the
social changes, ice hockey matches formed ritual-like occasions, or a sym-
bolic scene to be more exact (Gruneau and Witson 1993). The context of
the game evoked and strengthened collective identities and traditions. By
rooting in Hungarian, singing rhymed tags, shouting, and the travels of
the supporters, the sport of ice hockey meant a cultural point of identifica-
tion for the community. It is revealing that the sports base and association
created with the support of the community, the Amza-Peak Sports
Association, has been hosting the contest entitled the Délhegy Cup since
1972. The name, as it regularly happens in sports, carries a symbolic mes-
sage for the outside world. The 1695-metre-high peak symbolises the
locality, the village, living in symbiosis and harmony with nature and sur-
vival towering high above everything else.
Beside its initiators, three other important actors were involved in the
formation of community sports, the ice hockey movement of Ciumani.
During the increasingly frequent matches, the formation of the volunteer
firefighters ensured public order, its representatives collecting the entrance
fees. The volunteer firefighters were constituted as a kind of informal civic
organisation. The association performing fire protection tasks has a long
tradition in the whole region. As local homesteads were historically built
on woodcutting, and the risk of fire has always been high, their existence
was tolerated by the system. A further actor was the rooting audience; they
inspired the ice hockey movement and represented the community during
the matches. Rooting also bore ritual characteristics and it strengthened
the connections among the members; in fact it integrated the participants
into the Ciumani community symbolised by the ice hockey team. Beyond
encouraging the team, rooting also strengthened the inner social connec-
tions. Ties became stronger between the family relations of ice hockey
players, which constituted a further important element of the ice hockey
movement. It is revealing that during the Délhegy Cups, specifically, later
on the occasions of the Előre/Forward Cups that started in 1977, the
players of guest teams were hosted by families in the village. They were
ready to support the full board and lodging of the children, irrespective of
whether or not there was an ice hockey player in the family. On occasions,
that meant the accommodation of more than 200 guest children! When
the team played at other locations, sports fans followed the team in a
worker transporter attached to a local tractor provided by the local agri-
cultural machinery station.
Ice hockey got a boost and legitimacy from the conceptions of the party
leadership related to physical training, formulated by the Central Committee
of the RCP in 1976. The state organisation for sports life followed the pat-
terns of the five-year plans in the economy (Necula 2001). In 1977, the
Daciada sports series began like the Soviet Spartakiad, a framework of the
mass sports movement of national communism. Emphasising 2000 years of
statehood and the Daco-Roman continuity, Daciada was a patriotic
Romanian amateur Olympics that existed for six editions (Bogdan 2014).
The aim of the mass sports event meant to serve public health and physical
exercise was in fact to take possession and control of the bodies of the citi-
zens and their political socialisation. It provided opportunities for the colo-
nisation of leisure time and the etatization of time (Verdery 1996). The
sports movement under the aegis of the National Centre for Physical
Education and Sport (Centrul Naţional pentru Educaţie Fizică și Sport,
abbreviated CNEFS) was one modality to create the “new man” (Kligman
1998). The official competitions organised within its framework took place
among the teams affiliated to schools and state companies (Péter 2017).
The series of events also had positive unintended consequences. Ice
hockey in the villages of the Szeklerland gained ground in the era of social-
ism; however, it did not mean biopolitical control over the body or a
means of indoctrination for its participants and the rooters. According to
the amateur ice hockey players:
We rather lived it as a game of child mass sports, but even in the best village
team of the country there was less pressure for performance in the rink than in
the school. Besides, it carried the possibility of escape; and of a more liveable
alternative career for teenagers and young adults, which meant greater free-
dom and less control.
—Sociologist Zsombor Csata
The Daciada was given another meaning by those rooting in Hungarian,

which rather meant danger for the regime. The crowds gathered to observe
the matches, and as a consequence of the Hungarian language encourage-
ments, to shout and praise loudly, the gatherings turned into collective reli-
gious rites by the end of the seventies. That is exactly why the regime became
uncertain: in the mid-eighties not even the daily paper Előre, which had given
the name for the competition, published the results in its sports column.
The Daciada demonstrates well the role and the modus operandi of
the organisers of the sports movement and of its supporting audience.
26 L. PÉTER
The organising elites used their connection networks and capital in order
to achieve local goals: even the idea of the Előre Cup came up in Ciumani.
The school principal, the editor of the Előre daily newspaper, and the
person in charge of the pioneers in the county (all ethnic Hungarians),
using the benefits of the Daciada, “invented” a regional contest series.
The official reports connected to the Daciada are deconstructed in the
course of the practices of the competition series and in the light of local
contexts. They are filled with local, community and ethnic meanings.
They create a “new social playground” which becomes one of the scenes
of silent resistance. In this case the interdependent dynamics of power
figurations was shaped and utilised by the community, for its own sake.
The organisers of the ice hockey movement mobilised their networks of
connections acquired at the university and at various professional train-
ings and postgraduate courses for the benefit of ice hockey.
These connections were used within the community in order to mobil-
ise and reproduce, or even to strengthen available resources. The profes-
sional knowledge was used to create the lighting equipment, the scoreboard
or to train the team. Acquaintances were used to obtain a transportation
vehicle that could be available for the team and the rooters; creating the
prestige to make ice hockey accepted locally. These practices mobilised
further capital: financial capital was pooled by private individuals of their
own free will to build the stand, cultural capital to shape up rooters’ cul-
ture, and newer connection network capital for the collective accommoda-
tion for the guest players, and all of these together created prestige, a
positive collective self-image, ethnic and cultural identity and community
capital available for other purposes. It’s not a mere chance that the practice
of gatherings was organically built on the ice hockey movement and used
its organisational and connection infrastructure in the eighties character-
ised by deteriorating living conditions and narrowed ethnic conditions of
existence. In the beginning it was subsisted by the accumulated commu-
nity capital, and after that it also greatly contributed to its reproduction.
The Natural History of Football Gatherings

The social history of football gatherings in Ciumani started in the seven-
ties, and originated from the pattern evolved in Cluj. Several stages of
development can be distinguished in the examination of the phenomenon,
which can be simultaneously seen with financial possibilities and the devel-
opment of the local sports movement, as well as with the changing
t echnical conditions. In what comes, I shall describe these stages, present-

ing their most relevant features.
1. The period of spontaneous pattern acquisition. The initiators of the
“consumption” of forbidden football in Ciumani mostly coincided with
the “inventors” of the local ice hockey movement, which many others
soon joined. A number of the intellectuals arriving at the village in 1968
had studied in Cluj. Cluj has been characterised by a highly developed
sports culture since the end of the nineteenth century, and in the sixties it
was one of the most significant sports and cultural centres of Romania.
The university students studying here unavoidably became involved with
local sports or with the prevailing patterns of sports consumption. There
were three important football teams functioning in the city, and the uni-
versities and industrial plants all had their vigorous sports lives. Besides, in
Cluj and its vicinity it was much easier to watch the Hungarian television
programmes, and those spending their student years here also went
through a certain sports socialisation process. Sean did not only like sports,
but was an active sportsman himself, with an above average set of knowl-
edge about football. Because of his family background he was in good
relationship with the students of the Protestant Theological Institute (his
father was a protestant minister), among whom watching football matches
was generally, and following the performance of the Hungarian national
team and the matches of the Hungarian first league, was a particularly
widespread leisure time activity. Under such circumstances, Sean, together
with other fellow students, went out frequently to the restaurant near St.
John’s Fountain, situated along the road leading through the Făget forest,
where—due to its geographical location—Hungarian television pro-
grammes could be received relatively clearly. At the request of the small
group of students the bartender working here often switched the TV (a rare
piece of equipment at the time) to the programmes of the neighbouring
country for the sake of a football match or two. These could be followed
quite well here. The location was quite far, but regular customers soon got
used to that.
On weekends many of the students of the Protestant Theological
Institute travelled in an organised form to Huedin, a town west of Cluj.
Here, the Hungarian television programmes could be seen in much better
quality. They usually went to the local minister or one of the presbyters.
Sean also knew about that—a couple of times he went along with the
theologians as well. Cluj in this respect is important insofar as the internal
drive, need and motivation that served as motives for the mass spreading
28 L. PÉTER
of the phenomenon appeared here for many of the students studying in

the city. I consider this first, incipient stage the “period of spontaneous
pattern acquisition”, which occurred in Cluj.
2. The period of exhausting commuting. Following their placing at
Ciumani, the love of sports for Leo and the others did not change; neither
did they lose their natural interest for football matches. Until the end of
the seventies, more precisely, until 1978, the most important matches of
the world championships could still be followed on TVR in Romania. This
partly “alleviated their thirst for matches”. However, the matches of the
Hungarian national team were obviously not broadcast by the TVR, not
to mention the matches of the Hungarian championship. This lack gener-
ated the first stage of the gatherings, which I call the period of exhausting
commuting. Roughly in the period starting with the mid-seventies until
the beginning of the eighties, match watching was available only for the
members of a narrow, somewhat privileged group of people. I am thinking
of the core of the later organisers. In order to satisfy this ongoing need,
they returned to the pattern socialised in Cluj, involving several well-off
inhabitants from Ciumani. When it was possible, they travelled to watch
the games at Cluj, Huedin, or Izvorul Crișului. In the beginning they
travelled by bus. With the growing number of private passenger cars from
the second half of the seventies, the phenomenon resembling sports tour-
ism today (Weed 2008) was already characteristic for a larger population
segment. There would be 10–15 or even 20 cars departing towards Cluj
for a more important match of the Hungarian national team, meaning
that 75 or even 100 people would be travelling. This commuting was
obviously not only characteristic for the people of Ciumani, but also for
other localities in the Szeklerland. Among my interviewees in Cluj and its
vicinity many remember well the convoys of cars from Harghita, Mureș
and Covasna counties, descending from Feleacu and passing through the
city towards Lomb, Făget, Cheile Baciului or the village of Gheorgheni. In
the seventies the practice was spreading during the periods of international
football championships, where families went for holidays to thermal spas
in Western Romania with a trade union tourist voucher, thereby increasing
the number of dissident TV watchers along the border.
Commuting caused a lot of difficulties and demanded great efforts, and
could never have become a mass phenomenon on the long run—although
subjects from Ciumani called it half jokingly and half tragically “football
migrations”. Part of the problem was of a financial nature. Although auto-
mobiles were available from the second half of the seventies, they were still a
scarce resource only but a few possessed. Romanian car manufacturing

began in 1968, the time when the fabrication of cars started. Then in 1969
the iconic 1300 Dacias started to roll, built on the pattern of R12 Renault
cars. Their price was around 70,000 lei at the end of the seventies (equal to
54 months of average salaries in 1970), and demanding customers were
placed on waiting lists. It was hard to obtain a car. The circle of commuting
watchers was restricted by the financial possibilities and the connections with
people who owned a car (yet the number of commuters was not negligible
at all). In order to diminish the tensions of dependency those with cars tried
to transport passengers on a rotating basis, with the obvious exception of the
owner of the car and the person with connection to the receiving family in
Huedin. The yard of the church in Huedin, which had accommodated many
visitors in the beginning, proved to be too small after a while so first the
presbyters of the congregation, and later others also, got involved in receiv-
ing “sports tourists”. Friendships lasting for many years formed here, some
of the hosts even visited the Szeklerland. Commuting created a very strong
feeling of solidarity. Ice hockey trainer Árpád Kercsó remembers:
In Huedin the Hungarian television was also clearly visible, and before a
match of the Hungarian national team the queues on the road were similar to
the ones between Budapest and Lake Balaton on Fridays. Seven or eight of us
settled to watch the game as a family; we brought cakes and wine, as it is cus-
tomary when paying a visit to someone. It was a powerful feeling of belonging
together that even as I am speaking about it right now, tears are coming to my
eyes. The cursed Argentina–Hungary match in ’78, when Törőcsik and Nyilasi
were sent off the field, was a Huedin experience, too. We were leading by one-
nil, and I got so excited that I could not watch the TV; I had to go out to the
street. There was a church there on the square; I walked around it, and I even-
tually even went inside to pray for victory. And then at the end of the match,
when I saw all those faces tormented by defeat, one could not imagine anything
worse than that… (Csillag 2015)
Kercsó was the gym teacher at the school in Ciumani between 1977
and 1982, then he moved to Hungary in 1985, accomplishing a successful
career; he even worked as the trainer of the ice hockey teams of the
Ferencváros and later the national team of Hungary.
Beyond the difficulty of acquiring a car, transportation and mainte-
nance costs meant further problems. According to later estimations one
return trip could cost as much as 100–200 lei per person (which was 5–10
per cent of the average monthly salary of 2011 lei in 1978), because the
30 L. PÉTER
participants did not only have to pay for fuel and food, but also the pos-
sible repairing costs of the car, the continuous patching of poor quality
tyres. Accidents also happened, bringing further expenses. After the 1979
oil crisis the price of fuel got drastically expensive in Romania. It was get-
ting more and more difficult to buy it, and later on it was rationed. Finally,
as part of forcible austerity, cars with odd and even numbers could only
run alternately on Sundays (cars with an odd number plate were allowed
to circulate on one Sunday and those with an even number plate on the
next one). This situation narrowed down the number of employable cars,
and the collective pooling of fuel also meant efforts. This was either done
by bribing an employee at the petrol station in order to get a larger quan-
tity of fuel, or saving up from other travels. Car owners in a higher posi-
tion sometimes received extra fuel in exchange for certain favours or
simply bought gasoline from the flourishing black market, and kept them
in metal drums. This strategy had to be followed until the change of
regime anyway, as the economic situation in Romania continued to
deteriorate.
A further problem was the scarcity of free time. Intellectuals and profes-
sionals in higher positions had larger degrees of freedom, but for the sim-
ple workers, often working in three shifts, it was a lot more difficult task to
get enough free time. Thus it was not rare that the match watchers left
right from work and returned directly to the factory at the end. The issue
of scarce free time was further aggravated by the six-day working week,
causing conflicts appearing within the family on such occasions. As watch-
ing the game in this period was an entirely “male issue”, the objections of
the wives left at home also had to be handled. All these impediments were
increased if the football fan worker had to change shifts with someone else
in order to get away from work, because the favour of switching the shift
had to be properly returned twice.
A further acute problem was the relationship with the authorities. The
relationship between the police and the match watchers was contradictory
right from the very beginning, but with the rapid increase of the phenom-
enon it turned into a hostile and conflicting one, which necessitated specific
strategies of defence. With the introduction of the county system in 1968,
car plates also included a reference to the county of origin. Before impor-
tant matches the authorities expected a large number of cars from the coun-
ties of the Szeklerland to depart for the cities close to the border. Due to its
mass character, this raised more serious questions, because these “motor-
cades” were done in the public space, and in the eyes of the power they
were quite close to spontaneous demonstrations and protesting gatherings.
According to the accounts, policemen frequently picked on drivers, sub-

jected the vehicles to exaggerated, and rather slow technical controls, and
in certain cases they even mocked the drivers for their poor knowledge of
Romanian. If they asked a question using technical terms denoting car
parts, and the drivers did not know the answer because they had not even
understood the question, they gave cynical remarks. Fines were frequent—
some were fined by the same policeman on the way there and also when
returning—but the general objective followed by the authorities was hin-
drance, the demonstration of power and the deliberate slowing down of the
advancement. As the drivers belonging together waited for each other, it
happened that they all missed the game because of the controls. After a
while, when they were asked about the purpose of their trip, the counter-
reaction of the drivers was that they were travelling on “church-related
business”—which was true in the sense that many of them watched the
game in the yard of the Reformed church in Huedin. Or that they were
going to attend a funeral, or just to help someone in co-operative work. In
certain cases, one could reach an agreement with the policeman with the
help of some money or brandy. In many cases those travelling behind the
car controlled by the police (not only those from Ciumani, but the cars
from Mureș, Harghita, Covasna) demonstratively stopped, considerably
expanding the queue and blocking the traffic completely. This method of
urging an agreement did not always work, as after a while the number of
controlling police officers was also raised significantly. Another method of
intimidation was that the policemen wrote down the number plates, but
according to later recollections, the football fans did not bother too much
with this. Of course, there were rightful fines, too, especially with relation
to the consumption of alcohol or because of clumsy drivers in big city traf-
fic. The cars departing together usually took care of each other, making
sure that nobody was left behind.
So John left with four bad tyres, without a spare tyre, without a lever, without
anything. On the way home we repaired quite a few flat tyres before the Bucin
Peak (…). Around 22 on our way home, like every 5–10 kilometres. All the way
from Huedin…. he did not have an inner tube, I gave one, an inner tube that
was not exactly the size needed for the Dacia, but it had to work somehow, then
he had cold patches, but this was in the fall, and the weather was quite wretched.
So they placed that cold patch, which came off after a few kilometres, then they
put it back again. We were standing and waiting. We did the distance from
Huedin to Cluj all in a row. 40–50 cars!
—Luke
32 L. PÉTER
From the above it can be seen that in spite of the increasing numbers,
“exhausting commuting” only remained available for the more privileged
and better-schooled, as the matches were not watched in Ciumani.
Although it was not a mass phenomenon, still it permitted access to the
matches of Hungarian and European cups for a considerable number of
people. And what was even more important: it thematised on a wider scale
a relevant issue for the community: the question of “forbidden football”.
The solution in this stage was not yet satisfactory for the entire commu-
nity, but the collective need was already there, and urging for some kind
of a local solution. This aim was consciously formulated by the end of the
seventies, yet the human intelligentsia fulfilling a pioneer and innovative
role was not able to find a solution for it. This necessitated a technical
knowledge, which was soon successfully provided by the enthusiastic and
persevering representatives of the technical sciences. Without them the
phenomenon would have only remained a marginal one (not only in
Ciumani but all over Inner-Transylvania).
3. The stage of technical innovations. The third stage could also be seen
as a transitional or a hybrid one. By this I do not mean that some contin-
ued to commute to Huedin and Izvorul Crișului, in spite of the growing
difficulties (“travelled to the TV signal”), but the technical experts around
Ciumani were already trying to “catch the TV signal on the spot”.
According to pieces of information a few people already watched matches
on the top of the surrounding mountains as early as in 1977, but the true
breakthrough only came later. The news that in 1980–1981 the Chișinău
TV programme from the Soviet Republic of Moldavia was successfully
received in neighbouring Mureș County, gave a strong impetus to the
“signal hunting”. As a consequence, many from the region, including
from Ciumani went to the spot in Sovata. However, the police were
already waiting for them there and chased them away by saying that the
location belonged to an area of nature protection, therefore it was not
allowed to be there. According to the accounts the breakthrough came
with the help of TV professional, Noel (whose name was still remembered
and respected by all the interviewees after so many years). Noel, a true
hero, saw the building of the antenna and the finding of an appropriate
location for catching the signal as a professional challenge. According to
those who knew him, he enjoyed hiking and spent a lot of time in nature.
He walked the surrounding pastures and higher peaks for months, either
alone or in the company of the local forest ranger. As the former ranger
told us, Noel also studied geographic maps, in order to find an adequate
eastern corridor to catch the signal from Soviet-Moldavia. He built sev-

eral versions of a dismountable antenna, and assembled it at locations that
seemed appropriate in different combinations. He carried his small TV
set and the battery with a barrow-like wheeled cart. As a technician
trained in television reception, he could easily obtain the basic materials
necessary for an aerial. Finally, at a location close to the Amza-Peak, he
managed to find a location suitable for reception. Here they fixed the rod
of the antenna to a higher pine tree, and left it there after adequately
camouflaging it. For a while they kept it as a secret and one of the capital
tasks of the ranger became to supervise the security of the antenna and its
surroundings.
The reason for leaving the antenna there was primarily related to the
long distance. Turning off from the macadam road, a steep, gravelly-
pebbly section leading to the place had to be done by foot. Thus the
antenna did not have to be transported and mounted every time. By hid-
ing it, the likely location of the football gatherings could be kept secret
from the authorities. This was done as a precaution, which also guaranteed
that in the given circumstances the police would not prevent the spreading
of the phenomenon (learning from the case in Sovata). Noel’s antenna
functioned indeed, and several other antennas were built using his exam-
ple, with which the broadcast of the Moldavian television could be received
in the coming years at the nearby location, particularly after 1985 on the
Pângărat ̦i-Peak, a place that could accommodate much larger masses of
people. In addition to Noel’s intuition about the free eastern corridor and
his legendary obsession, the first successful reception was also helped by a
technical development, about which he had no idea at the time. By 1982
the Soviet Union set up two great capacities, 350 m high TV amplifiers
and transmission stations on the hills near Strășeni and Cahul in Moldavia,
and practically extended the programme of the Moldavian television
broadcast in Romanian into a whole-day programme (between 7 a.m. and
1 a.m.) (Mustat ̦ă 2015: 472). Thus Noel found a strengthened and whole-
day signal, which had been strengthened exactly to be received in Romania.
4. The stage of mass football gatherings. Finding the location adequate
for reception and making it public generated a revolutionary change,
increased to the maximum by the lack of the transmission of the 1982
world cup. This was the moment when the phenomenon became a mas-
sive one. The Romanian and the Hungarian national teams got into the
same selection group in 1981/1982, and many people still travelled to
Cluj to watch the matches of the Hungarian team and to listen the
34 L. PÉTER
Hungarian commentary. The TVR only broadcast the qualifying matches

of the national team of Romania. A few people had already watched a
couple of games at the “new location” before the world cup, but the phe-
nomenon became a real social institution during the Spanish World Cup.
It was no longer necessary to travel, “forbidden football”, could be
watched instead “at home”, “on home ground” (i.e. at a hardly accessible
mountain roughly 11 km away from Ciumani). This practically democra-
tised gatherings, as the matches became accessible to everyone, irrespec-
tive of their financial situation. Moreover, thanks to the local ice hockey
movement, the location could be reached even without a personal car or a
friend with a car.
By this a new point of connection unfolded between the football gath-
erings and the ice hockey movement. As I have said earlier, the initiators
of the two phenomena were the same intellectual actors: gym teachers,
trainers, the doctor of the ice hockey team, the teacher of physics and the
other close members of their network. Noel joins the club later on, he
moves to the locality later on, but the discovery of the place of reception
immediately activated the organisational infrastructure of the ice hockey
movement. Majority of the rooters mobilised by the ice hockey matches
got involved in the active audience of gatherings, thus closing the circle:
football gatherings became the summer, freer alternative to the ice hockey
competitions. Local rooters also “brought with them their winter know-
how. It was completely natural that the same rooters used the same means
of transportation to travel on the mountain for the same community
objectives”. This may seem like an obvious thing, yet it is not. For it is one
thing to go to an organised trip with the SMA (agricultural machine sta-
tion) operated “dogcatcher carriage” within the framework of the Daciada,
and something completely different to use the same transportation for
protest-like gatherings, which were followed by the authorities with scep-
ticism and aversion, to say the least. The critical elite organising the ice
hockey and dissident match watching simply pretended that they did not
sense this contradiction, involving the leader of the SMA and the president
of the agricultural co-operative farm the same way as in the case of the
winter ice-hockey-related events—making them accomplices. Both parties
pretended that it was the most natural thing in the world that with the
money of the Romanian State rooters they were transported in the winter
and in the summer to watch ice hockey, or to watch the matches of the
Hungarian national team on the mountain. Here again we witness the
deliberate shaping of the interdependent dynamics of the figurations
between power factors, just like in the two earlier cases. In other words,
the “innocent” organisers activate the existing personal relationships
between the local educational and economic institutions and the leaders of
the ice-hockey movement (rooters, sports fans) against the police repre-
senting the State and the local representatives of the Party. The latter
bided their time in the beginning, and then remained passive when seeing
the mass phenomenon unfold and only retaliated against the flagrant cases
that came to their knowledge.
The organisers simply activated and adapted the earlier existing organ-
isational logic. The issue of the antenna was sorted out by Noel and his
companions, and the transportation of the viewers was undertaken by the
worker transporters of the named “Onedin” vehicle (dog catcher car-
riage). The name of Onedin was borrowed from a popular seafaring drama
series, The Onedin Line, produced by the BBC and also broadcast by TVR
in the seventies. The name stuck because of the permanent rocking of the
vehicle. The transportation means of the capitalist seafarer trade route and
its four-wheeled socialist equivalent self-ironically represented the radical
difference between the two worlds. When needed, the Onedin covered
the route several times, so that all the interested people could reach the
scene of the football gathering. The batteries were transported on the
same vehicle, and in the final distance of almost two kilometres the partici-
pants took turns in carrying them to the top of the mountain. The organ-
isers mostly arrived in personal cars, which also carried the first TV set,
which belonged to Cole.
The architecture of the location formed around the TV set placed
under the pine tree with the antenna. At this point there were only one or
two sets to watch for approximately 150–200 people. The most people
gathered to see the world cup matches of the national team of Hungary.
Most of my interviewees remembered from this period the Hungary vs. El
Salvador match, resulting in 10-1 (06.06.1982), as well as the semi-finals
and the finals. The audience regularly arrived at the scene early, and after
the match, if the quality of the reception permitted it, some of them
watched movies or other broadcast programmes (Moldavian TV transmit-
ted programmes in Romanian, so they could understand them). The best
places were taken by the organisers, the transporters and those coming
earlier. Interestingly enough, according to the accounts not everyone was
attracted by the match; many people came for the good company and
atmosphere, for the community experience. The screens of the small TV
sets could often hardly be seen by those sitting farther; sometimes they
36 L. PÉTER
even had to inquire from the others about the results or the outcomes of
chances to score.
Football gatherings in Ciumani were primarily the world of men.
Women also attended, mostly young unmarried girls coming with their
boyfriends, but that was not the norm. The social situation (Spradley
1980) created on the mountain in connection with the match had a mark-
edly masculine character (Hadas 2003). Under the notion of a social situ-
ation, Spradley (1980) understands the “triangle” formed by the
physical-geographical location, the actors being present there and the
activities/actions carried out. The location (the woods, nature in general,
and the vicinity of the high peak far from the village) in the local cultural
tradition was primarily the space of men and of the works carried out there
by men. The place of dangerous woodcutting and logging, where wild
animals could appear, difficult to reach, far from home. The people who
watched the matches were mostly men and a few teenage boys, and the
activities could be typically related to traditional masculinity (Connell
1995): everything related to painful rooting (Hornby 2012). The dense
cigarette smoke, the smell of home-brew brandy, the loud remarks and
vulgar swearing, the cynical comments on women or the rude jokes, the
card-playing (they played sixty-six, mostly with German playing cards,
sometimes making bets in drinks) all evoked a stifling manlike atmosphere.
Comic situations were frequent. Cole (a teacher) told of one occasion
when he had to stand behind the TV and hold the TV cable and the
antenna bar the whole time, as the wind kept moving the antenna.
Meanwhile, he was watching the game in a mirror held by someone else,
and he could not even drink without assistance: “Once I watched a match
in the mirror, ‘cause I had to keep and move the antenna, so that we could
see something. Even the brandy was poured into my mouth by somebody
else.”
They obviously also ate on the mountain, they barbecued lard, sausages
and grilled meat, “rinsed” or “hallowed” with beer, but mostly with
brandy. They made the fire with dry wood gathered on the spot. Some
brought along axes to cut firewood or to clean the location of the gather-
ing. In the spontaneously formed but later on strictly observed division of
tasks the protection of the fire and the prevention of littering were the task
of the forest ranger. He marked out the spot for the fire and he personally
checked that the remains of the fire would cause no problems. Fire protec-
tion rules were strictly observed; especially as many of the participants
belonged to the group of volunteer firemen themselves.
This became some sort of a third place (Nylund 2007) built up by men,
beside the workplace and family, which at the same time also meant a
quasi-conscious withdrawal from everyday socialism. One of my subjects
(Adam) gave a very plastic explanation: “We went out in the free nature to
become free”. In this formulation the term “free nature” is understood as
opposed to social reality (the expression of going out into the free nature
was frequently used in the region to denote the outside space as opposed
to the closed inside space). Freedom simply meant the desired freedom,
the freedom from the constraints of the dictatorial regime, and the free
will. In this striking formulation there is a sharp contradiction between the
everyday reality of the society and the state of freedom created by the
gatherings and found on the mountain. In this interpretation the matches
watched are secondary, and only play some role in the creation of the
natural state of freedom.
Out there, in the free nature—much freer than the stand of the ice hockey
rink—they played cards, drank, had conversations and also sung. They rooted
in Hungarian for the Hungarian national team, and although the strictly for-
bidden national anthem of Hungary was only sung rarely, on special occa-
sions, when the anthem was played before the official matches by the official
orchestras of the hosting countries, they listened to it standing up. Eventless
everyday life, “Szekler wit” prevailed: they did not start singing; they “simply”
watched and listened. As the match was broadcast by the television of the
“friendly” Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia, while humming the “song”
heard there, they could avoid possible problems. Yet there were cases when
they effectively sang it, on their own initiative. In 1977, for instance, trainer
Árpád Kercsó was among the singers at one of the matches, and for that he
was called to the Securitate (someone denounced him), where he denied
everything and so he escaped. “Of course it was true, but I denied every-
thing.” The interrogation had a huge stake, as two of his acquaintances had
sung the Hungarian national anthem at a house party earlier, for which they
received seven years of imprisonment, of which they served five. In 1982, after
the match won against Salvador, during the celebration afterwards in a pub,
the rooters sang the equally forbidden Szekler anthem, and the next day they
all denied it, saying that they were drunk (based on the accounts of Sean and
Cole). The system obviously tried to follow the events. It was a good idea to
prevent all possible danger; therefore, it became a practice before the matches
to have all known suspicious persons, the ones “with blue eyes” (as potential
informers were denoted in private conversations) thoroughly drunk, so they
are not able to see or hear anything.
38 L. PÉTER
In this male dominated social space the presence of young boys was also
natural. They, too, were frequently taken to the mountain, especially when
important world competitions took place in the summer holidays, pro-
vided that they “deserved it”, and were already capable of looking after
themselves. In other words, when they were mature enough to obey the
rules—that they did not walk far away from the scene of the gathering,
they kept away from the fire and especially if they “could keep their mouths
shut”; that is, they did not divulge sensitive information at home or to
others (about women, the wives, or drinking, and especially about political
jokes, or critical remarks about the system). The ability for secrecy repre-
sented a quality that was a precondition of participation, recognised by the
boys spontaneously. This also meant a type of complicity between grown-
up men and children, who were in fact supervised together, and watched
that they suffer no harm, especially when going home in the dark. For that
matter, the difficulty of travelling home on a cold, dark and rainy night
were the main sources of inconveniences. From the later interviews it
turns out that the children saw the events as a stage of introduction into
adult manhood, as occasions of admission and acceptance, a kind of rite of
passage.
5. The stage of regional level football gatherings. After 1982 the phenom-
enon became region-wide in the Giurgeului Basin. The technicians made
significant achievements in designing the adequate forms and the place-
ment of reception antennas. Progress was also due to a magazine printed
in Hungary under the title of Ezermester (Jack-of-all-trades), in which
useful television-related tips were published mainly for those living in
Eastern-Transylvania, but the experience, knowledge related to match-
watching, the types of aerials used in the various localities of Inner-
Transylvania—this kind of “knowledge sharing” accumulated a common,
freely accessible set of information, by which reception became possible in
several locations in Ciumani, too. Martin remembers this as follows:
Yes. There was an interesting issue here. I went to Hungary that year, and
found an antenna in a shop, suitable for long distance reception; I think it was
sold under the name of “Szaliton”. I don’t remember its exact price, more than
ten thousand of Forints, which was quite an amount [of money] back then in
the 80s. I bought one because that was exactly what I wanted: long distance
viewing. (…) Then we tried to make some measurements. We started in the
Mórisz curve. Then we came back to Basa, and then to the bridge of the Mureș,
and the Linen Factory in Joseni. There was a relatively good signal everywhere,
it could be seen. Still, the image was not as good as we had hoped. And then we
went up to the foundry. Near the foundry sometimes there was a signal, some-
times there wasn’t. Then we gave up going to Borzont on this side. Then the
thought came to go on the Pângărat ̦i Peak, where the signal was excellent, we
went back towards Lamanc, and it was OK there, too, only along the road it
was weaker, and then one more mountain before it. I don’t remember exactly
who discovered it that back towards the Víg havas there is a place called Vinkli,
where it worked perfectly. Hats off! There was a direct, open corridor towards
Moldavia, towards Chișinău.
The majority of the viewers arriving from the different localities of the
Giurgeului Basin followed the 1986 World Cup on the Pângărat ̦i-Peak. By
that time the Pângărat ̦i-Peak had become the scene of a regular football
festival for a complete month. Although it is located a bit further but more
accessible, thanks to the better road conditions. It was possible to get
there by a vehicle. A regional sized event took place here, to which people
came to watch matches from all over the neighbourhood. Some camped
there and stayed there for days or weeks, forming a regular tent camp.
In comparison with 1982, the additional events on the scene changed
only a little, yet the watching of the matches occurred in smaller groups of
25–30 people. The groups sitting or standing around the cars were organ-
ised along friendly and family relations; the TV sets were placed on the top
of the cars or on their engine compartments. The practice of watching the
match organised around smaller circles had several reasons. The number
of available portable sets increased in the mean time, and the rooters tried
to obtain them in time. Since 1982 it became clear to everyone that the
TVR would not broadcast the football event taking place in Mexico,
either. Besides that, the antennas also became more widespread, and
became easier to make. Furthermore, as we are speaking about a larger
mass of people at this location, it would have been technically impossible
to solve the issue without fewer sets. I have heard of experiments like that,
too. In Harghita-Băi, close to Miercurea-Ciuc, the owners of holiday cot-
tages built a semicircular stand out of boles, from where a lot of people
could follow the matches. But in Harghita-Băi 220 Volt electricity was
available; therefore, they could use a larger TV. Besides, due to a TV relay
station nearby, Moldavian TV could be received at several places in the
locality. In a similar way a stand was built also near a forest in Sângeorgiu
de Pădure (Mureș County), and the TV set was placed on a stilted table
with long legs, at the same level as the back rows of the stand (as seen on
40 L. PÉTER
a photograph taken at the time). Such conditions could not be ensured on

the Pângărat ̦i-Peak.
Furthermore, the location attracted a socially heterogeneous popula-
tion. People of various ages and from different walks of life were present.
As compared to 1982, there were more women attending. They helped in
cooking and catering, and took care of the younger children especially in
the case of those camping there, or if they arrived with a larger friendly
company. The organisation was also carried out by spontaneous develop-
ment of well-defined roles: transporters with cars, TV owners, antenna
owners, radio owners, those who knew the place well and organised the
scene, fuel procurers, damage repairers (car repairers, tyre changers, car
towers), forest rangers supervising the security of the place, game wardens
(there were wild animals in the woods nearby, bears among them), clean-
ers and fire protectors. According to the narrations, there were people
who kept an eye on strangers, suspicious persons. An important task was
to discover and keep track of the programmes of transmissions. By 1986,
the programme of the transmissions was circulated in a hand-written note-
book there on the peak.
The football gatherings on the Pângărat ̦i-Peak, which hallmarked the
fifth stage of the natural history of gatherings, were a great deal different
than the previous ones. While back in 1982 the events functioned in a nar-
rower circle, embedded in the local village community, by 1986 they grew
into a regional phenomenon. Earlier local practices organised indepen-
dently and somewhat isolated from one another “merged” here and
appeared in a larger common social space. The practice of gatherings did
not only increase in their volume, but also became institutionalised.
Repeating itself, following the earlier patterns of 1982 and partially of
1984, it became more complex, diversified and gained a cyclical character.
By 1988, the newly evolved pattern became active again, which under-
lined its deep social embeddedness and social relevance. In time people
were attracted to the mountain over and over again not only by events of
great significance, but also by international cup matches and other qualify-
ing rounds: it became a part of how people spent their leisure time. Some
of the people started to climb the Pângărat ̦i-Peak to watch all kinds of
matches after 1984, and large masses after 1986, to temporarily escape the
grip of the system.
The year 1986, just like 1982, is a relevant memory from the perspec-
tive of Magyar identity for the people living in the area. Many were very
curious to follow the performance of the Hungarian national team with

great expectations, and the defeat by 6-0 suffered against the Soviet Union
is a traumatic point in the history of football gatherings that came up in
conversations all the time. The humiliating defeat was interpreted as a
tragic and unfair event, deeply personal in nature, and a new tragic devel-
opment overall for Hungarians.
Therefore there… people often remembered, it practically frequently surfaced in

this small world, that rooters here lived everything much more intensely, and
emotionally. It meant a great deal more from the perspective of the community
itself, and from the perspective of community building, the nurturing of
national feelings, these sports successes and these defeats meant a lot more and
were felt much more tragically by the audience here.
—Ian
The entire phenomenon had an undeniably accented ethnic connota-

tion—it created an occasion and a possibility to strengthen and reproduce
the feeling of belonging to the Hungarian nation. Forbidden football was
an excellent opportunity for this, and gatherings devoid of constraints
could fulfil their role in the preservation of identity much more strongly
than the otherwise very important ice hockey rooting. And there wasn’t
really anything else available. This ethnic dimension is extremely well illus-
trated by a story that occurred during the European Cup in 1988. Neither
Hungary, nor Romania, participated in the European championship that
year. Thus, the social situation, the context of football gathering from
where the Hungarian team—the object of community identification sym-
bolising the Hungarian nation—was de facto missing, can be much better
underlined. That year, on one occasion, the youngsters crowded together
to watch the match, and after the transmission sang a rock opera entitled
Stephen, the King (István, a király), which was strictly forbidden in
Romania.
So we went out there… We sang, and we did in fact do even more than that…
we only sang what we were not supposed to sing! What was forbidden…! What
was the year when we sang Stephen, the King? In 88. Yes! All of a sudden
everybody knew what their role was. Yes–yes, we learned the whole rock opera, as
amateurs. We stayed there.
—Brad
42 L. PÉTER
The musical produced in 1983 became part of popular culture. It was

smuggled into Romania. It tells the history of how Hungarians became
Christians, in a story about the conflicts that preceded the coronation of
St. Stephen. The lyrics and the music were learned by heart by many
young people all over Transylvania. Its catchy tunes and part of its lyrics
became the symbol of Hungarian relatedness across the Carpathian Basin,
just like the 1954 Golden Team, Puskás, or the prevailing team of Hungary.
The singing of the musical was a severely punishable deed by itself,
regarded by the authorities as a brusque manifestation of revisionism and
irredentism. But St. Stephen in this context, beyond its obvious ethnic
connotation, stood for football, universally unifying the people. It was not
the mere expression of Magyar identity, but also the symbol of discontent-
edness and protest because of forbidden football. For many people were
there in 1988, too, during the tournament in Germany. All of them were
attracted there by forbidden football: they wanted to see matches, to feel
the freedom, irrespective of ethnic background or rooting preferences. In
this setup István or Stephen (just like in the year 1000 AD) symbolised
free Europe, Western civilisation, freedom. The absurdity of the situation
and of the conditions in Romania at that time are well indicated by the fact
that the Western civilisation and liberty hallmarked by football had to
arrive here from the East, through the wavelength of the Moldavian
television.
The striking force of the phenomenon is also well shown by the fact
that some people did not only come here to watch football: they also
watched movies and other types of sports transmissions. One of my inter-
view subjects told me an incredible story. According to that story, the
earlier mentioned Árpád Kercsó, the ice hockey trainer for the Hungarian
national team, learned one of his later master strokes by watching an ice
hockey match on the hill. The earlier Hungarian head coach, the trainer of
the Alba Volán junior team of Székesfehérvár confirmed all this:
The story is true; I still teach the trick series of the Soviet Makarov, shown at the
1983 world championship, in the match against Czechoslovakia. I remember, it
was early spring and the weather was sleety, dirty. Three of us, my brother, a
friend and me were travelling in a Dacia and it was difficult to proceed on the
forest road, at one point we even had to cut a tree fallen across the road with a
saw, in order to be able to go on. Up there among the trees we caught the Soviet
channel on our Yunost TV set with much difficulty, but the reception was so
poor that sometimes it was only possible to recognise that there was not a football
or a handball match being played on the screen, but ice hockey. The performance
of the Makarov, Larionov, Krutov trio still fascinated me; the result was 1–1.
(Csillag 2015)
In this way, the practice of football gatherings, in effect, became an

organic part of the regional cultural pattern; it got on the activity calendar
of the communities. This meant a much larger-scale event series: more
people got involved and it presumed more complex organisation and co-
ordination because people started to come from different locations. It
turned into an event series co-ordinated on a higher level, presuming
united local forces and logistics—it became a freely organising movement
extended regionally and with a concrete aim. Not a bricolage-like impro-
visation at all, but the institutional form of resistance, leaning on the local
communities, their social and reliance capital.
At the end of the Ciumani case study, I only make a couple of punctual
remarks with reference to the protest character, the resistant feature of the
mass phenomenon. I will get back to this with more details in the follow-
ing chapter, after the ethnographic description of the larger spectrum of
the case studies. On the one hand, in a totalitarian system, where there are
no legitimate goals and interests except for the will of the power, even the
bare existence of autonomously organised gatherings and the institution-
alisation of the practice bear right from the beginning the germs of resis-
tance. Then, organisation on a regional level based on volunteerism, active
mass mobilisation for the sake of a collective aim (mass commuting, car
processions up to and down from the mountains, the sojourn in the public
space of large numbers of people for a longer period of time, the collective
consumption of foreign media contents, discussions about the problems
of minority existence in Romania, rooting for the Hungarian team, sing-
ing) were disturbing and risky for the power, which wanted to exclusively
assert its own objectives. The abundance of jokes told in such a context,
the spontaneous thematisation of economic issues, the occurrence of
clearly forbidden activities (the singing of forbidden songs, the listening to
foreign radio programmes), as well as the formulation of explicitly critical
remarks about the system in the public space and before the others, all this
confirm my initial starting point.
I continue to affirm that football gatherings created an alternative social
space that could be placed in opposition with the official political order and
the everyday reality, where the spectators of forbidden football “could feel
free, out in free nature”. The narrative of the participants systematically
44 L. PÉTER
includes the message that match watching was lived by everybody as an

individual and collective success, which turned into a source of pride. In a
simpler form this was frequently formulated as “[match watching] was
good because we could make it, we could still watch them”. The plural
pronoun “we” (the local society) in “we could” is valid against the power
that “forbade” the population from watching the European championship,
the world championship, the European cups and other football events on
TV. The “still” in these regular formulations is a very important element: it
denotes that although the power did not want this, did not ensure this, did
not make it possible, did not broadcast it, it was still achieved, for we
together achieved it. By this the spectators pose themselves from the outset
against the power, on the other side. They are the ones that stand up against
the power, by making their own wish and intention become reality. This
validates my initial presentation of the issue, according to which a dissident
audience is at the same time a protesting, resisting public, too, in which
two elements are interlinked: the mass manifestation against a system char-
acterised by constraints, as well as the declaration and the living with ethnic
identity. This duality is well demonstrated by the following quote:
It was a constraint that made us climb the mountain, because there had been
no matches on TV. And as Hungarians we could sustain the Hungarian team.
—Adam
To sum up, this case exemplified that the local sports movement con-
tributed to the strengthening of the collective local ethnic identity in the
community. Furthermore, the football gatherings were built on the infra-
structure of the ice hockey movement, becoming some kind of a freer
extension and replacement for it in the late eighties. The gatherings grew
into a social institution in which the protest character was also expressed.
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CHAPTER 3
Bălan: Angry Men in The Night
Abstract This chapter presents the way in which the football gathering
was organised in a typical socialist mono-industrial mining town with spe-
cific workers’ culture due to the copper mine and hardship. The inter-
ethnic context—Romanian majority and Hungarian minority—influenced
the special setting of football consumption. However, the supporters left
the ethnic differences behind, based on the commonly shared workers’
culture formed alongside hard and dangerous work. The chapter shows
how the football played a bridging role. It argues that the football gather-
ings placed all the inhabitants of Bălan, irrespective of their jobs, on the
same side. As the borders and the social differences between physical and
intellectual workers disappeared on the mountain, both the “lads” and the
“eggheads” became active members of the same dissident public. All of
them were concerned and angry because of the hard economic situation
and struggle to survive, so the football gathering provided a common
basis to express a certain form of protest and gave them a unifying force.
Although the equipment was ensured by the intellectuals, the role of the
blue-collar workers and regular miners was not unimportant either, in set-
ting up. This chapter underlines the role of technical knowledge in the
economy of football gatherings, as it was described in connection with the
antenna designs and organisation of the collective events.
Keywords Bălan • Mono-industrial town • Inter-ethnic relations •

Worker’s culture • Football • Integration • Scarcity

48 L. PÉTER
The Research Location

Bălan is interesting due to its character and dominant workers’ culture. It
is one of the “pampered”, significant towns of the system, bearing each
element of the philosophy of socialist order. It is a new town and its his-
tory is closely linked to the socialist era; it was founded on the logic of
planned economy. The inhabitants were attracted here by the mine; the
majority was recruited from different regions of the country, and—due to
the growth of the town—could never form an organic community. In
exchange for the dangerous work they undertook, they received housing
and prestige, and higher than average incomes, which indeed kept a lot of
people tied to the town. Bălan is the model of socialist urbanisation, sub-
ordinated to the industrial development objectives and the political inter-
ests of the five-year plans. The most important employer in town was the
mining company itself, there were no other significant economic units
functioning, with the exception of collateral services. In 1979 the town
was awarded the highest-ranking socialist decoration. The Order of
Labour, First Class, was handed over by the dictator himself, in the com-
pany of his wife and several members of the government, to the director
of the mine and the town leadership, at the entrance of the mine—all of
them dressed in mining outfits!
Bălan is a town in the Szeklerland, gaining its town status in 1967. A
winner of the forced industrialisation—and the serious loser of the eco-
nomic structural changes after 1989. It is a typical, mono-industrial-made
city (Szirmai 1988) built around the copper mine, thought to be of stra-
tegic importance. The town lies at the foot of the picturesque Hășmaș
Mountains at an altitude of 825 metres above sea level, in a narrow valley.
The geographically isolated locality stretches along the Olt River, 11 km
away from the main county road, at a distance of 42 km from the county
capital. It was never connected to the railroad network. The town itself
was mixed from an ethnic point of view; it had a Romanian majority,
where in addition to the autochthonous Hungarian population, those
seeking employment opportunities mainly arrived from Moldova.
The life cycle of the town was closely connected to the growth of the
mining company and its decline after the change of the political system. It
lived its days of glory at the end of the seventies and the beginning of the
eighties, synchronously with the amount of copper ore brought to the
surface by the mining company. The mine fulfilled a strategic role in the
national planned economy; it produced 7 per cent of all copper ore
extracted in Romania. This was used in the manufacturing of heavy
BĂLAN: ANGRY MEN IN THE NIGHT 49
machines and in the defence industry (Hunya et al. 1990). Exploitation

was increased at the request of the Party between 1970 and 1975, which
meant the opening of new shafts and galleries; this also caused the spec-
tacular growth of the population. The population of the town in the mid-
dle of the last century was 1002 (in 1956) which grew to 11,489 by 1974,
then continued to grow until 1986, when it reached a total of 16,180
people. The rapid population increase was followed by a similarly rapid
decline after 1989, in which the intelligentsia was in the vanguard—732 of
the 836 experts drifted away. The census in 1992 only registered 10,937
people; in 2002 there were 7902, then 6115 in 2012, and the decrease is
continuing today (TEMPO 2017).
A football pitch was inaugurated to develop sports life in 1966. And
yet the town remained the grim compound of the mining enterprise, a
set of standardised blocks with an underdeveloped system of institu-
tions dominated by the mine. The housing stock was in the hands of the
copper mine, which took an active part in the distribution of the
resources, leaving its mark on the leadership of the town. It greatly
defined cultural and sports life, aiming to avoid conflicts and sustain the
fragile status quo, so that the expected amount of copper could be
exploited year by year.
The Patterns of Local Worker Culture

In this chapter I shall focus on the manifestations of two aspects of football
gatherings: the appearance of workers’ culture and the dynamics of inter-
ethnic relations during the 1986 Mexican championship, under worsening
living conditions. The data of my description primarily come from the
accounts from former participants and are based on information obtained
first hand.
The majority of those working for the mining company were first gen-
eration workers, often arriving from poorer, rural settlements. Only but a
few were coming from multi-generational worker’s families, who were
much respected. Moving from the village to the town, the experience of
upward social mobility, better living conditions in comparison with the
older generation and the family of origin, and not the least, the dangerous
nature of the work, created a typically lad-like worker culture (Willis
1975). This worker culture characteristic for the new miner proletariat was
to some extent legitimised by the relatively good and secure monthly sal-
ary, which reduced the economic distance between physical and white-
collar workers.
50 L. PÉTER
Thus the underground world shared with comrades, and the over-
ground world resulted in a divided form of existence. Free time and enter-
tainment spent together with working colleagues intermediated between
the two, taking place in pubs or in the public spaces in front of the blocks
of flats, where people had conversations, drank, played backgammon or
listened together to the radio transmissions of the domestic football
matches. They also took care of the animals kept in cages built behind the
blocks, a practice that got quite widespread after the 1981 introduction of
the rationing system. In sheds built against the mountainside called cotet ̦i,
poultry and pigs were kept as a result of food shortage. Animal husbandry,
widespread behind the blocks of flats by 1986, grew into an agricultural
type of activity system in the “new town”, remaining without heating or
hot water. Besides drinking—an important tool in coping with stress in
the absence of any kinds of psychological assistance—dirty jokes and
coarseness, frequent rusticity and bravado, speech full of oppressive sexual
allusions, and the deep disrespect and occasional ridiculing of non-physical
labour, the cult of brute force constituted the defining elements of this
hybrid working class culture (of factory workers, but at the same time,
because of the cotet ̦i, showing accented rural features). Violence and fight-
ing was not strange either for the true lads; however, this was already
under tighter control, especially by the elder masters and other specialists.
Serious assault and battery occurred only very rarely.
The large numbers of employees certainly did not create a homoge-
neous mass. We are talking about a hierarchically structured population,
where social layers of rightfully defiant and sometimes angry men (per-
forming tough jobs), were segmented to a large degree according to dif-
ferent geographical origin, ethnicity, social background (workers or
peasant origin, intelligentsia), and habitation (in the Northern or the
Southern part of the town), as well as age, or job and profession. Older
blasters, experienced electricians and carpenters were at the top of the
hierarchy, followed by the pitmen. The auxiliary personnel (trammers,
heavers, workers in the flotation process) provided the essential support.
The younger and the less experienced stood on the lowest levels of this
hierarchy. Intellectual work was uniformly despised and they were out-
right distrustful of the engineers, as they descended the mine every day,
whereas the engineers went down only twice a week. The miners had to
work in literally close-to-death conditions, which was even worsened by
the fact that after 1985, investments in development were drastically
reduced; the technology put in place in the seventies became gradually
obsolete, causing regular workplace discontentment in the eighties.
The roots for forcibly strengthened solidarity were given, as the grounds
of the mining profession are strong solidarity, continuous interdependence
and mutual assistance (Erikson 1982), something that defined the every-
day life. These feelings were intentionally cultivated by the mining com-
pany by other means as well: on the occasions of common miners’ days,
May Days, a shared identity was built. Other social support was provided,
too: it tacitly contributed to the private use of the tools and other instru-
ments by the employees for their own purposes. The company overlooked
the fact that certain items were being taken home, as objects of personal
use were manufactured in the workshop. In this setting the mine fulfilled
a strong role of redistribution, and created some sort of a knot and aid
(Kideckel et al. 2000), deeply entering into the handling of everyday
problems (Péter 2006).
Sports life was developed in the town by means of the mine, which
unequivocally fulfilled an integrating role and significantly contributed to
survival in critical times, becoming an organic part of worker culture. The
football team established in 1951, Minerul Bălan, played in the third
league, the hockey team established in the eighties played in the county
championship, just like Avântul, the male and female handball teams.
After 1977, in accordance with the patriotic spirit of the age, the employ-
ees of the mining company participated in the mass sports events of
Daciada. Besides, there existed an extremely strong community sports
movement: the voluntarily organised amateur five-a-side football champi-
onship that functioned all across the town. On the pitch of School no. 1
of the town, teams created on grounds on working place networks or
friendly circles competed with each other every year, regularly playing in
front of several hundred viewers. This initiative was embraced by the mine
and supported, with the aim of promoting a healthy lifestyle and commu-
nity spirit, but also to cover up worsening problems.
Covacipeter—The 1986 Adventure

from the “Ethnical Incident” to the “Common
Enemy”
The 1986 World Championship came about in such a context. The
football-loving public was not surprised by the fact that they would not be
able to follow the championship on TVR. According to the account of
Eric, the issue had been bothering him and his friends for months. The
“choice of the location” was relatively simple; the possibilities were in fact
52 L. PÉTER
quite limited. Bălan is surrounded by high mountains and peaks. To the

north, at a distance of 11 km on a forest road, there was a farmstead called
Covacipeter, with roughly 45 permanent inhabitants at that time (of which
only 7 remained there by 2011). Covacipeter was a dispersed “settlement”
located at an altitude of 1321 metres. The sources of the rivers Olt and
Mureș are literally a few metres away from here. A few wealthier citizens
built weekend houses in Covacipeter, Alan among them, who at that time
spent a part of his free time here. Alan and others had already experienced
in 1982 that Moldavian TV can be received here, and for the people of
Bălan this was the nearest place suitable for the reception of television
signals. Thus Eric and his friends, and several hundred other people, Liam
among them, watched the football matches from here in 1986.
The distance from the town on a steep, winding road raised quite a
few problems to be sorted out. Among these the subjects mentioned the
commuting between the town and the location of match-watching, the
acquisition of an appropriate aerial, and the transportation of TV sets
and batteries, as well as the issue of the spare time needed for the
“adventure”.
The issue of the antenna to receive the TV signals is of a capital impor-
tance in this case, too, as there was no standard norm that could have been
simply copied and multiplied. That had to be experimented with each time
for the specific circumstances of the location, the technical parameters of
the TV station to be captured, and the aerial had to be built to function
with the existing materials. The acquisition of the parts was the task of the
electricians. They were the ones to provide service for the transformer
houses pertaining to the mine, including the replacements of the broken
parts. This was an important task, as in 1985–1986 electric power was
regularly switched off in the flats, for reasons of energy economy. The
mine, the public institutions and a few privileged blocks of flats were con-
nected to an independent power network without interruptions, as the
enterprise operated in three shifts and this had to be sustained. Due to
their roles of key importance, electricians and electric engineers could eas-
ily access important resources. According to the accounts, good quality
flat aluminium sheets from the transformer houses were used as the basic
material for the aerials, cut to exact dimensions by those skilled in elec-
tronics. They tried to manufacture the antennas in a way that they could
be easily taken apart and relatively quickly assembled again. They obvi-
ously did that in the workshops at the factory, in official work time and
using the tools of the company. The reason for that was practical: the
aluminium sheets from the transformer houses had to be introduced into

the workshop, and then the pieces of the half-ready aerial cut to the ade-
quate dimensions, had to be smuggled out. At the same time, these pieces
had to be easy to carry, to permit their later transportation by vehicles.
They cut larger and smaller sized antenna elements, which were combined
on the spot, changing the parts among each other.
Many people at various locations experimented with the aerials: during
the technical activities in the school, enthusiastic amateurs in the cotet ̦i
(where no material rose suspicions, as people kept all kinds of odds and
ends there, because “who knows when they could be used”), and so on.
Accumulated experience was shared among each other, the ideas that
came up, were tested. Unlike at the other locations of the region, when I
asked about the technical drawing/plan of the antenna, here I received an
answer from Samuel that was surprising from the outset: they adapted a
plan seen in a magazine. My first intuition was that it must have been a
scientific review smuggled in from abroad. But no, the electronic expert
was quick to mention a Romanian monthly publication, called Tehnium.
To investigate that, I looked up the mentioned technical magazine. Much
to my surprise I discovered that while in 1985 none of the 12 issues dealt
with any kind of television-related technical question—which is under-
standable, as in 1985 the programme of RTV was reduced to two hours a
day—in March, April and June 1986, three articles in the periodical dealt
with the topic of amateur aerial construction. In the March article entitled
“High Efficiency Antennas” two engineers (Florescu and Tritoiu 1986)
gave detailed technical data, tables of frequency, drawings and measure-
ments to show how adequate TV signals can be caught from a distance as
far as 300 km. In the next issue the authors further developed the ideas in
an article bearing the title of “Special Antennas”, and in June they
addressed the topic of antennas suitable for “Collective Reception”
(Florescu 1986a, b). All this appeared in the official technical periodical of
the Central Committee of the Union of Communist Youth. In the later
issues of the magazine neither the TV/DX column, nor any materials
related to TV antennas appeared. The question remains whether the well-
intentioned editors succeeded in overreaching the alertness of censorship,
which forgot about the technical papers just before the championship?
Anyways, the experts here “got the message” at the right moment.
Regarding the road to and from Covacipeter, most fans were in a bad
position. As Liam remembers, there were youngsters during the world
championship, who could walk up there in the afternoon (31 May–29
54 L. PÉTER
June), yet walking back was impossible on the dark forest road. Especially
when the second match took place at one o’clock in the morning
(Moldavian television did not broadcast all the matches either, and some-
times it happened that only those of the team matches could be seen,
which were transmitted after midnight). In Bălan in 1986 there were rela-
tively few cars in circulation. Because of the scarcity of the available “car
fleet”, the majority needed other solutions. According to Eric, the solu-
tions were the worker transportation vans of the mining company, which
usually transported the shifts of workers to and from the various entrances
of the mine dispersed geographically. The drivers—most likely football
fans themselves—could be easily convinced to “help out” with a little
detour for those 600–650 people that needed a lift. Most probably the
management of the mine was also aware of this, but the unwritten agree-
ment with the employees could bear the one-month “burden” every sec-
ond year.
According to Alan those better off drove to Covacipeter with their own
vehicles, often carrying one or two of the smaller boys back in the boot of
the car. Mostly these were the organisers, too, who transported the batter-
ies, TV sets and antennas to the location. Those with cars and the ones
needing a lift could only be separated with regard to the division of labour;
as far as the matches are concerned, they obviously watched them together.
Both sides in the peculiar relationship between these two segments—
“lads” and “eggheads”—tried to loosen up a little: among the car owners
the majority belonged to the technical personnel (technicians, topogra-
phers, geologists, engineers and teachers) deeply scorned by the simple
worker lads. Those arriving on foot or rather with the worker transporter
vehicles called “moving toilets” were the majority of the company employ-
ees, the “ordinary workmen” doing the bulk of the physical work, looking
for acquaintances with a TV set on the spot. They were simple watchers,
who did not bring batteries, nor sets or antennas. Yet the actual location
had to be approached on foot by both groups, because neither the van,
nor the automobiles were able to reach the location where the TV signal
could be received. They all had to walk for the last few hundred metres. As
Liam remembers, the “free riders” of the worker transporters usually
offered to carry the equipment (batteries and sets), successfully trying to
equalise and turn an unequal situation to their benefit. The undertakers
carried the batteries to the scene in a spectacular way, without stopping, by
which they did not only want to prove the necessity of physical power (and
brag in front of the others with this performance of strength), but also
wished to demonstrate their indispensability in the process. In certain

cases, such chav spectacles “stole the show”; and the performer gained the
attention of the others, obtaining virile encouragements.
Why, those (batteries) were heavy enough and staggering in the dark with two
of those in your hands was quite something. Sometimes they ran races to see who
gets there first. They even fell down, but it was some sort of a championship, they
took it very seriously, they were strong and young at the time.
—Steve
Regarding the time that could be dedicated to watching the matches,

in the memory of those involved, the mining company remained firm,
officially not releasing anyone to go watch the game. Travelling to the
location and returning could take couple of hours, according to the esti-
mations, and if there were two matches, many people stayed until dawn,
and went directly to work from the field in the morning. As Alan related,
the luckier ones spent a part of their holidays on the spot in a tent, yet this
was not frequent at all. According to each subject, reaching the location
was an exhausting task, which was aggravated by the demanding commut-
ing between the location and the working place, especially because of the
large time gap and the late starting times of the matches. This also became
a source of pride. From a gender perspective the events were considered a
male thing; no women were present on the spot according to the subjects’
recollections.
The 1986 world championship did have ethnic connotations on the
local level—just as in each and every other location that I examined. In the
recollections of ethnic Hungarian subjects, there is an enduring, common,
firm point that appears systematically, mentioned by everyone, every-
where, without exception. This is marked by the match between the Soviet
Union and Hungary on the 2nd of June 1986, starting at nine o’clock in
the evening. This had both ethnic and sports professional reasons.
Regarding the latter, the professional publications, including the Romanian
sports media, talked about the Hungarian national team as about one of
the favourites of the tournament, especially in the light of the friendly
match disputed earlier between Hungary and Brazil (3-0, Vienna, March
1986). As a consequence, most of the rooters were curious to see the
Hungarian team play. Everyone was certain that the match would be
broadcast by the Moldavian television, as the Soviet Union was playing.
On the other hand, for the Hungarian rooters the team played a special
56 L. PÉTER
role under the ever-more complicated circumstances of minority life func-

tioning as a symbolic requisite and point of self-identification. In an ethni-
cally mixed social context the latter relation was not simple. According to
ethnic Hungarian, Eric, expectations were high; therefore, in order to
avoid any possible inconvenience, the compact group with which he
arrived went to watch the TV of an acquaintance (in fact, a closer
relative).
We had agreed a long time before, where we will watch it. We went up earlier,
so we did not even have to look for the place. We knew where they were, they had
a house up there; they had everything prepared. We did not bother with others.
Everything was ready. The drinks, too, of course, we also took with us, and
offered to the others.
The core of this group was formed by the basic people of the same five-
a-side football team, most of them Hungarians. They rooted together
there loudly, but the defeat of 6-0 and the counter-rooting nearby gener-
ated a strong feeling of frustration and anger (everywhere all my ethnic
Hungarian interviewees reported with a high degree of reflexivity and in
detail about this unpleasant feeling). No physical assault and battery
occurred there, because of the case of a local mate, who had been known
to everyone present. He had been “taken away” less then a year before and
condemned to seven years of imprisonment because their group had lis-
tened to forbidden speeches recorded on tapes and someone denounced
them to the Securitate. On that night walking home, at someone’s initia-
tive they unexpectedly started to sing a widely known song, the “Sparrow-
bird of Harghita” (Hargitai fecskemadár), a song that may seem innocent
at first, yet with a double meaning, just by way of appeasement. But it had
another significance in that context. It was some sort of an answer
addressed to the counter-rooters, and a satisfaction, a subtle snap at the
system that “forbade” the audience to watch the game in normal settings.
The song was known by the general public in the interpretation of Gábor
Tamás, a singer from Cluj, who had emigrated to Sweden in the seventies.
Tamás was a well-known singer from a programme of Radio Free Europe,
in which those who had defected abroad frequently sent, or dedicated
songs to “console” their relatives and friends “stuck” in Transylvania. The
lyrics include two lines full of pathos: “A flock of crows has covered the whole
landscape/At home all Szekler homes are plunged into mourning”. In this
interpretation, according to the feelings of the Hungarian rooters, grief
was general in every “orderly Szekler” house, while the flock of crows
symbolised the Romanian majority settled in the region, who were the
counter-rooters of the Hungarians, the cause of minority problems.
We sang; what else we could have done… Hungarian people always sing, but
this time we were singing out of sorrow, because we had been beaten, and the
others made us upset. I remember well (…), there were many of us up there, it
was darkness, we could not even see who was happy, but we were angry indeed
while all those many goals were scored. Yet, there were no other problems, really.
—Hugo
The Hungarian team, in spite of the expectations, quickly fell out and
thus the ethnic dimension of the world championship also came to an
end. This, (at least in the interpretation of the account of Liam) opened
the gate to the emotions felt against the common enemy. Many of those
who were present at that time have moved away or died, and a portion of
the interviewees obviously only remembered the events that were relevant
for them. Often it is difficult for the interlocutors or the researcher to
distinguish among the events and the meaning attached to them later on.
Yet the messages of a few well-remembered statements in my view evoke
well the suppressed feelings characteristic of 1986, which were brought to
the surface by the experience of a collective event that moved so many
people. Particularly if they are placed in the context in which these state-
ments had been uttered. Here I quote a sentence, formulated by someone
in the passenger section, separated from the driving compartment of a
crowded, illegally used worker bus, traveling home at dawn, full of tired
people, many of whom were heading to work. As it is remembered, after
one of the Argentinian team’s matches, an exhausted rooter (an electri-
cian) said loudly: “Ceaușescu ne este președinte și noi trăim ca Kunta
Kinte” (translated into English: “Ceaușescu is our president and we all
live like Kunta Kinte”). Our man is not original, perhaps only brave or
outright irresponsible, putting himself and the others, the driver illegiti-
mately transporting them, in danger. He did not make up the rhyming
statement, he must have heard it somewhere, but said it there and then,
because he felt that the statement was true for that situation, in which
they all were in.
Kunta Kinte was known to the Romanian general public as the black
and exploited slave hero of an American TV series entitled Roots, trans-
mitted by television at the very end of the seventies. The main character
58 L. PÉTER
is savagely kidnapped and enslaved, and after that he is submitted to

continuous humiliation and suffering, yet he never loses his rebellious
spirit. The story was probably put in the programme by the system as a
political fable, to illustrate the exploitation of men by men, to showcase
the problems of Western societies. In 1986, Kunta Kinte symbolised the
workmen compressed into a crowded transporter, taken by the van every
day, not to the cotton field, but “only” to their working places in the
depths of the mine, forcing them to fight for their survival. The rooter
subtly criticising the system, yet supplying its accurate diagnosis may
have seen Kunta Kinte at home, on television, while now he has to climb
the mountain to watch a football match, because Ceaușescu was the
president who “forbade” the matches from the screen, and he was
responsible for the worsening living conditions, too, in the opinion of
the rooter.
Summing up, this case highlights two elements. In workers’ culture
football played a bounding role. In “normal times” the championship,
and in “revolutionary” times the football gatherings placed the viewers
irrespective of their jobs, on the same side. There was a close connection
between the two theatres; the practice of common match-watching settled
organically on the amateur championship. As the borders and the social
differences between physical and intellectual workers disappeared on the
pitch, before, during, and after the match on the mountain, both the
“lads” and the “eggheads” became active members of the same dissident
public. On the other hand, it underlines the role of technical knowledge
in the economy of gatherings, as was described in connection with the
antenna designs.
References
Erikson, K. T. (1982). Everything in its path. Destruction of community in the
Buffalo Creek flood. New York: Simon and Shuster.
Florescu, M. (1986a). Antene speciale. Tehnium, 185(4), 16–17.
Florescu, M. (1986b). Antene colective TV. Tehnium, 187(6), 16–17.
Florescu, M., & Tritoiu, V. C. (1986). Antene TV de mare eficacitate. Tehnium,
184(3), 10–11.
Hunya, G., Réti, T., Süle, R. A., & Tóth, L. (1990). Románia 1944–1990.
Gazdaság- és politikatörténet. Budapest: Atlantisz.
Kideckel, D., Botea, B. E., & Nahorniac, R. (2000). A new “cult of labor”: Stress
and crisis among Romanian workers. Sociologie Românească, 1, 142–161.
Péter, L. (2006). How extreme marginalization generates ethnicity? In W. Heller,

P. Jordan, T. Kahl, & J. Sallanz (Eds.), Bedeutungswandel von ethnizitat im
lendichen raum (pp. 99–118). Wien and Berlin: Lit Verlag.
Szirmai, V. (1988). Csinált városok. Budapest: Magvető.
TEMPO. (2017). Data series. Retrieved April 3, 2017, from http://statistici.
insse.ro/shop/
Willis, P. (1975). Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs.
New York: Columbia University Press.
CHAPTER 4
Cluj: Big City Versions of the Football

Gatherings
Abstract The fourth chapter presents the big city versions of the football
gatherings in the eighties. The Cluj ethnographic case study shows the
widespread consumption of forbidden football. As in Eastern-Transylvania,
the dissident football consumption became a mass phenomenon, a signifi-
cant community event, and a powerful social institution. The chapter deals
with the case of one of the largest cities in Inner-Transylvania, and argues
that the football gatherings functioned depending on the local and rapidly
changing complex social relationships. It was primarily embedded into the
workplace relations of the first-generation working class moving to the
residential districts during forced socialist industrialisation and urbanisa-
tion. The chapter highlights that older neighbours’ relationships also
played a major role in the development of football gatherings. The phe-
nomenon, which was related to the local sports life and leisure activities,
showed several variants as follows: the commercialised/marketed version;
the closed version of nomenclature; the workplace version; and the mass
version of open air match-viewing on the surrounding hills. The latter
reached large scale in 1982 and was constantly developing throughout the
eighties. The chapter also focuses on the influence of the inter-ethnic envi-
ronment, but concludes that the nature of the phenomenon showed very
strong universal features, leaving behind the Romanian-Hungarian ethic
differences. The chapter concludes that the need and constant curiosity
concerning the forbidden football matches also brought to life a
phenomenon far beyond itself: it became a means of escape from socialist
realities and a form of social resistance.

62 L. PÉTER
Keywords Cluj • Forced industrialisation • Urbanisation • Forbidden

football • Ethnic identity • Local communities • Football consumption
The Largest City of Inner-Transylvania

Cluj/Kolozsvár/Klausenburg is the second largest city of Romania,
located in the centre of Transylvania; bordered by the Muntii Apuseni, the
platform of the Someșul River, surrounded by the Feleacu hill (825 m),
Lomb hill (684 m) and Melcului hill (616 m).
The multicultural city hosting 11 higher education institutions is the
economic and administrative centre of Transylvania. Despite its forced
industrialisation in the seventies and the eighties, the city’s strong
educational-cultural-administrative character was preserved. In 1977 the
city had 262,858 inhabitants (among which 33% were Hungarians), in
1992 it had 328,602 inhabitants (Hungarians 23%), and in 2002 it had
318,027 inhabitants (Hungarians 19%) (INS 2017), due to the forced
modernisation, which characterised Romanian economic and social poli-
cies. This lead from “above” was clearly visible on the social and employ-
ment structure of the city (Pásztor 2016). The population and employment
structure has radically changed: its industrial character was strengthened,
an ever-growing percentage of its active population being employed in the
industry. The city’s old traditional economy (food, leather and shoes) was
gradually overshadowed by heavy engineering and metallurgy, accounting
for 35 per cent of the city’s economy by 1970 (Brubaker et al. 2008).
Industrial developments have altered the image of the city. At the south-
western, eastern and north-eastern border areas big residential districts
have developed, while former neighbourhoods were demolished. Starting
with the sixties, large residential areas were built: Mănăsț ur, Mărăsț i,
Gheorgheni, Grigorescu and Zorilor districts (Csedő et al. 2004). By the
end of the eighties, 80 per cent of the properties in Cluj were blocks of
flats, mostly inhabited by the first-generation city dwellers. The population
growth produced significant demarcation and/or break lines concerning
culture and civilisation among the “old” and the “new” inhabitants, the
“native” city dwellers and the village “newcomers” of Cluj (Brubaker et al.
2008), as well as between the old, multigeneration urban labour aristoc-
racy and the new, rural-originated working class. These tensions also had
CLUJ: BIG CITY VERSIONS OF THE FOOTBALL GATHERINGS 63
spatial connotations. The new urban dwellers were living in the peripheral
residential districts, which had been developed over the years through the
demolition of old neighbourhoods of houses. However, these under-the-
surface tensions eased due to the general economic problems. The former
tensions gave way to oppositions like the oppressive power vs. the impov-
erished people. According to the memories of the subjects, Cluj in the
eighties was characterised by shortages and cold, lack of food, long lines,
unheated homes, deteriorating infrastructure, unlit streets, bad public
transportation, and a lack of interesting social events.
In my view these have three significant aspects: the institutions defining
the patterns of relationship; the free-time activities; and in particular the
links between the workers’ culture and sports life.
Life in Blocks of Flats, Social Relations

and Entertainment
The increase in population and the building of large residential districts

brought about significant changes in the lives of the inhabitants. These
huge vertical socialist cities (Troc 2003) consisting of blocks (Mănăștur/
Mărăști) were Soviet- and partly North Korean-inspired settlements. The
overcrowded, labyrinth-like districts have created a unique milieu. Life in
residential districts meant an upward social mobility for villagers moving
to the city. Their living space increased, the separate kitchen and bath-
room, as well as the utilities like gas and electricity made their lives more
comfortable than before. There were, however, people, who were forced
to move into blocks, as they were former residents of the demolished
neighbourhoods and were given apartments in the newly built districts.
They considered their moving a failure. These two social groups met
within the residential districts, with a need to jointly establish their ways of
cohabitation. The new situation demanded changes in everybody’s life-
style. In spite of the standardised apartments in the blocks, several differ-
ent lifestyles met in these residential areas. Important features of the new
housing conditions were the high population density and the small dis-
tance between the blocks; thus the “collective life in blocks” actually took
place in a transparent, verifiable space, the flats becoming places of socialist
supervision.
The living space in districts has become smaller in the case of both
groups: the private spaces were limited to the inside of the apartments.
Thus, the areas in front of the blocks, near the entrances and around the
64 L. PÉTER
singular blocks of flats have become semi-private areas jointly used by the
inhabitants. These became spaces for socialising and free-time activities:
conversations, board games, playgrounds for the children, spontaneous
meetings or discussions on the common issues regarding the flats. The
entrances soon became symbolic areas expressing the unity of the block
(Mihăilescu et al. 1994). The entrances with benches replaced the village
home gate and the demolished garden, as life in the flats was boring and
uniform for the new residents.
Although we are speaking of a heterogeneous population—a significant
portion of which lived in blocks—the formation of local social relations
leads through the flats as living areas. The housing stock was allocated by
the employing units (Pásztor 2013); thus, the people who received apart-
ments in a block of flats were employed at the same company. So, there
was a great chance that people who worked together also became neigh-
bours. Moreover, if the people moving to the city were hired jointly or
through family relations, then there were not only work relations, but also
family relations within the residential districts. The residential area’s rela-
tions were interwoven with the patterns of workplace relations, which
were reproduced and strengthened.
The older Gheorgheni district in the eastern part of the city has some
houses with gardens left in the regions that are closer to the centre.
Here the inhabitants still lived in historically developed communities
(Pillich 1984), as the former inhabitants of the demolished city areas
were given quarters in the blocks of flats built in the neighbourhood.
Former neighbours probably became neighbours in the new living
places as well, which somewhat reproduced former community relation-
ships. Others are located alongside the railway, which was left untouched.
In these old house districts, local small-community relations persisted,
which were strengthened by workplace relations and had strong ethnic
implications (Pillich 1984). From the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, the inhabitants of these districts have traditionally worked in the
railway plants. The compact Zorilor district is located close to the
Feleacu hill.
Despite the structural differences and the different sociocultural pro-
files of the inhabitants, life in blocks of flats in Cluj, that is the lifestyles of
the inhabitants, have shown strong similarities. Bad public transporta-
tions, poor heating of apartments, chronic food shortages, long queues
(Câmpeanu 1994), regular power outages, and the gradual deterioration
of urban infrastructure and the blocks, have generated similar experiences
for the people. To many, the “antidote” for the bleak, routine-like, repeti-
tive activities (Lungu 2004), the two-hour-long daily TV programme and
the eventless days was sports and later the related football gatherings.
Sporting life in Cluj began to unfold in the second half of the nine-
teenth century. At first, only aristocrats and the haute bourgeoisie played
sports, but this practice quickly trickled down to the level of the working
class during the modernisation. After the turn of the last century, the
growing working class established independent sports clubs and associa-
tions. The highly significant Cluj Athletics Club (KAC) in 1885 (Kilyeni
2006). Football quickly became popular. The breakthrough came in
1907 when the predecessor to CFR 1907, the KVSC was founded. In
1919, the Universitatea sports club (Péter 2014: 142–170) was founded.
Covering a large spectrum, the Universitatea determined the sports life
(Ilieș et al. 2015).
Under the auspices of the industrial units a variety of sporting associa-
tions operated under trade union administration, some having their own
sports centres, and football teams as well. For example, Clujana shoe fac-
tory, which had its own stadium, or the CFR team having its own stadium
built in 1973. In the eighties, football, basketball and handball attracted
the most spectators, but fencing, orienteering, water sports and athletics
were also well developed and popular. The Daciada has brought sports
closer to the people.
I don’t intend to outline the history of sports in Cluj, but only to
emphasise the diversity and development of local sports life (see Lupu
2012), run by schools, universities and industrial units. There were also
other facilities with free entry that allowed the population to practice
sports. The sporting events available in Cluj had a socialising impact on a
large segment of the population, creating a demand and a need for sports
consumption, especially for football among men. Football was the most
popular among industry workers worldwide (Goldblatt 2006) and this
was the case in Cluj as well—the fans were workers, alongside students,
technical specialists, sportsmen and intellectuals. It was a common and
cheap form of entertainment. Reports have shown that sporting activities
were a priority among leisure activities. Many of those whom I interviewed
regularly watched football matches in stadiums. This sports consumption
was embedded in the work, friendship and occasionally neighbourly rela-
tions, and was a popular form of entertainment.
To sum up: just as the city itself, the new residential districts were inter-
nally stratified both regarding the population and the type and situation of
66 L. PÉTER
the blocks. Nevertheless, the distribution of housing stock by the compa-

nies, the models of the residential districts, the origins of the majority of
the population (mainly rural or rather local), and the period of construc-
tion gave the districts a character that is still noticeable today. The role and
importance of workplace and family relations, origins, ethnicity and old
neighbourhood relations was different from one residential district to the
other. So, the nature of the dominant relationships ideally defined the
“spirit of the place” (Troc 2003). As the residential areas fell closer to one
or another hill, the locations of the football gatherings and the events
occurring on the spot were also related to the conditions presented above.
The combinations of the strong ties that developed in residential areas, at
workplaces, in families and circles of friends (Granovetter 1973), trust and
the location of the residences have played a decisive role in the develop-
ment of peer groups societies (Gans 1962), which later took on the organ-
isational tasks in relation to watching the matches. The combinations of
the former elements have created different settings and distinct versions of
the gatherings.
Versions of Football Gatherings—From

the Marketed Version to the Free Social Places
This section presents the versions of football gatherings in the largest city
of Inner-Transylvania, tackling the structure of the presented versions and
the underlying social factors. I believe that the local forms of forbidden
football consumption were determined by the social structure of Cluj, the
institutions defining relationship systems, and free-time activities, as well
as the spatial and geographic structure of the city. The versions can be
placed along a continuous scale. Next to the cases in Cluj we can also find
cases in the surrounding areas, some of which were the destinations of the
commuting “sports tourism” of the Szeklers. From February to April
2017, I conducted 31 interviews in the city, which were completed by a
near hundred discussions, involving visits to the sites (twice accompanied
by the interviewed subjects).
The studied phenomenon was widespread in Cluj; people climbed the
hills surrounding the city. The location of Cluj was favourable because, by
the eighties, in several places there was good reception of the broadcast
from Hungary’s television (MTV). This became widespread in 1982, and
although it had earlier roots, it was relatively easy to watch MTV in certain
areas. It is unclear when people came to realise this, but from the late six-
ties in certain areas of the Făget forest, which is located on the south-
western side, and in the districts along the railroad the reception of MTV
was reasonable, but this did not have a mass character at the time. In any
case, the common element of the narratives is that some people were
already watching matches in the late sixties in the cabin at the St. John’s
Well area in the Făget forest, and in the yards of the houses/holiday houses
scattered along the road to Ciurila, especially in districts along the rail-
road. In the sixties, there was no massive spread of television sets in
Romania, yet up to the end of the seventies, the TVR’s programming was
competitive at European level (Matei 2013); it is understandable why
there wasn’t greater interest for the MTV. However, at the end of the six-
ties, there were some young students, fanatical football fans, “old inhabit-
ants” of Cluj were interested in MTV broadcast. I found that this practice
had become massive by the eighties.
In Cluj people used antennas sensitive to the MTV frequency, the
designs of which could be obtained easily. One just needed to buy an
antenna that worked in the eastern part of Hungary. The antenna was
purchased in the neighbouring country, where it was still easy to travel in
the seventies for visiting. It was enough to draw the antenna on a piece
of paper, and it was not even necessary to buy it. This was the starting
point for adapting antennas to meet local conditions. In the eighties, the
Ezermester magazine also presented plans of antennas, as because of the
changes to the technical parameters, the antennas had to be constantly
changed, next to on-site fine-tuning. The drafting of the basic plans, their
distribution, adaptation and implementation were similar to the example
of Bălan. Engineers and technicians were working on it. The situation in
Cluj was somewhat simpler than in Szeklerland; as there were more pro-
fessionals whose knowledge and creativity helped solve issues, more pro-
fessional know-how was accumulated. Moreover, there were several
factories where the necessary components or the antennas themselves
could be manufactured—illegally, of course, but it was tolerated—and
more information was available for the technicians. An advantage was
that they knew the source of the signal, and did not need to adapt it
depending on which country’s channel they were receiving and there
were many more places on the hills surrounding the city where one could
experiment.
By the end of the eighties, several versions of football gatherings devel-
oped in Cluj. These were practiced at the same time, but there were also
crossovers between them. In the following, I will outline the ethnographic
68 L. PÉTER
description of these versions, specifically the determining features of the

ideal types of these variants. The gatherings can be placed on a wide-
spectrum scale ranging from sports consumption in private spaces to large
events in public spaces.
1. Watching the game at home. The first stage of the imaginary axis is
watching the matches in private venues. This version is closest to the dis-
sident cross-border TV-watching in the border region, although it is not
entirely the same. In Cluj, in the factory district (behind the railway sta-
tion) and along the railway line, reception was possible for MTV during
the seventies. Multigeneration workers and gardening families lived in
these areas in garden houses. These districts have been avoided by the
urban systematisation (demolitions) that had begun in the meantime. In
the seventies, most of the people here were interested in the matches of
the Hungarian national team, but they also watched the Hungarian cham-
pionship matches. The viewers were family members or neighbours, as TV
reception was possible at certain places in the street. According to stories,
the “distribution” of the TV signal was quite erratic: in one house it was
good, but next door there wasn’t any, and in a neighbour’s garden, located
somewhat further, reception was good again. In the back yard of former
athlete and football player, Cain, reception of the TV signal was good
thanks to his antenna placed on a three-metre pole.
The men on the particular streets, who were interested in watching
football matches, gathered together and spent an entire afternoon to find
those isles, where there was a better or poorer reception. In these districts,
vicinities formed small cooperative communities (Pillich 1984) like in
Ciumani. They maintained intensive reciprocal contacts, and had strong
solidarity. They belonged to the same religious community, many of them
being church leaders. Neighbourhood relations played a primary role; sev-
eral generations grew up together; hence, the relationships between them
were inherently close. As one of the interview subjects, Cain, said: “Our
mothers have pulled through the front and the Russian invasion [in World
War II] together”. Moreover, the residents of the neighbourhood knew
each other’s football preferences. They knew each other’s team prefer-
ences, too. There were up to 20–30 neighbours and friends at such a
football gathering. These events were typical for the seventies. The num-
ber of participants was largely limited by the size of the house or court-
yard, and, as it turned out later, the quality of the signal was poorer than
the signal quality at later venues suitable for watching matches.
Furthermore, the presence of other family members limited the scope of
the activities of the football fans, most of whom were men. The rules on
behaviour were more stringent: the presence of young children and the
wife had to be taken into account, and the loudness of the supporters had
to be reduced. “It was not as much fun” (Cain) as later, on the Lomb hill.
This version was not restricted to the districts located along the rail-
road. In the 10-story blocks of flats closer to the Someș River, there were
also people who initially watched the matches at home, thanks to rooftop
antennas. For example, at the end of the seventies, Carl, a construction
craftsman and Teo, a technician, have seen a number of international foot-
ball matches on MTV in the apartment of their engineer colleague, who
lived in the same district. According to them, in the 50-square-metre
apartment of the engineer, as many as 35–40 men watched matches
together. Sometimes an unexpected neighbour would come over but this
could mess up the atmosphere of confidence. Carl, a TV repairman, tried
to use a reproduced antenna in his home, but gave up after a while and
started going to the Lomb with several others.
In the Zorilor district reception of TV signals could also be found.
Several people attempted to watch the matches at home as well, following
the pattern presented by Carl and Teo. Mike’s employer allocated him a
three-room apartment here. Having acquired a great deal of experience in
the “field” by then, in the mid-eighties Mike tried the home version. He
built two antenna models that had previously been used successfully and
he also acquired a TV, but he gave up after a while for technical reasons,
and returned to the commercialised version of Făget.
This version was widespread throughout the city in the seventies; many
used it until the eighties, but as a substitute for the TVR, to expand the
palette. I consider that this version differed greatly from the pattern
embodied by the Pângărat ̦i-Peak. It functioned in private settings, not in
public spaces and it was available for a limited number of people. The
circle of match-viewers was not an open one; most of the organisational
tasks were taken care of by the host.
Yet, this private version points to some important aspects. It highlights
the different bases on which the viewers’ groups were formed: some “old”
inhabitants organised their viewing groups based on neighbouring rela-
tions, while newcomers like Carl or Teo, joined the increasingly expanding
circle of the gatherings based on workplace relations. In turn, Mike tried
experimenting individually, just as he individually took part for nearly 20
years in the next versions of football gatherings, which are called “com-
mercialised versions”.
70 L. PÉTER
2. The commercialised version was developed at the same time as the

previous one and it spread in the Făget forest located at the southern part
of the city. On the mental map of the inhabitants the Făget forest repre-
sented one of the venues of the compulsory festivals characteristic of the
socialist period. On the 1st of May, the mandatory march was followed by
a likewise mandatory May Day socialist picnic. This was organised in the
Făget forest near St. John’s Well and the Hoia forest. The Făget was
directly present on the mental map of the first generational urban worker
masses living the neighbouring Mănăștur district, while the Lomb beyond
the factory district behind the railway station was not.
The owners of the farmhouses, scattered along the road that led
through Făget, found a market opportunity in the service-like organisa-
tion of football gatherings from the mid-seventies until 1989. This was a
place relatively easy to reach coming from the city having MTV reception.
In the seventies, 10–15 houses were systematically set up to allow the
consumption of matches. The profiteering homeowners supplied their
courtyards with benches placed behind each other. According to Mike, at
the house he went to, the TV set was placed on a higher cabinet so that
the participants could see it well. Mike had regularly been going to one of
these houses for 15 years since he was a student. The price of a “ticket”
was five lei, which corresponded to the price of a loaf of bread. After a
while, a stable group of viewers was formed at each house. The second and
third lines were the best, one could see the TV better than from the back
lines, which were farther away. The viewers came alone or in small groups.
If there was room, anyone could attend as long as they paid the fee. Most
of the viewers came on foot; others came by bike or even by car.
Initially, people viewed international club matches and then, in 1982
and afterwards, the great international world competitions. Mike lived
close by and came there first as a student and later on as a teacher. His
detailed account shows that the matches attracted the viewers; however,
a feeling of fans’ solidarity emerged among the core viewers, despite
their different team preferences. “Football brought us there together”,
he recalls. Sam also began to regularly come from Mănăștur to such a
house in Făget, and did so until the regime change. He went there alone,
but felt good in that community where the others accepted him.
According to him one could have fun, meet others, and talk about foot-
ball with civilised people for a long time. “It was inexpensive and good.
Then people were different, there wasn’t as much bickering”, he remem-
bers tearfully.
The audience was ethnically mixed; a yard could fit 25–30 people. The
official language used here was Romanian, given that the host and the
majority of the people were Romanian. However, the second language
was Hungarian, because the television commentary was in Hungarian,
which the majority understood at a basic level. If necessary, the Hungarian
speakers would translate, but everybody talked to each other in their
mother tongue. According to interviews, this dual language use did not
generate any problems. Sam also felt this openness when he spoke of the
lack of bickering.
Over the years the circumstances changed. Part of the seating area was
covered, after the mid-eighties there were colour TVs (the purchasing of
which could not have been easy, as Romania and Hungary had different
broadcast systems; one in SECAM other in PAL), and the host purchased
a generator. This was due to the fact that power failures were quite fre-
quent in the eighties. Over the years, Mike became friends with the host,
helping his children in learning, teaching them chess, or playing football
with them. After a while he did not have to pay and he had a higher posi-
tion among the viewers. He recalls that sometimes uniformed policemen
would sit among the viewers. At these times, the atmosphere was some-
what restrained. During my research, I went back to the venue with Mike,
where we talked to the host, who had aged in the meantime. On the same
spot, his family operates a grocery store founded in 1991, which has been
working well ever since. The yard has also changed, but Mike recognised
the basic features of the place’s former architecture. During the conversa-
tion, the entrepreneur (David), who ran the marketed version of the gath-
erings, spontaneously said that “only decent and honest people came
here”, “he never had any issues because of it, and everyone was happy”
and “in those times it was the only way”. Does this mean, that others did
have problems elsewhere because they were not “decent”? From his point
of view or rather that of the system?
It was an important feature of this version that TV-watching was strictly
confined to football matches. The host handled the TV set; he switched it
on shortly before the match, and switched it off immediately after it. Thus,
no other topics were debated beside sports. In my opinion, this was a
deliberately used defensive strategy. Replying to my question, David firmly
stated that his guests never caused him any politically related problems,
even though they came from Brașov as well. This means that they were
total strangers. David provided his service of watching football matches as
a “legitimate” business: he produced profits, he sometimes invested in the
72 L. PÉTER
business, he kept personal, but distant relations with the viewers, and pos-
sibly made an agreement with the official bodies as well. After the change
of regime, he opened a shop, part of his capital being created in the afore-
mentioned way. If I assess the phenomenon from the “capitalism in social-
ism” point of view, then a marginal, but existing new function of illicit
football-watching has been discovered, which could have occurred else-
where in the country too. It is, however, a fact that the lack of media
generated a demand and a need to the serving of which the marketed form
has (slightly) contributed, and which later provided the financial basis for
a capitalist enterprise.
Although the above version was one of the ways to watch football
matches in the Făget area, there were few houses in the region; hence it
was an important, but not the dominant version. This was also a quasi-
private situation and was suitable for a limited number of viewers. It was a
marketed and profit-oriented “socialist enterprise”, which provided a
ready-made form for the viewers, almost entirely men, who paid a fee in
return. Thus, viewers were merely clients, which generated restraint, self-
moderation and conscious self-censorship. The importance of self-
censorship was underlined by the occasional presence of a uniformed
policeman. He could have been a sincere football fan, but his presence did
not only have symbolic meaning to the viewers: it also reminded the host
of their probably mutual economic agreement.
The role of the “commercialised version” in the later spread of football
gatherings is, however, not negligible. It made the matches watchable,
even though it did so on a small scale. If we consider the average number
of viewers and the number of houses that provided this service, we are
talking about 400–450 people per match, which is not few. Then it was
socialiser for the consumption of forbidden football. It was also comfort-
able because the host took care of the organisation and also had the
responsibility. However, in terms of its character and nature, it was unsuit-
able for providing access to forbidden football to the masses. Perhaps that
is why the entrance fee became 10 lei by 1982, for which in return the son
of the host gave one a paper “ticket”, the benches were covered with blan-
kets and so on. Compared to the pure version on the Pângărat ̦i-Peak, the
viewers in the Făget houses did not form an active viewers’ group, they
hardly had any ancillary activities, and because of the self-censorship, their
on-site manifestations and activities were related exclusively to sports con-
sumption. Nevertheless, this placed the Făget forest on the mental map of
inhabitants as a suitable place for watching football. Moreover, as Sam
mentioned, it also produced solidarity among the viewers, and despite

their passivity, it made up the individual members of the dissident audi-
ence. This was an important role in the seventies for a lot of young men,
who had freshly moved to the city—it gave them a kind of membership; it
integrated them, even if they paid for it.
3. The closed version of the nomenclature. As a result of my ethnographic
field research, it turned out that everyone was curious about the matches,
even the beneficiaries or operators of the system. During my investigation,
I had a chance to interview a very high-ranking retired officer, who was
dealing with national security issues in terms of his studies; he and his close
friends watched large football competitions in the Făget as well under
comfortable and safe conditions. He talked about the Championship of
1986. He and his friends “booked” the restaurant of the campsite in
Făget, where the staff had previously provided the technical conditions for
watching the matches and the full accommodation and meals. The camp-
site has small wooden houses, mostly for two people. The touristic unit
surrounded by a fence and holding a restaurant as well is located in a quiet,
peaceful, tree-lined and landscaped area of the Făget hill. At the exclusive
venue, bureaucrats, higher-up football enthusiasts and the invited friends
watched the matches in the houses. Their meals were provided by the
restaurant, and the waiters were constantly at their disposal. The fine for-
eign drinks they brought, highlighted in the narrative, were consumed
together. According to him, he watched the matches together with judges,
prosecutors, hospital directors and other officials, and they sometimes
spent the whole weekend there. He described the event as a gathering of
friends with the purpose of watching the football match, where “good”
and “quality” people were present and they were “among themselves”. In
this case, the condition to be met for “organising” a football gathering was
belonging to the circle of power, the nomenclature—the word “we” in this
context—did not mean the average person—that is to say, the “people”—
but the beneficiaries or runners of the regime.
This unique match-viewing version provides a narrow, yet expressive
insight into the habits of the representatives of power at that time, in addi-
tion to demonstrating the universality of interest for banned football. The
campsite was state-owned, but the nomenclature used it partially or totally
for its own purposes. My interview subject could not recall who paid for
all this, if someone paid at all. During the worldwide competitions, the
campsite functioned as a closed, “aristocratic” men’s club. Due to its isola-
tion from the masses and due to the members positively assessing their
74 L. PÉTER
in-group, the events here actually strengthened and reproduced the power
consciousness and esprit de corps of the ruling nomenclature. They didn’t
need anyone’s approval: football consumption was done literally “among
themselves”. Compared to the rest, this exclusive version is entirely
unique, although it systematically occurred in other locations as well,
depending on the local facilities. In Târgu-Mureş, for example, the Party’s
lunchroom on the Platoul Cornești was “booked” for similar purposes for
the party comrades in 1986 where, of course, the average person could
not get in, as Adam experienced. In Deva, the party leaders watched the
matches at the television relay station, from where at those times ordinary
people were simply sent away.
4. The workplace version is also an exception to the rule and an atypical
form. This does not mean that someone had illicit football consumption
as a job or a workplace obligation, but rather that people used work facili-
ties, offices, electricity, TV set, and furniture provided by particular jobs
for the purpose of watching a forbidden football match. The tall building
stands behind the train station, on the banks of the Nadăș River. The
research institute set up in 1971 operated in this venue. The building had
a strategic location: the staff realised that there was easy reception of
MTV in the building and the broadcast was of enjoyable quality. After
work, the white-collars organised veritable football watching “séances”
here. Although it was a closed group, one could get in through friendly
relations. Thanks to one of his neighbours, Paul saw international matches
here between 1984 and 1985. The institute staff worked in a sole shift,
because it wasn’t a production unit. Matches of club teams began in the
evening, so “workplace match-viewing” was disguised as “voluntary over-
time”. To reduce the growing crisis of the Romanian economy, on 13th
September 1983, the supreme party leadership Plenary Assembly of the
Party introduced the regulation known as “acord global”; that is, “gen-
eral agreement”. Its provisions concerned workers’ performance-related
wages, but in fact it was aimed at curbing expenditure and wage costs. It
was thus easy to stay in the building for overtime, and the 20–25 people
who gathered together on such occasions watched football matches. The
organisation of these events was built entirely on workplace relationships
and maximised the use of workplace infrastructure. The group of viewers
was made up of staff members and their close friends. Due to its private
nature, this version is closer to the private, home-version, because the
employees’ friends could also attend. One of the key elements for this
version to work was strict confidentiality and full compliance with the
rules set up by the organisers. The friends had to arrive on time, with a
previously discussed pretext; one could not drink alcohol, had to help in
arranging the venue and had to care for order and cleanness.
Despite the fact that this version was also atypical and did not spread
widely, it says a lot about the work relations of the era. In fact, nothing else
happened here than in any other business unit: employees appropriated
and temporarily took possession of the workplace, more specifically its
tools for their own purposes. Here, the suitable location of the building
led to the consumption of illicit football. The employees of the
Telecommunication Centre operating in Gheorgeni district did the same,
as the technological equipment allowed the reception of foreign television
broadcasts. According to Dan, at the end of the eighties, he and some of
his friends “begged” for admission to see a Champion’s Cup semi-final.
They were initially refused access, but as they did not leave, at the begin-
ning of the second half they were finally let in. It was humiliating, so he
remembered the score of the AC Milan-Real Madrid match in the spring
of 1989 quite well (19th April, 5-0). One of his neighbour’s friends
worked there; otherwise they would not have allowed anyone in, accord-
ing to the rules.
5. Open-air match-viewing. In 1982, the massively widespread ver-
sions have taken the phenomenon out to public places, similarly to the
case of the Pângărați-Peak “Open-air match-viewing”. In 1982, football
fans in Cluj were also shocked to find out that the TVR would not
broadcast the World Championship. Just like in Cluj, this news gener-
ated great outrage around the country. In his study on the history of
Romanian television Mustaţă notes that several thousand people called
the TVR’s public relations office vehemently complaining about this
unfortunate situation. Both the government and the dictator himself
have been blamed by anonymous calls (2011: 52). The piquancy of the
situation was that the party and the state leaders had already considered
not broadcasting the championship in 1978. At that time, however, due
to a strange turn of events, the TVR broadcast some of the matches of
the Argentinian Championship, as Romania’s qualification was certain
up to the last round. The Argentinian television provider had all the
broadcasting royalties paid out in advance because, due to prestige rea-
sons, the military junta did everything in its power to broadcast the
championship in colour to the outside world, thus beautifying the image
76 L. PÉTER
of the dictatorship (Kuper 1994). Romania, however, lost its last match
(on 15th November 1977, 4–6 for Yugoslavia). The national team thus
stayed home, but Argentina did not return the broadcasting royalties.
Thus, it had to broadcast some matches according to the pre-signed
contract. The former intention became a reality by 1982: none of the
matches were broadcast due to the highest order. Some funny situations
have also occurred. Electronica, a manufacturer of technical goods in
Bucharest, recognised the “shortage” and started producing TV antenna
amplifiers. When the party leadership found out with the help of the
Securitate, they furiously banned their production (Mustaţă 2015), just
like Electromures’s “capitalist” initiative in Târgu-Mures.
Hence, in 1982, the people of Cluj were forced to seek solutions. Three
main venues developed, where people started watching football matches:
on the Feleacu, in the Făget area, mostly along the road, and on the Lomb,
on the north-western side of the city.
Ralph and his family lived in the Gheorgheni district and in 1982 it still
had an area with houses and gardens. The local communities were made
up of old-time garden-working people, traditional workers’ families, and
first-generation inhabitants. By the early eighties, the organically function-
ing local community successfully integrated the newcomers who moved
here. In 1982, there were communities organised along neighbourly and
family relations (Pillich 1984), the so-called “quarters”. Ralph and his
family lived near a local school, having neighbours who also belonged to
the well-respected skilled workers. This was an ethnically mixed neigh-
bourhood. The young men in the nearby blocks of flats created autono-
mously organised amateur football teams and ran a mini-championship
every Sunday. Following this pattern, the smaller children also created
teams and regularly played with the supervision of the older children. The
middle-aged men, who already played third-league football or in the more
successful amateur teams, trained the younger ones and the children.
Football played an integrating role in the changing and expanding resi-
dential district. Older people were also present at the matches as specta-
tors, so different generations could be together. According to Ralph, the
fact that a small sports newspaper was issued on the parallel running
matches that engaged several age groups showed the “seriousness” and
the role of the community-sporting phenomenon. The newspaper
reported on the “Gheorgheni football”; it was sold for 2–3 lei and the
money was spent on buying balls. Although the newspaper failed, the ini-
tiative signalled the existence and strength of the local community capital.
The sport was embedded in the local connections linking families and
neighbours, ranging from workplaces to residents’ communities.
This was such a well-consolidated community of well-skilled, middle-class fac-

tory workers, who also went to work abroad, if needed [to Libya and Iraq in the
seventies]. That raised their status.
—Ralph
The sport contest has a socialising role: the young adults and teenage
boys were integrated in the peer group society (Gans 1962) that devel-
oped around local football. They went to the Feleacu hill together to
watch the matches in 1982. According to Ralph’s memories, their small
group consisted of people who fit into 4–5 cars and they watched the
football matches on the eastern side of the Feleacu hill, in a platform-like
area because there “there was good reception of the ‘good stuff’”. Others
also joined the group of approximately 25 people on the spot, but the
groups watched the match on their own sports TVs next to each other.
The groups were ethnically mixed. They simply wanted to watch the foot-
ball matches—it never occurred to them that they could have problems
because of it. They simply didn’t want to feel problems because the con-
tradictory legal status of the events. They were determined.
It was never an issue if this was forbidden or not. It was never the topic of dis-
cussion among the adults that this was semi-illegal or there will be a scandal
because of it. Nothing of the sort was discussed.
—Ralph
The group(s) of people were formed in 1982 along the football-playing

“quarters”. The division of the organisational tasks between the young
adults was spontaneous: those who had a car drove the others; the antenna
was copied in the factory from another one that was produced there.
Drinks were usually also taken; sometimes older children would get some.
Ralph remembers these match-viewing events as community-centred
events, which had a special order and ritual:
And then that little sport TV was brought out, everybody was trying to hold
it, the camping chairs, some drinks for the adults, a bit for the kids… but this
was not the main feature. Interestingly enough, it was not drinking-centred
at all. Interestingly, it was not like today, that we are sitting in a sports bar
and that’s it.
78 L. PÉTER
These events had a solemn atmosphere beyond the cheering for the
teams. This was apparent in the preparations, in the tense expectation, in
the known and recognised hierarchies, in the seating order:
It all had a ritual: as they connected the TV to the car battery, as they did it,
and at some level there was a seating order. The one who got the full picture
from the middle was the doge or, at least, the TV was his. The car owner also had
to be somewhere in the front and then the others found their places.
They also had solutions for unexpected situations:
One thing was certain, that everybody had everything against the rain. They
had all the equipment, there was no surprise, like the rain is coming and you
can’t watch it. And totally stoically, so if there was a shower, there was no prob-
lem. Just let the picture be clear!
—Ralph
Like the amateur community football championship in the Gheorgheni,

the supporters on the Feleacu were also male-dominated. A sense of cama-
raderie and brotherhood has also developed among the participants. Just
like in the case at Ciumani the boys experienced these events as an initia-
tion, an introduction to adult world, a rite of passage. It was a masculine
world, into which younger viewers were now included.
Now that we were considered adults as well, that feeling that they included us
[in the groups of males]. But it was natural that they included us. The issue
was never that there was no place [in the car], but they were trying to do it in
some way so that everybody, who was old enough to see it could be taken to the
hill. This was by all means a positive memory, then there were such old quips,
such remarks by the experts, I cannot quote them now, but they all had such a
flavour, there was a feeling to it. Or as they got angry if something was not
working and how they commented on it.
—Ralph
This is not the way Mary, who went to see the matches with her father
in the eighties, remembers:
I was bored, I didn’t like the matches. It was cold, it was raining, and they sent
me into the woods. I got sick, they had to take me to the doctor.
Along the Făget road, in 1982, 1986, or 1988 there were long lines of
parked cars with groups of 20–25 people standing and watching TVs on
the bonnets or tables of some kind. In 1982, it was reported that the lines
were several kilometres long. The antennas were put up on the eastern
side, and at every four–five metres there was a small group watching the
match, just like on Pângărat ̦i-Peak. The people sat on the higher grounds
next to the road, others stood behind them. Some TVs were packed in
plastic bags that protected them against the rain and from possible damage
during transport on the bad road. In 1982 the antennas were made in local
factories. We can say that this was the golden age of illegal antenna pro-
duction. In Bucharest, antennas for reception of Bulgarian television were
also mass-produced in factories, during working hours. Naturally, anten-
nas were sold on the black market as well, at prices between 400 and 600
lei, according to some accounts.
Yeah, from these factories! From these socialist companies. They made some
inventions with everything, all kinds of elements and stuff, to get better recep-
tion and things like that and I’ve seen antennas that had, I’ve seen antennas
with 24 elements! So, it was that long and the elements, I don’t know how the
guy sized it. So, he said: “Hey, I get reception like hell with this one!
—Lucas
The antennas were brought out of the factories in pieces; quite often
the gatekeepers were bribed. There was a spontaneous competition to cre-
ate the best antennas. Thus, there was a wide scale of models, some of
which have improved the image quality. According to the antennas the
respondents flicked: we “got them from the factory”, just like everything
else that they could get hold of.
Like in Ciumani, these gatherings were associated with the feeling of
freedom. Feelings of escape, “even if it was not necessarily consciously done.
You could not manifest yourself as a human being in any other way. There
was nothing else where you could withdraw. And since there were many,
many of us, this was perfect for it” said Lucas, currently the head of a
national TV network. In the circle of people, where he watched the matches
in 1986, people often criticised the regime and told anti-system jokes:
There were these resistance jokes, so to say. There were huge amounts of jokes
about Lenuţa and Ceaușescu! Yeah! It was like a kind of valve, you know? For
unloading, for doing away with frustrations, but you were not consciously
doing it, you know? Let me tell you what joke I just heard! That Lenuţa was
going somewhere… It was liberation! Freedom. There were jokes about her and
what a whore she was, you know? And her glorious past. She was the main tar-
get, but Ceaşcă and the whole thing were also aimed at.
80 L. PÉTER
In 1982, a group of supporters directly clashed with the police force.

After the match between Hungary and San Salvador (10-1, 16th June),
members of a younger group of fans, were shouting the strictly forbidden
“Ria-Ria-Hungária” in the heat of victory, as they came down the Turzii
road. At the end of the road policemen were already waiting for them and
they were all arrested. Almost everyone among my Hungarian interview
subjects in Cluj has heard about this incident, but it didn’t stop anyone
from further watching forbidden football.
Calvin can be considered one of the veterans of the Cluj football gath-
erings. At the end of the sixties, he attempted to use an antenna mounted
on a walnut tree in his yard, but the Yagi he made according to a plan
received from abroad did not work. Finally, he got black-and-white MTV-
reception thanks to the antenna mounted on the top of a high pole on the
side of his house. For a while, he watched all kinds of matches at home,
with neighbours and friends, but because of the bad quality, they ended up
at one of the Făget-houses, where they could view matches after paying
the fee. In 1978 he purchased a car that made him independent. He went
to the Lomb hill, which was closer to his neighbourhood, taking along the
Yagi and the set he purchased in the meantime. The place was suggested
to him by other neighbours.
I got the car in ’78 and then we travelled by car, and we heard that one could
watch it here on the Lomb road too, but only in a three to four hundred meters’
area. The stables were there. There, above the cemetery, and you have to go fur-
ther, and there is a right turn and there 400 meters straight on. Then we stood
next to the car, one side or the other. The antenna was next to the car, the little
TV on the front of the car, a blanket on it, or something. Then, in the evening,
the crowd gathered around us. So, we went at the times when there were matches.
Then, when there were world championships and European championships,
everyone came.
Before 1982, on the Lomb, the sports-loving core match-viewers came

together based on neighbourly and workplace relations. In the seventies,
most people walked to the viewing place, but in the eighties they started
going by car as well. Like in the Făget area, the “explosion” occurred here
in 1982 as well. The pattern of the match-viewing was the same: a car, a
factory-made antenna, a car-mounted TV set in a visible place, viewers in
front of it, young and middle-aged men, for whom, according to Calvin,
a technician: “It was recreation, a way to leave that world”. At the time of
world competitions there were usually many people there, and they formed
spontaneous and open audiences around a television set:
Many came by car, but they parked and came to us. They looked for a place
where they could see better, where they could stand, and there was no problem,
they didn’t need to ask, “Can I stand here?” They just stood somewhere; they did
not bother us, not at all.
Occasionally, there were some funny events as well:
So, for example, we were out here at the Lomb hill, and a villager, so the car was
stopped and the antenna was about two meters away from the car, and the wires
were just hanging there, and one night, a villager let his cow go near the cars.
Now that tore out all the wires, but it happened only once. We did not bother
them.
Calvin recalled that on a Sunday in 1986 they wanted to go by car, but

his car had an even number on the license plate and only cars with odd
numbers could go on the roads. His neighbour had an extra license plate,
which he lent him. The two cars went to the Lomb with identical license
plate.
And there was this neighbour, I had a neighbour, who had a Dacia with an odd
number. Mine was even. So, how do we go watch the match? Then he gave me a
license plate, an extra one he had and I put it on my car. My car CJ1AS, his car
CJ1AS, and then when we came home, he stood next to me. Two white Dacias,
CJ1AS, side by side! There was usually a policeman, he stopped cars, wrote down
the numbers, who went, who came… One of us started off sooner and then I
came down, not to come with the same number one after the other … They
didn’t notice it! There was some interesting stuff! We got away with it!
Next to the Făget, the Lomb attracted the most viewers. Calvin’s esti-
mate that there were thousands of people on this hill may be an exaggera-
tion. However, according to the sociologist Nándor Magyari, after such a
match, one could only descend extremely slowly by car from the two hills
surrounding the city in a semicircle, and the car lights that were shining
from the higher points of the dark city for hours on end, that equalled a
silent protest.
At city surroundings, the phenomenon flourished, too. Not only were
people watching matches, but it was also the destination of the “commut-
82 L. PÉTER
ing” version of “sports tourism”. From Cluj for instance, students of the
Protestant Theology Institute travelled to Huedin for matches in the
Reformed parish house. Izvoru-Crișului was one of the popular venues for
gatherings. The authorities paid close attention to this, which sometimes
involved direct conflicts and retaliations. In 1986 there was a conflict inci-
dent in Izvoru-Crișului, where such visitors arrived. This incident must
have left deep traces because even after so many years, several of my sub-
jects remembered it, but they subsequently overdramatised it and told the
story inaccurately. However, I was able to identify the family that was
directly affected. Ever since the seventies smaller and larger groups of fans
from Szeklerland often came here for forbidden football. At the end of
May or early June 1986, a roughly 30-people group came, which appar-
ently no one wanted to or could receive. They were too many, the locals
might have been afraid as they did not know them. Mathias decided that
if they travelled from such a long distance, they will fit in his yard. They all
camped in his garden, and, according to him, they had full camping equip-
ment and also had the “technology” needed for watching the matches. He
remembers five or six families, and there were children as well. They
accommodated themselves to the situation and behaved respectfully, but
when Hungary played one of its matches, they placed a large red-white-
green flag on one of the tents and started singing loudly. The house stood
(and still stands) next to the main road; the yard is perpendicular to the
road and one can see the back of the yard from the outside. The flag and
the loud singing prompted the attention of the local police and the civil
Securitate officer. Very soon, there was a police raid in the courtyard. At
first, the host was questioned as to why he did not report the presence of
his guests from Hungary at the police station, as he should have done,
according to the law. Then came the questions regarding the Hungarian
flag and finally, the singing. The viewers were threatened after strict inter-
rogations. According to Mathias, they all left the village on the next day,
and for some time he did not know what happened to them. After a few
years, one of the involved families transited the region and visited Mathias,
telling him that after some further persecution they got away with it thanks
to the intervention of a high-level prosecutor. After it became clear that
although they were Hungarian speakers, but did not come from Hungary,
the host was let off after a while of police harassment. According to
Mathias memories, the guests sang folk songs and presumably forbidden
military songs.
This case study showed the widespread consumption of forbidden foot-

ball. Like in Ciumani, the mass phenomenon became a community event
and a social institution. Its function depending on the local social relation-
ships. It was primarily embedded into the workplace relations of the first-
generation urban working class from big districts. Nevertheless, older
neighbours’ relationships also played a role. Its mass forms were similar to
the Pângărat ̦i-Peak variant. The influence of the inter-ethnic environment
can be seen but the nature of the phenomenon showed strong universal
features.
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and everyday ethnicity in a Transylvanian town. New Jersey and Oxfordshire:
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Cluj: Sciencia.
Gans, H. (1962). The urban villagers. New York: Free Press.
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Penguin Books.
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Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.
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Mustat ̦ă, D. (2011). The Power of television: Including the historicizing of the Live
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táról. Web Szociológiai Folyóirat, 13(11), 9–14.
CHAPTER 5
Southern-Transylvania—Further Faces
of the Extended Phenomenon
Abstract The present chapter presents the main results of the ethno-
graphic research carried out in Southern-Transylvania in order to find fur-
ther forms of football gatherings and to test the validity of the conclusions
based on the case studies carried out in Eastern- and Central Transylvania.
The chapter focuses on the cases of Alba Iulia, Galda, Ighiu and other
larger industrial cities like Deva and Hunedoara. The chapter examines the
way in which Southern-Transylvanian average football fans organised
themselves in order to watch the forbidden football matches and found
proper places in order to catch the Yugoslavian television broadcast with
home-made antennas. The chapter describes how the rooters organised
around the Roman Catholic Church tried to consume football using the
high tower of the episcopal cathedral as an antenna and the patterns in
which they commuted to the higher mountains in order to set up football
gatherings. The chapter concludes that the forbidden football strength-
ened the local identity and empowered community solidarity and eventu-
ally gave opportunity to express dissatisfaction toward the socialist political
order and oppressive dictatorship. The phenomenon was widespread in
Southern-Transylvania, also, which shoes once again the power of football
as mobilising factor during harsh times and opportunity to construct alter-
native and free social spaces.

86 L. PÉTER
Keywords Southern-Transylvania • Church, local identity • Community

relations • Football consumption • Leisure
Southern-Transylvania: The Location
The research here targeted the Alba and Hunedoara counties: Alba Iulia
and Deva and several surrounding villages. Both counties have a moun-
tainous relief, located in the vicinity of the Apuseni Mountains and the
Southern Carpathians. The region has a large majority of Romanians. Alba
County had over 409,000 inhabitants in 1977, of which 88 per cent were
Romanian, 6.6 per cent Hungarian, and 5.3 per cent other nationalities
(INS 2017). Alba Iulia, the largest city and county seat, is an administra-
tive, political and religious centre. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth
centuries it was the residence of the Transylvanian princes, where the
national assembly that legitimated the union of Transylvania and Banat
with Romania in 1918 was held. In 1922, the crowning ceremony of kings
Ferdinand I and Maria also took place here.
The city hosts the oldest Roman Catholic Archdiocese in Romania,
founded in 1009. The Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Michael is the most
valuable monument of Romanesque architecture in Transylvania.
Construction started with the foundation of the ward. The population of
the city increased from 14,000 in 1956 to 71,000 in 1992 (INS 2017;
TEMPO 2017) due to industrialisation and labour migration. The produc-
tion of porcelain, leather and leather goods, dairy products and heavy indus-
try has attracted thousands of people from rural areas looking for income.
Hunedoara County in 1977 had 514,000 inhabitants, of which 90 per
cent were Romanians; their proportion continuously increased during the
eighties. Rich in mineral resources, the county has an important mining
and industrial history. It is one of the most industrialised counties in the
Ceausescu’s period. The town of Deva, the county seat, was the adminis-
trative centre of the mines. He also hosted factories and factories related
to the mining industry (steel works, metallurgy, mining equipment). The
population of the city grew almost five times (from 16,000 to 78,000
people) between 1956 and 1992 (INS 2017; TEMPO 2017).
The hard and routinised labour from factories and mines and life in a
block of flats becomes the daily reality of the cities of Southern-Transylvania
just like in other cities. The routine of daily work and living in a stan-
dardised urban environment have provided little leisure activity.
SOUTHERN-TRANSYLVANIA—FURTHER FACES OF THE EXTENDED… 87
Southern-Transylvanian Manifestations
of the Match-Viewing
This region has played the role of a “control group”. I was eager to know
whether there are any other forms that may have been radically different
from those found in the Szeklerland and Cluj. In Southern-Transylvania,
I conducted my research in the cities of Alba Iulia, Deva and the villages
of Ighiu and Galda in May 2017. Fourteen interviews were conducted,
but I also had spontaneous discussions with other locals about this issue. I
will highlight the particular features and the differences regarding previ-
ous variations. I found that football gatherings have been a widespread
phenomenon in Southern-Transylvania as well. In the regions studied, the
desire and curiosity for forbidden football was also built on the basic pat-
tern (“DNA”) already found. The main feature of the versions (mass phe-
nomenon), their nature (community and voluntary movement), their
purpose (watching matches) and manifestations (activities) were similar.
In the cities, the gatherings were organised on the basis of workplace and
friendly relations, while in the villages they were based on neighbourly and
family relations and the winegrowers’ networks.
Robin currently owns a large company. As a young man, he was already
a great football fan in the eighties, and because his family was well known
in the village, it was relatively easy for him to become a gathering initiator.
Since 1982, the football fans of Galda de Jos and the nearby Cricau as well
as those of Galda de Sus have gone to a higher hill in the Craca-valley,
located approximately 14 km away, and in 1986, to the Observator hill,
which was closer to Galda de Sus. The bad roads were a major impediment
and, according to the people’s memories, the cars always had to be repaired
afterwards. The people who were better off financially drove in their own
Dacias to the spot, or (interestingly, like in Ciumani) arrived on the work-
ers’ transportation vehicle of the local SMA. The Director of the
Agricultural Machine Station was a fan, so he organised the transport of
the villagers until the road facilities permitted it. It often happened that
the exhaust pipes of the passenger cars fell off before they reached their
destination. Due to the difficult access, by the time of the 1986 Mexico
Championship people looked for other alternatives; hence, trying to get
Yugoslavian TV reception on the Observator hill, where there was a better-
quality macadam road leading to the viewing place, but the Yugoslavian
TV reception was poor. The area is surrounded by large mountains, so it
was difficult to find good transmission from the southwest.
88 L. PÉTER
Because of the bad signal, the matches were only one of the attractions,
the free and community-like nature of the events and the intense experi-
ences were just as important. The evening campfires burning into the
night and the long conversations still mean a decisive experience for our
interview subject, Robin, who currently has several hundred employees:
“Of course, it was all surrounded by an extraordinary and pleasant atmo-
sphere, with a campfire, sometimes at night.” The pattern here was the
same as the one described before, there were about 20–30 people and
older children standing around a car, and although “it was night, it was
cold, we were cold, we made a fire, but there was a great atmosphere to
it”. One could hear the sound clearly, but there were serious problems
with the image. Due to the unfavorable geographic location, the reception
was never satisfactory, and very often the screen went blank. For this rea-
son, the antenna was a much bigger problem in this area than in previous
ones, the most important issue was having a proper antenna plan and its
subsequent adaptation to the local conditions. Logically, this was also the
cornerstone of the organisation. As this was a village community, thanks to
the intensity of the relationships between families and neighbours and
thanks to the intervention of influential sponsors, such as the SMA direc-
tor, the problems of transportation and of acquiring a television set were
easily resolved; the technical know-how was, however, scarce. Antenna
plans acquired from western areas, such as Deva, hardly worked locally,
which meant constant local innovations and trying out newer and newer
antenna designs. “It was a continuous innovation process. Yes, some peo-
ple were constantly working on this because we always needed a newer
antenna.” There were all kinds of antennas, and they said before each and
every one: “This is going to work, I’ve seen it, and we’ll have great recep-
tion.” This is how we managed to get some Yugoslavian TV reception,”
Robin stated.
These events were mainly a manifestation of the men’s world, and,
although some women were also present, the organisers and the consum-
ers of forbidden football were mostly men. For them this was a real adven-
ture, from organising to carrying out the events. They cut wood, fried
meat, told jokes, drank home brandy, but mainly wine, “because it was
ultimately an adventure. All the way from the preparations to its organisa-
tion, the way to the spot and the things that happened there, all an adven-
ture.” It was a source of pride as well, because one could get some
information about the “things of the outer world” there. “If you were
informed, the next day everyone knew that you had been match-viewing.
You were closer to Western Europe,” he recalls.
Occasionally, wine competitions between neighbouring villages were
also held at the venue. Home winemakers took their best wines, and a
panel of “independent” winegrowers ruled on the quality of the wines,
which they naturally drank afterwards. Individual farmers’ wines or wines
representing neighbouring villages took part in the competition. The
events at this venue had a similar atmosphere to the system of activities in
Ciumani in 1982 (apart from the ethnic aspect, because here everyone had
Romanian nationality). These were events of “joy”, “foolishness”, “mas-
culine adventure”, “adrenaline”, “liberation” and the opportunity to
freely be together with others. This was especially due to the bad reception
of the TV signal (it could be seen, but the screen was very blurry) com-
pared to other venues investigated. The essence of the football gatherings
was stepping out into nature as well as the community experience organ-
ised together and by helping each other. Similarly to other small commu-
nities, these events used and reproduced community capital.
And this was not just in the case of Galda de Jos, but of the whole sur-
rounding region.
It was just for the joy of meeting many people, of talking, of being together with
the others, to have something to tell, that we were at the match, we saw it. Of
discussions, like how could you see over there? That this was here in Alba, I don’t
know, there, on the Straja, up at Sebeș, yeah. Each with his own hill, each with
his own antenna. To get an antenna, you had to know somebody, to give you
that, to tell you the material, to tell you the size. And everyone who was a bit
inventive put something to it. All in one place, it often turned out to be some-
thing nice, something free.
—George
Robin is a highly qualified, successful person. What he said during the

pleasant interview was highly reflective, analytical and contextualised
information. With regard to the meaning of the gatherings, I will end this
case study with a quote:
The match was a pretext to go out. People had to find an alternative. In the
evening there was no power, you had a TV, and you had nothing to watch, and
we found these solutions that were pleasant, free. It was a complex activity
involving some earlier preparations, each did something out of those five. He
90 L. PÉTER
brought the TV set, the battery, the car, all put together, he looked for wood, he
lit the fire, he made the shelter, at least the TV had to be covered. All in one
place, and if we did something, in the end there was something. A community
with a capital.
—Robin
In Alba Iulia, people with an interest in football went to watch matches

on the surrounding hills. As the proportion of the first-generation city
inhabitants was high here as well, people often went back to their places of
origin, where they watched the matches in versions like in Galda de Jos, or
the highly similar Ighiu variants.
William is a churchman, an employee of the local Archdiocese. He was
always a great football fan, which was manifested, among other things, in
his organising of football-watching gatherings back in the seventies. He
bought a car in the mid-seventies; at first they drove to the border city,
Arad, located at a distance of 247 km. They watched football matches at
their relatives’ house. The trip was very time-consuming, fuel costs were
also not negligible, and the 500-kilometre trip cost slightly more than 200
lei (in 1989, a litre of 85 octane gas cost 9 lei, before 1980 it had cost 6
lei). It also had advantages because it did not require any technical invest-
ment, the relatives’ home television and antenna was used. This version is
the local equivalent of the Szeklerland “commuter version”, just another
destination.
At the very end of the seventies, just like in Ciumani, William and other
local football fans tried to get foreign TV reception in the city area to save
costs and time. The story he told me in one of the protocol rooms of the
archdiocese give us an astounding glimpse into the social significance,
deep community-determination of the phenomenon and the depth of
meanings related to watching football matches. In other words, what such
a match-viewing actually comprised. William and the others soon realised
that they didn’t (yet) possess the appropriately efficient tools (an antenna
adapted to local geographical forms), they didn’t know the suitable places
on the surrounding hills either, so a clear, but unconventional solution
was outlined. The church people interested in forbidden football placed
the antenna in the 65-metre-tall tower of the local St. Michael’s Cathedral
of the Archdiocese founded in 1009! The endeavour, during which they
also encountered technical problems (a long antenna cable was needed,
they forgot about the amplifier, wind in the tower was strong, they needed
cable for electricity) was only partially successful, but its significance
exceeds this by far. The Archdiocese and the Cathedral are the centre of
the Roman Catholic Church in Transylvania. The Theology is also here.
During this period, the bishop was Márton Áron, an iconic personality of
the Hungarian minority in Romania, who was enthroned in 1938, and has
stepped up against the oppression of minorities and the Holocaust from a
very young age, and has been in communist prisons after 1945. The
church leaders were also aware of the initiative. To my genuinely surprised
question as to what the supreme ecclesiastical leaders’ take was on the situ-
ation, the funny answer I received was that they were praying that every-
one would see the match… The symbolic link between the communitarian
meanings of football, the universally integrative values of the beautiful
game and the ecclesiastical “blessing” overwhelmingly reflect the social
role and significance of match-viewing that reaches far beyond sports!
After their “tower adventure”, our subjects found suitable locations for
TV reception in Deva and on the surrounding hills to the west. In 1982
and 1986 they watched the matches there, but, at the same time, they
sometimes travelled to Cluj until 1989, mostly watching the matches on
the Feleacu. So for the most significant matches they came by five to six
cars to Cluj. The team, which was organised around William, had a spare
battery, TV sets and an antenna suitable for reception in Cluj as well as one
for reception in Alba Iulia. The former was manufactured in the Metalul-
Rosu factory, the latter in a local plant.
So, in 1982, the phenomenon spread in Alba Iulia as well, which,
according to Robin and Henry, was due to commuting to the nearby Deva
and followed the patterns of the Făget and Lomb versions, just like in
Deva. Deva was one of the earliest centres of forbidden football watching.
It was here that people responded the fastest to the lack of the world
championship broadcast in 1982. One of the reasons was the location of
the city. The mountains and hills surrounding the city provided favourable
geographic opportunities for reception of the Yugoslav TV from the west.
A television amplifier tower designed for the TVR was close to the city.
Another reason was the large number of experts and thus, the accumu-
lated expertise (technicians, communications engineers). A division of the
ICE Felix computer manufacturing company was also in the city. With the
antennas produced here, the dissident public like the ones on the Pâgărat ̦i-
Peak, the Făget and the Lomb were soon formed in Deva as well.
Forbidden football watching spread not only here, but also in
Hunedoara and in other parts of Southern-Transylvania: fans from
Petroșani, Hat ̦eg, Brad, Orăștie went out in masses for forbidden football,
92 L. PÉTER
triggering the attention of the authorities as well. Here the masses went to
the Nucetului and Muncelului mountains; the Securitate was immediately
aware of this and made detailed reports (Mustat ̦ă 2015: 470), but did not
dare or could not act violently against it.
References
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RPL2002INS/vol1/tabele/t01.pdf
insse.ro/shop/
CHAPTER 6
The Social and Political Significance

of Football Gatherings: Escape to Freedom
Abstract The chapter grasps the theory of forbidden football, more pre-
cisely the social-political significance of football gatherings as special form
of consumption of transboundary media transmission. The phenomenon
presented itself along three dimensions: sports consumption; the expres-
sion of ethnic/community identity; and resistance against the Romanian
political system of the time. Football gatherings created and alternative
social space characterised by volunteer co-operation (as opposed to the
compulsory activities imposed by the system), openness (as opposed to
closed society) and coercion-free discourse (as opposed to coercive dis-
course). The opposition of alternative expert networks and legitimate and
illegitimate counter-expert networks stood in the field of forces of the grass-
roots movement.
Keywords Local identity • Ethnic identity • Grassroots movement •

Resistance • Dissident public • Protest

94 L. PÉTER
Cold War, Propaganda and Dissident Media

Consumption
A widely spread, en masse and cyclically repeated practice of football gath-
erings evolved in Inner-Transylvania. Case studies support the thesis
according to which this novel and popular phenomenon was generated by
the shortage characteristic for the system, besides the existing universal
curiosity for football. When speaking about shortage I primarily refer to
the media shortage appearing in the eighties and to the eventless everyday
life of the population. In the seventies television fulfilled a role of enter-
tainment for the growing and upward mobile masses. Absurdly the system
gave that up completely in the following decade, as television was taken
over by the dictatorial couple for their personal purposes (Mustat ̦ă 2013).
Among the population furnished with technical equipment the unsatisfied
need for media consumption contributed to forbidden football pointing
beyond itself and fulfilling an important social and community function.
The lack of sports transmissions only served as a starting point: the “pre-
text” to all this. The stopping short of the modernisation of Romania,
later the depth of its economic crisis and the ideological saturation of the
public space trough football created a free, open, inclusive and egalitarian
social space, organised on a volunteer basis, which “slid” out of the strict
control of the regime. Because of the mass character of the phenomenon,
the dictatorship was compelled to shut its eyes to the dissident public and
to the resistance of the defiant masses of people disregarding its officials.
Communication technologies, quickly developing during the Cold
War, generated techno-political problems for the dictatorial regimes. The
spreading of commercial and civilian satellites also represented a painful
period in the relationship between the countries of Eastern and Western
blocs. At an international conference organised in 1973 in Canada on the
topic of individual and state rights, in connection with the effects of tech-
nologies the issue arose that satellite transmissions could endanger the
sovereignty of nation states (Câmpeanu 1979). The reason for that was
that the geographical boundaries of information dispersion did not coin-
cide with state borders. The leader of the Polish delegation qualified the
functioning of satellite TV programmes as political aggression, respec-
tively a possible propagandistic weapon. The issue obviously had larger
relevance for closed, non-democratic states, as in order to preserve their
political stability and legitimacy, these regimes regularly restricted (or tried
to restrict) the inflow of information from abroad. Possible problems
THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF FOOTBALL GATHERINGS… 95
related to transboundary transmissions already appeared in the case of

land TV channels, as—unlike radio programmes—TV signals cannot be
jammed so easily (Câmpeanu 1979: 15). This of course, caused problems
earlier in the case of radio programmes, too, but satellite broadcasting
increased the risk.
In Eastern Europe the danger that needed to be averted was not
really seen in the political contents, much more in the abundance of
Western popular culture products, considered dangerous and subversive
in the ideological battle. The negative effects of the mass products of
culture industry, such as movies, music, leisure time magazines, photo-
graphs and other lifestyle magazines, sports programmes and not least,
commercial advertisements were the ones that truly made the leaders of
the socialist camp nervous. Western mass culture depicted the attractive
aspects of the capitalist way of life, considered corrupted and harmful,
to which the meanings of freedom and welfare were attached. The
restriction, or the incidental prohibition, of these contents appeared as
an antidote against the internal decay and erosion apprehensible in the
long run (Mattelart 1999: 106), which meant problems to be tackled
(Mickiewicz 1988).
At the same time, there are real examples, too, when Western mass
culture indeed contributed to the public mobilisation of the population of
socialist countries. For the more significant opposition movements born in
Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia as a consequence of the student
movements and riots in 1968 for instance, Western media meant publicity.
Cultural products coming in from abroad functioned as soft power and
greatly contributed to a political socialisation (Gross 1999), provided
background information about the opportunities available in the free
world, the operating mechanisms of pluralist democracies, and about the
possibilities existing in the Western world to choose without constraint
from different career path opportunities. Western popular culture pro-
moted values like freedom, free competition, and individualism, respec-
tively pointed to mechanisms such as meritocracy-based social mobility. In
other words, the consumption of films, music, books, and magazines com-
ing from the West created harmful counter-cultures that were potentially
dangerous on the existing order, even if these counter-cultures were only
isolated pockets. Uncontrolled information was primarily deemed as out-
standingly dangerous for the young people still in the early stages of their
personality development, as it purported the possibility of ideological
destabilisation (Mattelart 1999: 107).
96 L. PÉTER
The spreading, exchange of foreign media products, the created under-

ground distribution networks were in fact considered undesirable in every
Eastern European country, because they represented contents in contra-
diction with the rhetoric of the established official political order. Mattelart
(1999) affirms that rock music, “rebellious” by nature, represented a high
risk in this row, as it became popular as a result of the spreading of transis-
tor radios, which made individual, delocalised, thus hardly controllable
listening possible. The problem of oppressing regimes was real, because
the young generations everywhere were quick to adapt the patterns heard
and seen, something that was mostly expressed by nonconformist hair
styles, fashion, dance, and language codes, as pointed out in the case of
Estonian youngsters by Pilkington (1994). These resulted in a habitus
that was different or even in contradiction with the official and compul-
sory principles of “socialist ethics and equity”, and which was quickly and
commonly labelled as hedonism and tried to do away with.
By the mid-sixties, television became the main carrier of Western cul-
tural products. Transboundary transmissions and the issue of dissident TV
watching became a political problem first in the socialist countries in the
immediate Eastern vicinity of the Iron Curtain. The phenomenon called
“forbidden fruit psychosis” (Szekfii 1989: 163) culminated at the very end
of the sixties in Hungary, where Austrian TV programmes could be
viewed. The situation was similar in Czechoslovakia where the programmes
of Austrian and West-German television channels could be received, in
Estonia, where the broadcasting of the Finnish national TV was followed,
in Latvia, where Swedish national television was received, or the GDR
where the complete palette of the TV channels of the adversary FRG could
be received and obviously followed by the critical majority of the popula-
tion. Mickiewicz (1988), usually quoted in this matter, points out in his
suggestive volume entitled Split Signal: Television and Politics in the Soviet
Union, using the example of the Soviet Union yet with relevance also to
the cases above, that the protests and prohibitions coming from the social-
ist side could be framed around three main systems of arguments. First,
“outside” TV programmes are private enterprises and therefore they sug-
gest the superiority of private property over socialist community owner-
ship and state-administered planned economy. Second, he mentions
among moral objections the (more) open ways of presenting sexuality (the
socialist ethics were quite prudish), the acceptance of unemployment, and
the promotion of a hedonist way of life. Finally, unacceptable political
implications appeared, as these popular products usually placed middle-class
way of life in contrast with the living style of the working class (1988: 13),
which they devalued according to the censorship. In the light of these, in
the eyes of the Soviet power, the intervention against “information impe-
rialism” and “bourgeois propaganda” was completely justified and
reasoned.
At the same time, the flow of Western mass culture products in the
region was fluctuant. Their fluxes and persecution showed a great variance
in different countries, respectively even inside the same countries, depend-
ing on the current administration and on the possibilities and strength of
the oppressive machinery. The equation was also influenced by the diplo-
matic system of relations, so the enforcement of state control moved on a
very large scale. On the one hand, the socialist regimes were aware that
with the fast pace of technological development total prohibition would
simply not work for practical reasons. Therefore, in the periods of the de-
Stalinisation processes for instance, for the sake of the pacification of soci-
eties, their “appeasing” in a way, and in order to extort a new social
contract and an acceptable modus vivendi, they rather applied the tech-
niques of controlled accessibility (Massino 2012).
In Romania the second half of the sixties, between 1965 and 1968, in
the period of liberalisation (Tismăneanu 2006: 499), it was possible to
have access to the more neutral pieces of French and American media
products, usually in movie theatres, the television or in the theatres.
Important international sports events were also broadcast. This was an
organic part of the peculiar domestic socialist consumerism (Massino
2012), marking the fact that progress has reached Romania, and the
socialist political order is similar for the people to the Western one, or at
least it can ensure living standards and consumer goods comparable to
that. Massimo (2012) in his study about female roles, way of life and con-
sumption points out that the first years of the Ceaușescu era were charac-
terised by openness with respect to consumer goods and Western media
products, as evident proof of socialist modernity and quickly improving
way of life. The official image of the modern socialist citizen, the “new
socialist man” at that time could still include more colourful and lively
fashion items (socialist fashion), a peculiar adaptation of current Western
fashion. It could also accommodate the cult of physical beauty and the
legitimate consumption of Western music and blockbuster movies (in the
beginning in the cinemas, and later on more widely, via television). Relative
consumer abundance and widening leisure time activities were necessary
in the opinion of the author because with these the attention of the
98 L. PÉTER
opulation could be oriented towards issues non-political in nature

p
(p. 228). Furthermore, in the construction of the individual identity char-
acteristic for the socialist citizen, political contents (liberty, freedom of
choice) could be changed with contents free of politics, notably with the
improving living standards of first generation townsfolk moving upward as
a result of industrialisation. In plain English, fashion, affordable—mostly
Romanian made—consumer goods such as washing machines, cars or
even media products from abroad could be designated as symbols of new
and successful socialist modernisation, the success of Romanian economy.
The system wanted to suggest by this that the rights of political freedom
were in fact not essential in this new social contract, and the guaranteeing
of social services such as permanent employment, secured income, freely
allocated housing, state subsidised public services, and a stable, predict-
able life, more comfortable than village conditions, were more important
(Mattelart 1999: 111).
Thus, socialist consumerism and social services, together with relative
information openness, represented one of the main sources of legitimacy
for Ceaușescu, freshly in power (1965) and wanting to strengthen his
position. The other legitimacy source was the autochthonist nationalism
trying its wings (Boia 2012), but this was not yet evident. From the mid-
seventies, consumerism became completely extinct, and the function of
television, which was initially also meant to entertain, had radically changed
by the beginning of the eighties. By the end of the seventies the legitimacy
role of consumerism with a freer air was completely taken over by hard line
nationalism, of which television became the most important ideological
organ (Țiu 2013). In parallel with the drastic decline of the economic situ-
ation, and the growing role of the secret services, the mediascape was nar-
rowed down critically, and its contents offer was filled by the requisites of
personality cult and the programmes of uninteresting, outright stupid
propaganda (Gross 1999: 71). By this time, television had completely lost
its entertaining function.
The most important change with the strongest implications can be
observed in the switch of the role of television, which gave up its role of
entertainment and started to serve political propaganda and the personal-
ity cult of Ceaușescu. Domestic studies (Gross 1999; Mustat ̦ă 2013; Țiu
2013), point out that television had been dominated by politics from as
early as the later years of the seventies, being turned over to the Ceaușescu
couple in the beginning of the eighties. Whereas in the seventies, the pro-
fessional bodies of the television still had some kind of influence on
rogramme policy, by 1980–1981 this state of affairs changed completely.

p
Television has obviously always been under political control since its estab-
lishment in 1956, its functioning was funded from the budget and it was
created in harmony with official ideology, yet the first, early stage of the
history of television, roughly in the years until 1970, was characterised by
technical grounding and the seeking of its place and social embeddedness
within the developed media system. This expansive stage was called the era
of scarcity by Mustat ̦ă (2013: 52). In the expansive period of the sixties
the airtime grew continuously, just like the numbers of sold TV sets and
subscriptions: In 1957 a total of 571 hours of programmes were aired,
while in 1961 airtime exceeded 1396 hours, and the figure grew to 3161
hours in 1971, and 4642 hours in 1975. If we take a look at the number
of those with a TV subscription, the same fast growing trend can be
observed: 28,000 in 1957, 2,692,000 in 1975, and 3,713,111 by 1985
(same source). According to the data of Câmpeanu there were 1,500,000
TVR subscribers in 1970, and by 1977 there were 3,300,000 subscribers,
which in his view meant a total number of 8,000,000 viewers (1979:
110–110). Under such rate of growth, the programme policy of the sev-
enties was characterised by diversification and differentiation, while the
period corresponds to the era of availability (Mustat ̦ă 2013: 53).
The most watched programmes in 1975–1976 were the foreign movies
and serials, followed by the popular Teleenciclopedia, TV theatre and the
musical programmes Câmpeanu (1979: 112–116). To this the football
matches of the 1978 world championship organised in Argentina can be
compared, being watched by a little bit less than 70 per cent of the popula-
tion. Câmpeanu (1979), probably for political reasons, says in his research
report that viewership “did not reach 70 per cent” (p. 115). We can only
guess what viewership ratings the subsequent championships achieved, as
those could only be seen in Romania on foreign TV channels.
From the reviewed data it can be deduced that watching TV in 1977 in
Romania, was a highly intensive activity, with more than 75 per cent of
potential viewers watching at least one programme on a daily basis, and
more than one third watched an average of four per day (p. 137). In the
first quarter of 1978 one viewer watched an average number of 20 hours
of TV programmes a week, which was 40 per cent of the amount of time
of a week’s work! Câmpeanu related that in the seventies, audience
researches measured ever-increasing figures not only in the number of TV
sets, but also in the average times of watching, both in the villages and in
the cities. As to be expected, men, those with housekeeping activities, and
100 L. PÉTER
retired persons watched more TV than the average (p. 143). In 1978, the
average time spent in front of the TV a day was more than three hours in
weekdays, and five hours on weekends (p. 152). According to the statisti-
cal conclusions of the researchers of the time, this pattern of watching TV
placed Romania into the European average; TV was watched to a similar
degree and proportion in Poland and England, exceeding by far Bulgaria,
Hungary or Yugoslavia data (p. 143). This situation, however, changed
radically by the beginning of the eighties, something that was the direct
reflection of political and cultural-political changes (Gross 1999).
In 1971 Ceausescu visited North Korea and China, where he was fasci-
nated by the “achievements” of the Cultural Revolution, urging him to
try these at home. At the meeting on the 6th of July of the Executive
Committee of the RCP the 17 clauses of the Neptun Principles were for-
mulated, declaring that culture must exclusively reflect the general direc-
tion of the Party (Deletant 2012). By this the melting period came to an
end and the process of Romanian “Small Cultural Revolution” started
(re-dogmatisation in culture, the exclusiveness of socialist realism and the
accomplishment of a nationalism) (Tismăneanu 2006). This could not yet
be seen in the programme policy of the television, because the position of
the dictator was not yet strong enough, and the professional bodies were
able to slow down the programme policy built on the cult of personality
for a while (Mustat ̦ă 2011). One year later, at the National Conference of
the RCP the basic principles of national homogenisation were formulated
(Hunya et al. 1990), the ground of political work and ideological educa-
tion was laid, and in 1974 The Media Law was adopted, which introduced
an even stronger censorship (Țiu 2013), although this has been officially
stopped earlier (Gross 1999).
As part of his endeavour to become independent from the Soviets,
Ceaușescu strived for energetic self-reliance and the development of large-
scale industry (Boia 2016). In the Five-Year Plan between 1971 and 1975,
a dominant proportion of the investments was oriented to the industry,
especially the areas of mining, heavy machinery, petro-chemistry and met-
allurgy (Hunya et al. 1990). The aim was to develop a so-called multilater-
ally developed socialist society. In 1975 Romania was granted the status of
a Most Favoured Nation by the USA, which was seen by the system as
some kind of recognition, and the American movies in the programme were
still a sign of that. At the same time, in the seventies Romania started an
active international diplomatic offensive: it tried to mediate in the Chino-
Soviet conflict, put efforts in trying to move Chinese-American dialogue,
and several state visits took place in which the dictator also tried to assume
a mediating role in the Middle East. However, by the mid-eighties the
economic failure became complete; at a 1981 National Conference of the
RCP Ceaușescu announced that by 1985 Romania would pay back half of
its foreign state debts, and in the first three years of the following Five-
Year Plan it would pay back the rest. In 1985 power outages became
permanent. From the end of 1982 population power usage was restricted;
the energy necessary for public lighting was reduced to half, and power
was also switched off regularly in the homes of the population (127–140).
The brutal retrenchment in consumption and state spending, as well as
the increase of export, literally pushed the population into poverty.
Queues in front of shops became common, and food shortage chronic
(Lungu 2004). Beginning in 1981, the rationing of the food distribution
was introduced (rat ̦ia). Romania was literally ruled by cold and fear
(Neculau 2004), increased by the symbolic and often real intimidations of
the Securitate.
Following the mid-eighties, the official rhetoric of the system gravi-
tated within the triangle of the myth of a besieged fortress, the heroic past
and the cultivation of personality cult (Tismăneanu 2014). Former friendly
countries became in the first instance neighbouring countries only, then
hostile countries, and the openness somewhat characterising the earlier
decade disappeared altogether). The case of Romania is unique perhaps
because there were no capitalist countries among its neighbours. In spite
of this, by the mid-eighties—perhaps with the notable exception of
Bulgaria in the official interpretation of the regime all neighbours “aban-
doned the road of building a socialist society”; moreover, they “wanted to
interfere with the internal affairs of the country”. All information and TV
programmes coming from the outside were seen as dangerous and harm-
ful from the outset by the national-communist system of Ceaușescu.
These changes directly influenced TVR. Beginning on the 1st of
February 1982 airtime during weekdays is reduced by two hours. After
1983 TVR2 only broadcast two days a week, while in the case of TVR1
noon programmes were discontinued and the afternoon transmissions cut
to half. Then, after January 1985, the TV programme on weekdays
remained at two hours a day between 20:00 and 22:00 in the evenings,
and during the weekends it shrank to three hours on Saturdays and five
hours on Sundays. Hungarian and German language programmes were
completely discontinued concomitantly with the gradual reduction of
overall airtime. By this, the period of the so-called political scarcity became
102 L. PÉTER
consummate (Mustat ̦ă 2013: 57), and lasted until the 22nd of December
1989. After 1978 no important football matches were broadcast by RTV,
with the exception of the matches in one of the groups of the 1984
European Championship organised in France (with the participation of
Romania), respectively the final. Sports ceased to be acceptable pro-
gramme for the propaganda…
A peculiar situation came about in Romania, from the perspective of
media consumption. In the seventies, concomitantly with the expansion
of the media system and broadcast media contents and the equipment of
households with TV sets, a vigorous media socialisation also took place.
The system literally got the population into the habit of watching TV,
which was organically built into the everyday routine. The television of
the seventies produced a new need that was fulfilled by the broadcast
contents. With its abundantly transmitted programmes, television per-
formed an important entertaining function until the end of the seventies.
It is striking that whereas until the end of the seventies, RTV transmitted
serials also familiar to Western audiences, such as The Saint, Daktari,
Columbo, Lost in Space, Sesame Street, The Time Tunnel, The Invaders,
Mannix, Kojak and even the iconic Dallas, by the eighties viewers had to
be content with serials produced in Romania or at best in China, North
Korea, or perhaps Yugoslavia or Poland. The last episode of Dallas was
broadcast in 1981. In the eighties, the place of programmes fulfilling an
entertaining role was taken over by raw party propaganda and contents
cultivating the personality cult of the dictator (Țiu 2013). However, the
need to watch TV had been ingrained in the population by that time, and
did not disappear!
In spite of the restrictions, hidden forbiddance and symbolic or direct
reprisal, the consumption of foreign media contents still remained a social
fact in Romania. This had two main carriers: radio, and the TV pro-
grammes broadcast from neighbouring countries. After 1985 these were
completed by the consumption of video films in small groups, albeit to a
much more restricted degree. Satellite dishes appeared in 1988–1989.
According to estimations, there were approximately 300–500 satellite
dishes functioning in Romania in 1989 (Gross 1999: 73), while in con-
nection with the number of video players there are only very contradictory
estimates. There were reputedly 10,000 such pieces of equipment in
Bucharest and an estimated number of 100,000 elsewhere in the country;
and about 3000–5000 illegally copied and distributed VHS video films
may have been circulated.
The audience ratings of BBC, RFE, the Voice of America and Radio
Liberty have always been high in Romania, similarly to other socialist
countries. Although we have very few reliable data available, a media audi-
ence research carried out in 1971–1972 pointed out that the Romanian
language programmes of Radio Free Europe were listened regularly by 59
per cent of the adult population, of the BBC 18 per cent, and of Voice of
America 18 per cent (Paulu 1974 in Gross 1999: 75). A survey showed
that in 1982–1983 the audience rating of these radio stations further
increased: the rating of RFE reached 64 per cent (McIntosh 1986 in
Gross 1999: 75), whereas that of Voice of America 20 per cent
(Mainland 1986 in the same work). The magnitudes are expressive,
and show that Western stations gained dominance in providing infor-
mation, being listened by the masses. Just like the televisions of the
neighbouring countries.
Systematic research about television watching in the border areas is
entirely lacking, yet their factuality is beyond doubt, they were organic
part of local everyday knowledge. There is no research of a scholarly char-
acter about this topic. The phenomenon only appears sporadically in works
treating the history of public television in Romania (Mustat ̦ă 2011, 2013,
2015); thus the issue lacks scientific literature. In connection with TVR
Mustat ̦ă (2015) remarks that the total appropriation of television for polit-
ical purposes and its placement under the direct control of the Ceaușescus
resulted in negative consequences: it made dissident or resistant television
watching near the borders a mass phenomenon. In her view it is funda-
mental that this practice was a form of resistance at the same time (2015:
466); therefore, without any special definitions and justification she con-
siders the phenomenon dissident from the outset. She uses the notion of
dissident audience for the watchers, based on the CNSAS documents she
had analysed. In the reports of the Securitate about the issue, the practice
of watching television along the borders fell within the category of dissi-
dence, which means that the system defined the practice as a harmful phe-
nomenon, spelling danger on state security. Mustat ̦ă (2015) just mentions
the phenomenon I investigated to which she uses the term of defiant tele-
vision reception (2015: 470), which is a lot stronger than the notion of
dissident audience.
With respect to the football gatherings my raising of the question is simi-
lar; namely, I regard them as a mass, and a stronger form of resistance.
104 L. PÉTER
Dissident Audience or Dissident Public?

Under these circumstances it is undoubtable that dissident television
watching along the borders, but generally the consumption of popular
cultural products coming from abroad, especially from the West, was an
undesirable phenomenon in Romania, with numerous negative conse-
quences for the power. These “unpleasant” consequences were mainly
political, respectively economic, ethical and social in nature. The political
consequences are the most important, as in principle they made access to
forbidden/undesirable information possible, and the formation of opin-
ions about public affairs different from the expected-compulsory course.
Uncontrolled information resulted in strengthened critical reflexion or
commitment for a certain public cause, or more rarely, even a statement or
open disagreement—see, for example, the protests formulated in the end
of the decade by Ana Blandiana or Mircea Dinescu, the letters of the Six
or László Tőkés (Tismăneanu 2006). Among the detrimental economic
consequences upon the system we should mention first of all the black
market and second economy, private economic transactions and the profit-
able activities with smuggled in cultural products in contradiction with
socialist ethic, although their main reason was the failure of the shortage
economy itself.
In my view, the habitual, more or less regular consumption of foreign
TV programmes in the border areas mentioned by Mustat ̦ă (2015) was
indeed a notable “subversive” phenomenon, even more so as the Romanian
secret service, the dreaded Securitate watched them concerned and
adversely, too. Information coming from the former Yugoslavia, Hungary,
the Soviet Union, and Bulgaria penetrated the everyday lives of those liv-
ing near the border, decisively influencing their activities and time bud-
gets, becoming important, moreover indispensable parts of their lives.
One could say that they created a continuously existing parallel reality,
shaping and filling the lifeworld of the viewers. This undoubtedly contrib-
uted to what is the most damaging thing for all powers on the long run:
the wear of their legitimacy. In the case of Romania the legitimacy of the
system reached its peak in August 1968, and by the very end of the seven-
ties it did not only erode among the intelligentsia, but also among ordi-
nary people. To this the armchair dissident public also contributed.
However, I also think that between the consumption of information
“from the outside” (din afară) at home, in the family and in relatively safe
conditions and the practice of football gatherings there are significant and
defining differences. In what comes, I will also reflect upon these differ-
ences, analytically separating the issue I am investigating from dissident
media consumption taken in a general sense.
The regular following of Hungarian, Soviet, Yugoslav and Bulgarian
TV programmes near the border can indeed be regarded as some sort of
successful lonely and silent resistance (Mustat ̦ă 2011). Although the power
would like that, it cannot liquidate it because of its mass character. Yet this
resistance was a fragmented, passive phenomenon implicating actors that
were isolated from each other in space, in spite of its widespread character.
TV watchers never shared the same physical space, only rarely interacted
with each other, did not collectively step into the public sphere from the
private space, and their words and voices were never heard. They rather
meant only a virtual audience; Mustat ̦ă briefly reflecting on the phenom-
enon is right in this respect (2011). They do not form an active public
from a sociological point of view, rather a large multitude of private
individuals.
I consider that the gatherings represented a greater challenge for the
system, because besides the mere consumption of the matches, the ele-
ments of resistance also appeared in an explicit form. The gatherings
spread in the inner part of the country are different in several ways from
the above pattern working in a private context. First of all, they did not
function in a private space, blocked off from the outside world, but out-
side, in the open space. The masses, the multitude of watchers were pres-
ent at a given geographic location; their connections were manifold,
intensive and frequent. The analysed phenomenon is locally deeply embed-
ded into the culture and the systems of relations of the local community.
It presumed a much higher level organisation and the much better syn-
chronisation and co-ordination of the activities. In fact, it did not only
mean a sole passive activity, but rather a group of activities appearing
within the same social situation. The location—in contrast with the family,
which was closed and resistant against intrusion—was receptive; potential
and effective participants were free to enter, even if not in an absolute
sense. Furthermore, trust and social capital had an important role to play
in the equation, just like volunteering and the division of labour. The
opportunity was not given for the watchers: it had to be created over and
over again from one occasion to the other. Locations suitable for the
reception of TV signals had to be found first, then the equipment had to
be transported to and from the location and the knowledge creating the
opportunities had to be made common. So, the entire event had to be
106 L. PÉTER
thoroughly organised, and all of that had to be done voluntarily, out of

free initiative, with united community effort.
That is why I think that the actors of the phenomenon can rightfully be
called by the term of dissident public. I have used the attribute “dissident”
earlier, without problem and criticism (which is also empirically justified
by the case studies). The public as a sociological entity is different from the
audience, insofar as the members of the public are active, communication
among them is multi-directional, there are complex relationships among
its members; they act jointly (and not isolated from one another), out of a
common interest above each and every individual, and not out of narrow
private interest. The individuals forming the public are active members,
continuously interact with their environment, with others, and they sub-
mit themselves to the common interest, which in the present case is the
aim of being able to successfully watch the international match, “forbid-
den” by the power. The specific context of watching the game generates
(community, ethnic, political) meanings, which point beyond the mere
watching of the game. The political-social relevance of the events occur-
ring in the mountains and hills unfolds in a wider context: it grows to be
a form of community resistance.
Football Gatherings: A Complex Social Situation

Network
The reconstruction of the events was not simple; but the different per-
spectives of the narratives, the diversity of the lived and experienced events
and the differences and fine distinctions between all these helped me grasp
the “robot” images or the ideal-types of the phenomenon. The narrations
were obviously different as the experiences rooted in individual life situa-
tions, respectively their earlier and current positions created different sto-
ries and interpretations. The collation of very different stories made
possible the identification of the general features of the phenomenon, and
its ideal-typical forms. Ethnicity (Romanian/Hungarian), age (child/
adult), the role in the organisation (organiser/helper/participant), gender
(male/female) respectively the institutional embeddedness of the phe-
nomenon (family/working place/neighbourhood/sports life) constituted
the main perspectives of the narrations. The focal points in the different
narratives fell on different dimensions and aspects, providing a more
sophisticated picture, richer in details.
The general frame of the phenomenon included the following ele-

ments: community embeddedness, and technical knowledge and informa-
tion networks, as well as access to material tools. Of these have special
significance. As the event was continual, and everywhere collective in
nature, an institution or community had to be there with relations of
mutual trust, to ensure the frame. These were in most of the cases the
close-knit ties formed at workplaces, as we saw in Bălan and Cluj, but
small local communities and sports movements (Ciumani), neighbour-
hood (Cluj can be an example for that, too), or marketed versions (certain
households in the Cluj/Făget) could also play a role. The marketed ver-
sion is less embedded from a community point of view, but the spectators
here, too were recruited spontaneously, through informal networks, and
not by means of advertising or “direct marketing”. People frequently
arrived in groups, organised among them, right from the very beginning.
The minority communities organised around the church (the one in
Alba Iulia and the commuters to Huedin) were also “background institu-
tions” in an indirect way. These could be connected in reality, but had
different roles in the concrete versions of forbidden football consumption.
The role of working place communities is indispensable: it was not only
one of the main institutions that had previously integrated the potential
actors, but almost in each case it was also the source and the scene of the
indispensable materials and tools for the making of the antennas.
The role of technical knowledge was also of a capital importance. The
assembling and setting of the antennas, their improvement, the selection
of the appropriate aerial amplifier, and the finding of the locations suitable
for reception, all clearly depended on technical expertise. Where the num-
ber of technical experts was high (Cluj/Deva), the phenomenon also
spread out more quickly and easily than in the places where these were
more scarcely available (Ciumani/Bălan). Available time was also an
important component (in the case of commuting). The pool of knowl-
edge about the locations that were adequate for reception was again of a
defining importance—this was the most valuable information, still freely
available and a widely shared common good. What could mark better the
open, community character of the phenomenon, if not this?
The material assets that contributed to reception, the feeling of com-
fort and good atmosphere were also important. In order to travel to the
scene cars (with odd or even registration numbers), bicycles, carts or other
vehicles and fuel, car parts were needed, just as TV sets for the reception,
antennas, cables, amplifiers, batteries and radios. Comfort was ensured by
108 L. PÉTER
benches, camping chairs, perhaps built “stands”, a canvas, tents, tables, a

fireplace; good atmosphere, besides the good company, and was guaran-
teed by meals, drinks, homemade pastries, and occasionally parlour games.
In addition to above, the social capital activated together by the partici-
pants was necessary, which made the division of tasks, and co-operation
among the organisers and participants possible. It was inevitable to main-
tain contacts with various professionals: the shopkeeper (to acquire mate-
rial assets), the filling station attendant, the manager of the agricultural
machinery station (SMA) or the principal of the school. The pool of
knowledge by which the interactions with official functionaries were regu-
lated was greatly needed, just as the reaching of an agreement with the
police during commuting was also part of the phenomenon. Knowing the
repository of applicable behaviour with potential informers was not negli-
gible either (abstaining, bribing, making them drunken, intimidation,
beating, deceit).
I think that the practice of football gatherings formed a complex net-
work of social situations (Spradley 1980: 43–44), in which the same actors
also carried out different activities on other scenes, converging towards
the same goal. In our particular case this goal was to watch the matches.
The cases described so far of forbidden football consumption were special
social situations: people with different social statuses watch matches
together, at a peculiar location, in nature, respectively carry out other
activities at the same location (before, during and after the matches). The
actors are people from different walks of life grouped around the organis-
ers. The event could only take place there (it was the place where the TV
signal could be received); the collateral activities could have been risky in
other locations, yet they were customary on the mountain. All these cre-
ated an alternative social space, counter-reality against the official one. The
event unfolded in the middle of nature: this meant the peak experience.
Still, the entire phenomenon was not restricted to this peculiar “moun-
tain situation”, although it did indeed unfold on the mountain. Case stud-
ies have also demonstrated that the consumption of football could only
take place if the organisers and the “hardcore rooters” grouped around
them prepared the event previously. In other words, the same actors car-
ried out other activities, in different social situations in their everyday lives,
which were indispensable for the realisation of the event. One of the scenes
of the network of situations was the family, where the preliminary negotia-
tions took place with reference to the distribution of the resources. The
division of the fuel, scantily available anyway, presupposed parametric
decisions; thus travelling by car to the location of the TV watching could

only be done to the detriment of other common activities. Dividing family
spare time also meant negotiations or finding solutions for tensions. Adult
men often took their daughters to the hill so that they could be together
in their scarce free time or to sort out the issue of supervision (because the
mother was working the third shift). The other scene was the workplace,
where the conditions of the equipment and organisational details were
most frequently discussed. Sports movements (Ciumani/Bălan) or the
stadium could also be part of the situation network, just like (as one of the
cases from Southern-Transylvania showed) the church or the school
(Ciumani), besides the electronics shop, the black market or the neigh-
bourhood (in certain parts of Cluj). In rural settings the executive man-
ager of the SMA repeatedly appears, taking care of transportation to the
scene. In plain English, the “extensions” of the phenomenon were in
touch with numerous other institutions, mediated by the same group of
actors. Without these the consumption of forbidden football could not
have taken place. Moreover, opposing power-enforcement organisations
(the police, the Securitate) could also become part of the situation net-
work, if they subsequently summoned in certain participants, interro-
gated, blackmailed or recruited them as agents.
The Dimensions of Football Gatherings

Taking all these aspects into consideration, according to my empiric results
the phenomenon manifested itself along three main dimensions or fea-
tures: (1) the consumption of sports; (2) the expression of community/
local, professional and ethnic identity; and (3) resistance and protest
against the existing political regime. Dimension weights were different
depending on the previously described versions of match-watching and
the profiles of the spectators. In the Szeklerland for instance, in the case of
Hungarians representing a minority in Romania, the ethnic dimension was
far more important than in the small localities of Southern-Transylvania,
where its place was taken over by the strengthening of local cultural iden-
tity. In the commercialised version of match-watching, as found in Făget,
the ethnic dimension played a small role; the weight of the media con-
sumption dimension exceeded that by far, while the manifestation of the
resistance dimension was practically negligible. Then, in the case of the
organisers and those with more education the resistance dimension was
more important and more reflected, whereas for the young adults the
110 L. PÉTER
media consumption and (in the case of Hungarian respondents) the ethnic
dimension was more prevailing.
For example, in 1988, on the Pângărat ̦i-Peak, where the songs of the
forbidden rock opera, Stephen, the King, were sung at the location of the
gatherings. In the case of those with less schooling, the resisting and pro-
test character of the phenomenon was less deliberate, much more the
community characteristic and the ethnic feature, if it was about ethnic
Hungarians anywhere in Inner-Transylvania. In the case of communities
built from the very first on workplace solidarity—like in the industrial
mining town of Bălan—match-watching also had a collective professional
identity-preserving role, but connected to ethnic identity in the case of
those rooting for Hungarian team of in the Covacipeter in 1986. Beyond
the ethnic dimension, as they returned home in the night with the worker
wagon, the event heavily contributed to the strengthening of the profes-
sional identity of the participants here, and to the enforcement of solidar-
ity among them. Yet in connection with the “Kunta Kinte complaint” and
getting over the interethnic differences, the protest character also explic-
itly appeared. For the Hungarian match-watchers in Alba Iulia the matches
primarily played a role in the preservation of their ethnic identity, greatly
defined by the diaspora. In the other Southern-Transylvanian localities the
weights of the three dimensions changed in function of the schooling level
of the participants, their ages and ethnic backgrounds. In particular ver-
sions like the case of the post and communication station of Cluj, where
the young people were allowed to go in only at half-time to watch the
championship match, the situation interestingly highlighted the protest
dimension. The latter was entirely missing from the Făget camping ver-
sion operated by the nomenclature and for conflict avoidance, also from
the workplace taken over for the purposes of match-watching (“work-
place” version). However, it is a fact that these three dimensions can be
separated analytically in the narratives, and in what comes, I will focus on
these three.
1. Sports and media consumption. Undoubtedly the primary reason for
the appearance and the spreading of the phenomenon was the eagerness
to watch football on television. The more and more scarcely occurring
sport transmissions constituted the attractor that put the phenomenon
into shape. In the absence of transmissions, those affected sought for alter-
native solutions, which were not invented from “nothing”; they forcibly
turned to the early forms of the evolution of media consumption patterns.
In the sixties, electricity was introduced to a significant part of Romanian
settlements; thus it became widely possible to follow the programmes of

the Romanian television. As TV sets were expensive, which only the well-
to-do could afford, collective viewing was not a rare phenomenon before
the end of the sixties. This practice was revived by sports lovers for the
consumption of forbidden football. They wanted to see matches, which
under the given circumstances could be carried out in the variations
described in the case studies. The first reading of football gatherings can
be done from the direction of leisure time activities formed alongside the
sports consumption dimension. The patterns of this are included in detail
in the case studies. Yet the football consumption dimension—albeit it
gave the starting base and meant one of the central activities of the
phenomenon—was completed by other dimensions with a significance
and role that added a lot to and sometimes even exceeded the primary
social meanings attached to it. These meanings are related to the collective
identity of the participants and to the political system, because the football
rooters “picked up forbidden fruit” and did this collectively, in a specific
social situation.
2. The expression and strengthening of collective identity. One of the roles
of football is the function of expressing collective identity. The “profane
ceremonial institution” places the individuals into large groups and
enforces them in their membership. As it is a popular and mediatised cul-
tural product, football is appropriate to create and maintain social bonds
among those that are alike, strengthening and restoring these from time
to time. It links rooters with identical preferences to one another and inte-
grates them into a system of relationships that weaves through and knits
society together (Péter 2016). The division of labour in the sense of
Durkhéim (1997) was on a high level among the football gatherers, they
mutually depended from one another—the communities were character-
ised by organic solidarity. The community and the emotional climate sur-
rounding match-watching and the concomitant activities enhanced the
connecting and identity-expressing role. Rooter identification with one
another, with the team and the value system represented by it also united
the individual with the imagined community along common collective
supporter consciousness. My results show that football gatherings—as
volunteer-based, open and community gatherings—in addition to profes-
sional/workplace identity (Bălan) also represented an extremely effective
and important terrain for the expression and strengthening of local and
ethnic identity.
112 L. PÉTER
• Football gatherings as the representations of local identity. The Ciumani

example is also suggestive for the expression of local identity; where
through the “mountain-going” of the ice hockey rooters presenting
local features the deep feeling of “being from Ciumani” also appeared
in all its splendour—wit, persistence, ingenuity and the ability to sur-
vive. In the Southern-Transylvanian case of Galda de Jos the specific
character of the local community was signified by viticulture and
wine-production. The wines presented at the wine contests organ-
ised in connection with match-watching did not only symbolise local
male winemakers, but indirectly the whole community of Galda de
Jos. The wine contest played a role in drawing the boundaries of
local identity. Barth (1969) pointed out in relation to ethnicity that
with regard to community identities one must pay attention to the
various practices and procedures by which culturally different groups
shape up and maintain the symbolic borders among each other. At
the wine contest the community boundaries endowed with meaning
are marked symbolically and discursively (“better wine”, “winning
wine”). Terms like “our wine” as opposed to “your wine” represent
the flexible features of the two neighbouring communities, most
probably extremely similar in many ways. And either wins or loses a
wine in the informal contest, both communities win: they both had
an opportunity to express and strengthen their local identity in front
of the others. Minority and ethnic identity expressed and lived dur-
ing the consumption of forbidden football is somewhat more com-
plex than that.
• Football gatherings as the representations of ethnic identity. In the light
of the literature (Barth 1969; Eriksen 1993), it can be affirmed that
gatherings were an outstandingly important scene and institution of
the representation and living of ethnic identity for the Hungarian
community in Romania. Under ethnic minority identity we under-
stand the manifestations and life situations that are different from the
dominant Romanian language and cultural patterns in Romania, the
conscious reflexions upon the cultural self and the communitarian
nature of the individuals (Horváth 2006).
In the eighties the situation of the Hungarian minority in Romania

became a lot worse in comparison with the earlier decades. The scenes
where minority identity could be manifested rapidly narrowed, Hungarian
language usage was restricted by the dictatorship, the school network in
the mother tongue was gradually reduced, and in the second half of the
decade the Hungarian names of settlements were forbidden in the press.
Cultural institutions were gradually deprived of their tradition-preserving
contents, and Hungarians were no longer officially considered a stand-
alone ethnic group, only being regarded as Hungarian-speaking
Romanians, while the policy of homogenisation and assimilation became
more powerful (Novák 2016: 41). According to the official propaganda,
the problems of the Hungarians (the minority issue) had been favourably
settled, solved once and for all by socialism. Under such circumstances
empiric results also proved that football gatherings spontaneously filled
the gap left there by the degraded system of cultural institutions. Sports
fans quickly discovered that in the free context of football gatherings, in
the middle of nature, their Hungarian-ness could also be expressed and
lived freely. The modalities for that moved on a wide scale in the investi-
gated area, yet this dimension appeared strongly everywhere.
The matches of the Hungarian national team were outstandingly
important for the rooters with a Hungarian background. It is characteris-
tic that in the accounts the events are always personal in nature: identifica-
tion with the team of the neighbouring country was complete. The players
of the Hungarian national team were/are not only known by the majority,
but considered as their own players. The ethnic Hungarian rooters rooted
for the Hungarian teams, and felt sorrow when they were unsuccessful.
One of the frames of interpretation of the narratives is constituted by the
sports history of the successes and failures of the Hungarian football. In
this reading the Golden Team and its captain, Ferenc Puskás, playing in
the finals of the 1954 World Cup, symbolised the entire Hungarian nation.
The name of Puskás often appeared, showing that the “Öcsi” of the nation
was a unifying force across borders and a substantial element of Hungarian
self-identification. Puskás’ success was seen by the speakers as their own
success, too, but he was above all the hero of all the Hungarians living in
the Carpathian Basin. Beside Puskás, the Hungarian football and nation,
into which Transylvanian Hungarians also included themselves, was repre-
sented by football players Flórián Albert, Zoltán Varga and Tibor Nyilasi.
Not only the players, but also club teams meant national-ethnic identifica-
tion points. Thus the most “incorrigible” and nationalist Hungarian root-
ers did not only follow the important world competitions on the mountains,
but also some of the matches of the Hungarian premier league. The masses
were obviously attracted mostly by the national team; its qualifying
matches were possibly never missed by the rooters in Cluj or Alba Iulia.
114 L. PÉTER
The narratives systematically include matches like the El Salvador–Hungary

(1-10) in 1982, the Soviet Union–Hungary (6-0) in 1986 as markers of
success and failure.
The fact that when in 1981, the Romanian and Hungarian national
teams played in the same qualifying group, and their meeting was also
transmitted by the Romanian Television, many Transylvanian Hungarians
still went up to the mountains (in Cluj climbing the Lomb hill, and those
from the Szeklerland travelling to Huedin by car), in order to follow the
game with Hungarian language sports commentary can also be inter-
preted in a Romanian–Hungarian interethnic context. The Romanian
national team—which also included an ethnic Hungarian player, Zoltán
Krisán, born in Oradea—in their eyes also symbolised in a way the oppres-
sive dictatorship, albeit there were usually many beloved minority players
in the national team (e.g. Helmuth Duckadam, László Bölöni, Tibor
Selymesi, and Miodrag Belodedici later on). According to the narrations,
for the ethnic Hungarian rooters the fact that the Hungarian national
team made it to the World Cup in Spain, unlike the Romanian team, then
again in 1986 to Mexico, was also an identity-strengthening element.
These were sources for joy and national pride, and some “consolation” in
hard economic and social conditions.
The other aspect of the ethnic dimension appeared on the language
level. The manners of rooting and the verbal cheering for the Hungarian
team differed in function of the environment of the match watching and
the ethnic composition of the audience. In the Szeklerland, where
Hungarians represented a majority, the expression of ethnic identity
mostly occurred explicitly and in an extrovert manner. Hungarian speech,
Hungarian cheering, the compelling force of the stands all underlined the
ethnic features. In this free context Hungarian language was the norm, the
legitimate tongue, as opposed to the official situation of everyday life. This
was from the outset a manifestation of an ethnic nature, which gained a
meaning and fulfilled an identity-strengthening role in the counter-
language medium. The collateral activities and the collective manifesta-
tions also included emphatic ethnic elements. The common singing of folk
songs, sometimes forbidden marching songs, the listening to the national
anthem before the official games were substantial components of the
event. The spontaneous “Stephen, the King” happening on the Pângărat ̦i-
Peak was practically an ethnic enunciation. Hinting at Hungarian colours,
occasionally the using of the flag (as I have shown in the Izvorul Crișului
case) were explicitly ethnic manifestations. It can be concluded from the
interviews that football gatherings were not only community events, but
rather the spaces of living and manifesting ethnic identity.
The other aspect of the ethnic dimension was personal. In an intereth-
nic surrounding the Hungarian rooters lived their Hungarian-ness indi-
vidually and introverted. In a Cluj context the fact that the viewers,
irrespective of their ethnic backgrounds, watched the same transmission of
the MTV and listened to the Hungarian language commentary, got an
ethnic connotation. Here in the relationship between the TVR and the
MTV, and between Romania and Hungary, many of the members of the
Hungarian minority felt a “moral victory”, which generated in them a
feeling of cultural superiority. By the broadcast coming from the economi-
cally better-off neighbouring country all the spectators could follow the
matches, while nothing was transmitted by the TVR. The national anthem
played according to the protocol before the official matches—which they
did not even have to sing, only listen to—gave an individual enforcement
and satisfaction to the ethnic Hungarian viewers. It was not by chance that
in the case of the marketed version of football gathering in the Făget, the
money collecting host was eager to turn on the television only in the
moment when the match effectively began, in order to avoid moments
that could have been sensitive and liable to prosecution for the regime,
and which purported financial risks for himself. Manifestations such as the
collective celebration on the streets of Feleacu in 1982 and the cheering of
“Ria-Ria-Hungária” were rather the exception than the norm here—this
was restricted to the free counter-public sphere, where it manifested itself
freely, albeit in a changing form.
The consumption of forbidden football also served the creation of
closer and stronger connections between the Hungarian communities in
Inner-Transylvania. It created an organic relationship between the rooters
arriving from the Szeklerland to the area of Cluj and the neighbouring
receiving localities families got and stayed in touch. These relationships
resulted in mutual friendships. They strengthened the cohesion of the
Transylvanian community.
The importance of the ethnic dimension is well shown by the example
of counter-rooting and the spontaneous reaction described in the Bălan
case study. Yet, in my opinion the following case connected to the Alba
Iulia field, is quite expressive. A part of the ethnic Hungarian rooters from
here watched the 1986 failure of the Hungarian team in Mexico from the
closely located Drâmbar-Peak. They had known that place earlier, because
before the 1948 nationalisation the area had been the property of the
116 L. PÉTER
Roman Catholic Church. After the change of the political system in

Romania the church could have officially claimed back its property within
the restitution process, as it had been unlawfully confiscated by the com-
munist regime, yet it did not. When they prepared the list of the lands to
be claimed back, they left this grassland out, as “it had been cursed”. That
was the place where the failed match with the Soviet Union was watched
in 1986…
I consider it important to underline that the expression and living of
ethnic identity mentioned in the narrations was not oriented against root-
ers or citizens with a Romanian ethnic background, rather against the
constraints of the regime. Thus it is connected to the resistance and pro-
test features in several points.
3. Resistance and protest. The phenomenon was a priori problematic,
because it was organised on a volunteer basis and it became a mass event,
where matches broadcast by foreign TV channels were watched, and
what is more, it took place in the public space. Match-watching was not
explicitly forbidden by law, yet its legal status was contradictory. For a
totalitarian system rule of law is not binding anyway as there is nothing
to impede the tyranny of the regime. In dictatorships it is always ques-
tionable whether anything not compulsory is allowed or not. Then,
whereas the lack of transmissions was not defined as social problems for
the power, the rooters regarded it as a social problem, which needs a
solution. Approaching the issue from the side of the theory of social
problems (Bassis et al. 1982), there was a radical contradiction between
the interpretations of the regime and the population. The objective state
of affairs—lacking transmissions—was an undesirable situation that
needed a solution in the subjective perception of the population con-
trasting with the interpretation of the political power. Therefore, they
became mobilised, voluntarily organised themselves, and found that
solution. The resulting social situation can be regarded as resistance:
autonomous, voluntary co-operation, the evolution of activities officially
not prescribed, community solutions for problems regarded as social
ones: all these were signs of disobedience in the eyes of the regime. This
generated tensions materialised in supervision by the authority, surveil-
lances, secret service reports, summoning, the drawing of participant
profiles and denouncements.
The explicit manifestations at the scenes meant further forms of resis-
tance. The jokes told to the detriment of the system, the cynical signifiers
of the dictatorial couple such as “Telenicu” (as only Ceaușescu could be

seen on the television and Nicu was short for Nicolae), Ceașca (Teacup),
Lena, Curva (the Whore), and Csau all denoted dissatisfaction. Talking
about shortages, the discussions emerging on economic issues were
implicit manifestations of criticism towards the system. These were regu-
larly thematised in the half-time breaks in connection with the advertise-
ments broadcasts. These had a greatly ironic effect upon the spectators,
spending their lives in the conditions of a shortage economy, as they high-
lighted the enormous differences in living standards between them and
the people living their lives in the luckier part of the world. Especially as it
was about other socialist countries! The issue of the general situation of
economy resulted in comparing the state of affairs in Romania, Moldavia,
Hungary and Yugoslavia. Supplies of fuel, food, and electricity were
emphasised topics giving occasion for strong comments and self-ironical
jokes (haz de necaz).
The protest character of the events was realised on a high level by
the organisers and those with more schooling, but it is a recurring ele-
ment of the narratives, an unambiguous source of great pride, that in
spite of the will and the “forbiddance” of the system, they could still
watch the matches, making use of the strength of the community. The
common discursive frame of the narratives is formed by the community
and the free nature of the events. The used terms and attributes like
“betyár/haiduc” (social bandit), “evadare” (escape) “emulatie” (step-
ping out), “libertate” (freedom), “focis népvándorlás” (football migra-
tion), and “Woodstock fotbalistic” (football Woodstock) were all
epithets of resistance. In May 1986, rooters stepped out into the clas-
sical, urban public space, too. After the European Champion Clubs’
Cup victory of the Steaua the team was awaited at the Otopeni Airport
by a spontaneous mass of 30,000 people, an unexpected football hap-
piness riot. The regime was completely bewildered, as such a huge
crowd of people had never gathered together in an open space without
the will of the power. It arose that the gathering of the rooters should
be dispersed by force, but eventually they gave up the idea. The press
of the time fell silent of the event, official photographs were only taken
about the players returning home, and the television only showed the
returning football players while the noise made by the rooters was
removed.
118 L. PÉTER
The “Denseness” of the Phenomenon

The question arises what made the phenomenon become a mass one? Why
was it attractive? During my research I haven’t met anyone without some-
one partaking in it among his/her relatives or acquaintances! The forbid-
den matches had quite a strong appeal. The people wanted to watch the
matches and recognised and experienced its magic. I think that the success
of football gatherings resides in the fact that participants could forge sev-
eral relevant activities into a single social situation, for their own benefit,
successfully connecting together the previously mentioned three dimen-
sions. In other words, alongside the watching of matches in the middle of
nature other activities could also be performed, which were fragmented
and independent of one another in everyday life. In the context of the
gathering the collateral dimensions appeared in an increased denseness
and reinforced each other, synergy being developed among them, so the
yield of the event was great. The matches, as the common denominator of
the events, integrated a system of actions, in which literally everyone could
find the relevant activity, which guaranteed a community experience for
him. In the otherwise eventless everyday life the possibilities of leisure
time activities were also straitened. The excursions appearing in the narra-
tives (going out to nature in the company of friends and relatives), family
and friendly visits and common meals (at home, in a private setting),
drinking (at home, in the pub), playing cards (at home, in the pub), root-
ing (in the stadium, on the ice hockey rink), playing sports (on the sports
field) were the most characteristic.
There had not been many occasions to manifest ethnic identity, either.
In plain English, beside family and interpersonal communication, legiti-
mate conversations could be carried out in the church (for the believers),
partly in school (for school children), or on the sports field during root-
ing. Theatres or meetings with authors were available only for a narrow
group of people. The spaces of resistance were even narrower. The system
could be criticised at home, in a private family environment, where widely
spread joke-telling could also occur, or perhaps sometimes in the pub. The
consumption of forbidden media contents copied on videotapes became
widespread in the second half of the eighties, but the movies that could be
seen—the action movies of Stallone, Van Damme, Norris and others—and
passed from hand to hand, were hardly subversive.
Football gatherings in nature successfully mixed all of these, and made
them denser: they were occasions with good possibility to connect these
activities into the same social situation. This explains why among the root-
ers there were regularly people for whom football was not attractive, but
the community experience, one of the three dimensions, and the “dense
event” itself, were. The symbiosis of humans and nature and the concomi-
tant occurrence of the activities created the success and the striking social
power of forbidden football consumption. All these together gave birth to
a complex force field or social field (Bourdieu 1978), in which the differ-
ent variations of forbidden football consumption were the resultants of the
figurations and the dynamics (Elias 1994) between the institutions and the
professional networks.
Forbidden football consumption functioned in the force field of three
professional networks. I call the first group the alternative network of
expertise. Among its members there was a high level and finely tuned divi-
sion of labour. We find the conceivers of the events among them, the
“project initiators”: they are teachers, trainers, doctors, agricultural engi-
neers, clergymen and sportsmen. Many of these people became politicians
and entrepreneurs after the change of the political system in Romania.
They had been the locomotives of the phenomenon; they legitimised the
practice of forbidden football in front of the audience. As the owners of
technical knowledge, technical professionals (engineers, TV mechanics,
radio amateurs) made the local versions of the match-watching possible,
intermediating between the “project initiators” and those manufacturing
the technical equipment (factory technical experts, technicians, skilled
labourers). A whole series of machinery park administrators, chauffeurs,
transporters, filling station attendants, and organisers contributed on the
logistic line, to make match consumption possible. Within this volunteer-
based, alternative network of expertise men were playing the key roles,
while women fulfilled secondary or complementary tasks, being present
sometimes but only marginally, performing the duties of cooks (packing
food), tending (offering food, cakes on the mountain), loving, nursing (in
cases of injury), communicating (they were better in dealing with the
police), and taking care of the children.
Among the members of the legitimate counter-network of expertise I
found policemen in uniforms, party activists and occasionally the direct
supervisor of the rooter at his/her working place. The illegitimate counter-
network of expertise included informers, secret service officers and their
collaborators, who played a role in preventing the occurrence of football
gatherings, or applying punishments. Between the two networks gravi-
tated the experts in a contradictory position, who occasionally served the
120 L. PÉTER
rooters, or the regime. Such expert were, for example, the employee of the
TV amplifying and relaying station, who either chases the rooters away
(sometimes in Deva), or occasionally lets the imploring rooters in (Cluj),
the indulgent road police officer or the rooting, respectively penalising
local party secretary.
The phenomenon unfolded along the oppositions, struggles and com-
petitions among these complicated networks of expertise, in which the
symbolic distinctions between the roles were significant. The power fre-
quently bid its time in this fight, only stepped up against the participants
individually, was squeezed out of the free, alternative social space invented
by the football gatherers, without wanting or perhaps even being able to
colonise it.
References
Barth, F. (1969). Ethnic groups and boundaries. The social organization of culture
difference. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget Verlag.
Bassis, M. S., Gelles, R. J., & Levine, A. (1982). Social problems. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.
Boia, L. (2012). De ce este România altfel? Bucharest: Humanitas.
Bourdieu, P. (1978). A társadalmi egyenlőtlenségek újratermelődése. Budapest:
Gondolat Könyvkiadó.
Câmpeanu, P. (1979). Oamenii si televiziunea. Bucharest: Meridiane.
Durkhéim, É. (1997). The division of labor in society. New York: Free Press.
Elias, N. (1994). The civilizing process. Oxford: Blackwell.
Eriksen, T. H. (1993). Ethnicity and nationalism. Anthropological perspectives.
London and Boulder: Pluto Press.
Gross, P. (1999). Colosul cu picioarele de lut. Aspectele presei post-comuniste. Iași:
Polirom.
Horváth, I. (2006). Kisebbségszociológia. Alapfogalmak és kritikai perspektívák.
Cluj: Cluj Univeristy Press.
Massino, J. (2012). From black caviar to blackouts: Gender, consumption, and
lifestyle in Ceaușescu’s Romania. In P. Bren & M. Neuburger (Eds.),
Communism unwrapped. Consumption in cold war Eastern Europe
(pp. 226–254). New York: Oxford University Press.
Mattelart, T. (1999). Transboundary flows of western entertainment across the
iron curtain. Journal of International Communication, 6(2), 106–121.
Mickiewicz, E. P. (1988). Split signals: Television and politics in the Soviet Union.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Mustat ̦ă, D. (2013). Television in the age of (post)communism. Popular television
in Eastern Europe during and since socialism. In T. Havens, A. Imre, &
K. Lustyik (Eds.), Popular television in Eastern Europe during and since social-
ism (pp. 47–63). London and New York: Routledge.
Neculau, A. (Ed.). (2004). Viat ̦a cotidiană in comunism. Iași: Polirom.
Novák, C. Z. (2016). A Ceauşescu-korszak magyarságpolitikája 1965–1989. Pro
Minoritate, 1, 39–60.
Pilkington, H. (1994). Russia’s youth and its culture: A nation’s constructors and
constructed. London and New York: Routledge.
Szekfii, A. (1989). Intruders welcome? The beginnings of satellite TV in Hungary.
European Journal of Communication, 4(2), 161–171.
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nist. Sfera Politicii, 21(1), 108.
CHAPTER 7
Lessons and Conclusions
Abstract The closing chapter contains the conclusions. I argue that the
consumption of forbidden football in the eighties in Romania illustrates
the power of football, and its role of social mobilisation. According to the
findings the oppressive regime made a mistake when it decided to remove
world competitions from the programme of the TVR and broadcast pro-
grammes of political propaganda instead, cultivating the cult of personal-
ity. Football gatherings did not only become widespread: they created
resistant, voluntarily organised alternative social spaces, from where the
state was driven out. After the rapid spreading of the consumption of for-
bidden football in Romania, the power was unable to control the phe-
nomenon. The several decades of the functioning of the football gatherings
disproves the atomised character of Romanian society and highlights the
liberating and democratising effects of the information broadcast by for-
eign media.
Keywords Football gatherings • Political power • Information control •

Interstitial social space • Resistance
Quite a few years have passed since the narrated stories took place. In
December 1989 Romania rid itself of a dynastic regime bearing national-
communist marks and turned towards the path of liberal democracy and a

124 L. PÉTER
capitalist market economy. Although it is among the laggards in the EU

with respect to incomes and living standards, significant changes have
taken place in the past 28 years. A generation has grown up that has had
no direct connection with the previous regime, takes Internet access and
HD television for granted, follows live any kind of sports events, no matter
where and from, is cosmopolitan, and speaks foreign languages. They see
freedom as a natural thing. Hopefully this will never change; football will
never be a forbidden fruit again!
The question arises as to what kind of lessons can be learnt from the
ethnography of football gatherings. In my opinion this book has illus-
trated that the stories do have relevant conclusions. On the one hand it
shows the penetrating force of football, how great its social importance,
role and mobilising power are: under the conditions of a totalitarian sys-
tem, thumbing their noses at possible negative consequences, people mas-
sively solved “the problem of forbidden football”. They made sacrifices for
the sake of football consumption. Then they did not only sort it out,
but—spontaneously—created an alternative social space from where the
state was driven out without being able to get a firm stand. At gatherings
the rooters felt free, acquired community experience, discussed sensitive
issues and what is even more important, shaped valid norms and rules
autonomously. According to the unanimous narration of the interviewees,
the authority of the oppressing power did not prevail here; it was not able
to enforce its norms. During match-watching in nature the order of things
was radically different from the real world formed by the oppressive
regime.
Furthermore, it also points out that the degree of social atomisation
always characteristic of hard-line dictatorships was lower than we thought.
Apparently, people still had the hidden energy that made it possible to step
up for a well-defined goal all over Inner-Transylvania, independently from
one another, but in similar versions and as a community, to make match-
watching possible. This means that even in societies placed under a strong
pressure exercised by the power (loud propaganda, strong political police,
wide-scale system of informers, shortage of food, cold) can have hidden
reserves of resources that can generate reactions of massive resistance in
connection with an unexpected event or decision. In our case this trigger
event was a political decision thought to be inoffensive: the lack of sports
transmissions. Finally, the story of forbidden football calls our attention to
what danger free information can impose on closed, non-democratic, illib-
eral systems.
LESSONS AND CONCLUSIONS 125
The Power of Football

The Romanian dictatorial couple and their immediate servants could cer-
tainly not imagine that the “prohibition” of major competitions from the
screens would prove to be a serious mistake. This is also indicative to the
degree the power had broken away from reality, and the real needs of the
people. They devalued or underestimated the social and mobilising force
of sports—more precisely, of football. Football is one of the most deeply
embedded popular cultural products in modern societies (Giulianotti
2004), and disregarding it was not a wise political decision. The elite of
Greater Romania that came into being after 1920 had seen its role in the
cultural policy of nation-building (Livezeanu 1995), and hoped for a long
time that the national team could become the symbolic representation of
the long craved-for unity of the diverse country. After 1945, the emerged
Stalinist regime liquidated or remodelled earlier workers’ and civic sports
clubs (Péter 2014); following the Soviet model, the two bastions of the
communist power, the ministries of interior and of defence established the
Dinamo and the Steaua sports clubs in 1947 and 1948 respectively.
Football was planned to have a special role in the spreading of the new
ideology (Anghelescu and Cristea 2009). The young Ceaușescu himself,
still a member of the communist youth organisation (UTC) took care of
the affairs of the Steaua (following this tradition, his elder son Valentin
patronised Steaua in the eighties). In the sixties and the seventies, televi-
sion “accustomed” people to football. As everywhere, it became the
much-liked sports and main leisure time activity of the working class in
Romania, whilst the numerical proportion of the workers kept constantly
increasing. There were many more people going out to the stadiums and
watching football matches on TV than people consuming high culture.
The political leadership left the antecedents out of consideration and
totally underestimated the social role of football. They failed to under-
stand how deeply football was embedded in the fabric of society; what
strong feelings, emotions, and impulses were attached to it. They disre-
garded the fact that football was an integrating force connecting the peo-
ple, producing community solidarity, and that it was a permanent subject
of discussions that softened social inequalities. Although the common-
place saying, “everyone is an expert in football and politics” was also true
for Romania; apparently it was exactly “the cleverest politician”, the
“Genius of the Carpathians” that failed to be an expert. The mass reaction
after the discontinuing of the transmissions was unexpected for the regime.
126 L. PÉTER
In my view one of the most important conclusions point to the striking

social role of football, even in a despotic totalitarian system presenting the
signs of Sultanism (Nelson 1992). The resulting situation undoubtedly
significantly contributed to the decrease of the power’s legitimacy and the
more rapid erosion of the system.
Football Consumption Creates Free Social Space

As I have already mentioned, the state was squeezed out from the scenes
of football gatherings; more precisely, it never could enter there, failing to
take control. The rules valid here were not shaped by the power, but rather
by the general agreement of the volunteer participants. In spite of the
obvious presence of informers, the phenomenon was not liquidated,
although they did have detailed information about the events and the
participants.
Football lovers created a social space organised by the community,
which was formed for their own purposes. The genesis of this alternative
social space was due to the shortages, the media void, the eventless,
routine-like everyday life, and the changes in the eighties. If I wanted to
grasp the specific features of the alternative social space by the notion sys-
tem of the Chicago School and urban ecology, I would say that from the
point of view of the state it was an uncontrolled and “disorganised” space;
a “gap” appearing in the social system, a novel habitat (Thrasher 1927). It
was certainly disorganised; that is, uncontrolled from the perspective of
the regime. From the point of view of the rooters it was a freely organised
and community social space. The habitat of the match watchers simultane-
ously denotes the geographic location of the occurrence of the phenom-
enon (mountains and hills), as well as its dynamic and self-organising
feature, where autonomous community norms prevailed. Thrasher
remarks in the case of the gangs representing a problem from the perspec-
tive of dominant culture, that in changing societies uncontrolled social
spaces are formed, which are filled by the actors according to their own
rules. The emphasis falls on the life-organising practices and features, and
the mechanisms generating a specific existence of the transitionary and
interstitial world beyond dominant social institutions. In Thrasher’s sense
the habitat is a social space that is radically different from the existing
dominant cultural and political patterns: an interstice, a tear on the fabric
of society. Areas of cleft and rupture in the official social organisation,
where particular organisational patterns predominate because of

inadequate social control. In his view, the activities of the gangs are defined
by the situation complex (1927: 105); namely, the joint effects of two
groups of factors. On the one hand the compliance of the members with
changed life conditions, on the other the spatial and social structure of the
gangland (the structure of the habitation and the sociocultural character-
istics of the individuals).
Social change had a defining role in the evolution of football gatherings
(economic crisis, media void, lack of transmissions). The rooters con-
formed, and the participants with heterogeneous social origin and their
actions gave the situation complex that resulted in a new social space: in
the mountains and with the norms valid there. The state and the power
only gave the impetus in this equation; the match watchers (alike to the
gang-members in the poor neighbourhoods of Chicago) filled the “dis-
continuous”, in fact parallel social space that they had created. The com-
parison with the gangs also appeared in reality as the Romanian power
attempted to discredit the phenomenon by calling the young participants
“hooligans” (huligani), “csöves” (Hungarian youth subculture in the sev-
enties and eighties, a local equivalent of punks or bums, ciuviși), “bad
hats” (netrebnici), and stigmatising them as deviants. Thus, my other con-
clusion is that forbidden football created an alternative, community organ-
ised social space, from where the state was squeezed out from the outset.
Why could not the state plant its feet firmly in the newly developed
spaces? Why did it tolerate them, why did not the Securitate simply crush
the gatherings? There are only hypothetical answers to these questions.
Maybe it would have been risky, given their mass characters; maybe
because for lack of something better they saw it as a valve, through which
social tensions could come to the surface. Or, maybe, because the men of
the power were also interested in the non-transmitted matches, and they
watched them, too, although in completely different circumstances.
Because the agreements also worked here, only in this case there were the
people who forced the system to a tacit agreement and not the other way
round, as usually happened. Perhaps because world events were only
organised every second year, although the people also watched other
matches, and the number of the viewers kept increasing. But it also may be
that the regime would have simply been unable to liquidate a phenome-
non of this magnitude without serious conflicts. It could easily be that—
although it did not look like that from the inside—the system was much
128 L. PÉTER
more rotten and weaker than the population would have believed or
thought. And the phenomenon of forbidden football was a sign of this
illness, of the metastasis of the oppressing regime that the society just
failed to realise.
Community Co-Operation as the Refutation

of the Atomised State of Society
One of the central thoughts of professional literature about dictatorships

and totalitarian regimes (e.g. Arendt 1973) is that total power generates
mass men. The mass man is a distrustful, atomised individual, systemati-
cally bereaved of personality, self-reliance and unique features, isolated
from the others. He imperceptibly mingles with the faceless crowd, living
in complete subordination. In Romania, the system strived for the cre-
ation of this kind of man, people were deprived of their own time (Verdery
1996), the female body was successfully taken into possession (Kligman
1998), and the lack of food, the cold, the permanent queues indeed chased
people into a state of subordination. Fear (Liiceanu 2004) and insecurity
also greatly eroded trust among the individuals. However, in my opinion,
the widespread practice of football gatherings at the least impugns the
degree of atomisation so frequently mentioned by the specialist literature.
Apparently, Romanian society still possessed a certain “energy”—willing-
ness to co-operate, social and community capital potential, trust—that was
released by forbidden football, and alongside which isolated but active
spaces of resistance appeared, even if sometimes these only manifested
symbolically, in silence, periodically and in the middle of nature. It was
one of the manifestations of the accumulated social discontentment, which
did not present atomisation, but on the contrary, it showed close social
links, a strong fabric of society. By all means, it also played a socialisation
role for those dissatisfied with the regime. The gatherings had strong dele-
gitimizing consequences with regard to the autocratic political system. It
created an audience that could more courageously take to the streets in
December 1989 with these experiences behind them.
All this also permits glancing out. It can serve as a moral for any closed,
illiberal system: the social role and power of sports, especially of football
cannot be neglected. Neither can the power of information coming from
external sources, which the system of Ceaușescu could hardly confine.
Football and information together can become the extremely strong
bearers and effective tools of free thinking, free choice, resistance, eman-
cipation, and ultimately of liberty.
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Szekfii, A. (1989). Intruders welcome? The beginnings of satellite TV in Hungary.
European Journal of Communication, 4(2), 161–171.
Szirmai, V. (1988). Csinált városok. Budapest: Magvető.
insse.ro/shop/
Thrasher, F. M. (1927). The gang. A study of 1313 gangs in Chicago. Chicago:
Chicago University Press.
Țiu, I. (2013). Politici de ideologizare a mass-media în perioada regimului comu-
nist. Sfera Politicii, 21(1), 108.
Troc, G. (2003). A blokkok mögött, avagy a munkásnegyedek jelenlegi állapo-
táról. Web Szociológiai Folyóirat, 13(11), 9–14.
University Press.
Weed, M. (2008). Sport & tourism: A reader. New York: Routledge.
Willis, P. (1975). Learning to labor: How working class kids get working
class jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.
Index
A 65–68, 75, 76, 80, 87, 91, 107,

Agreement, 31, 54, 72, 74, 108, 126, 109, 110, 113–115, 120
127 CNSAS, 103
Alba Iulia, 13, 86, 87, 90, 91, 107, Community capital, 21, 26, 76, 89, 128
110, 113, 115 Complicity, 38
Conflict, 100, 110
Control, vi, 9, 25, 50, 87, 94, 97, 99,
B 103, 126, 127
Bălan, 13, 48, 51, 52, 54, 67, 107, Co-operation, 108, 116, 128
109–111, 115 Cult of personality, 100
Balla, Bálint, 9 Cultural Revolution, 100
Boia, Lucian, 5, 98, 100 Curiosity, 87, 94
Bulgaria, 101, 104
D
C Daciada, 25, 34, 51, 65
Ceaușescu, v, vi, 9, 57, 58, 79, 97, 98, Deletant, Dennis, 6, 100
100, 101, 117, 125, 128 Destabilisation, 95
Ciumani, 21–24, 26–28, 31, 32, 34, Deva, 13, 74, 86–88, 91, 107, 120
36, 38, 43, 68, 78, 79, 83, 87, Dissident, 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, 34, 44, 68,
89, 90, 107, 109, 112 73, 96, 103, 104
Cluj, v, vii, 2, 3, 6–8, 13, 14, 22, Dissident audience, 4, 44, 73, 103
26–28, 31, 33, 56, 62, 63, Dissident public, vi, 58, 91, 94, 104, 106

160 INDEX
E J
Elias, Norbert, 119 Jokes, 21, 36, 38, 43, 50, 79, 88, 116
Escape, vi, 10, 25, 40, 117
Ethnic identity, vi, 16, 22, 23, 44,
109–112, 114, 116, 118 K
Ethnographic research, 11, 15 Kligman, Gail, 25, 128
Exit, vi, 10 Kunta Kinte, 57, 110
Expert, 53, 120, 125
L
F Local community, 11, 22, 26, 76, 105,
Figurations, 26, 34, 119 112
Forbidden fruit, 96, 111, 124 Local identity, 112
Freedom, 25, 30, 37, 42, 79, 95, 98,
117, 124
Free time, 30, 52, 109 M
Masculinity, 36
Mattelart, Tristan, 95, 96, 98
G Mobility, 7, 49, 63, 95
Galda, 87, 89, 90, 112 Moldavia, 32, 33, 37, 39, 117
Geertz, Clifford, 11 Movement, 21–27, 34, 43, 44, 51, 87,
Giulianotti, Richard, 6, 125 109
Goldblatt, David, 65 Multi-sited, 11
Gross, Peter, 95, 98, 100, 102, Mustat ̦ă, Dana, 4, 8, 33, 92, 94,
103 98–100, 102–105
H N
Hungary, 4–7, 29, 35, 37, 38, National-communism, 5, 25
41, 42, 55, 66, 67, 71, National team, 3, 9, 27–29, 34, 35,
80, 82, 95, 96, 104, 114, 37, 41, 42, 55, 76, 113, 114, 125
115, 117 Network, 21, 26, 34, 48, 52, 108, 119
Nylund, David, 37
I
Ice-hockey, 22–27, 29, 34, 37, 41, 42, O
44, 112, 118 Organic solidarity, 111
Ighiu, 87, 90
Industrialization, 62, 86
Inner-Transylvania, 9–14, 32, 38, 62, P
63, 66, 94, 110, 115, 124 Peer group society, 77
Interstitial, 126 Planned economy, 48, 96
INDEX
161
Popular culture, 42, 95 T

Protest, vi, 10, 34, 42–44, 81, 109, Technical knowledge, 32, 58, 67, 107,
110, 116, 117 119
Tehnium, 53
Third place, 37
R Tismăneanu, Vladimir, 5
Radio Free Europe, 56, 103 Tourism, 28, 66, 67, 82
Resistance, vi, 9, 10, 16, 22, 26, 43, Transboundary, 95
79, 94, 103, 105, 106, 109, Transmission, 4, 6, 21, 33, 41, 87,
116–118, 124, 128 115
Rooters, 4–6, 25, 26, 34, 37, 39, 41, Transylvania, 3, 5, 6, 13, 14, 42, 56,
55, 56, 108, 111–117, 119, 120, 62, 86
124, 126, 127 Trust, 15, 21, 66, 105, 107,
Rooting, 3, 24, 25, 36, 41–43, 56, 128
110, 114, 115, 118, 120 TV
Bulgarian, 10, 79, 100, 105
Moldavian, 32, 33, 35, 39, 42, 52,
S 54, 55
Scarcity, 7, 30, 54, 99, 101 MTV, 5, 7, 8, 10, 27, 66–68, 70,
Securitate, 37, 56, 76, 82, 92, 101, 74, 80, 115
103, 104, 109, 127 RTV, 4, 53, 102, 111
Shortage, 9, 50, 76, 94, 101, 104, signal, 7, 32, 53, 54, 68, 69, 89, 91,
117, 124 95, 105, 108
Social capital, 105, 108 television, 3, 5, 29, 44, 78, 99, 102,
Socialisation, 23, 25, 27, 95, 102, 125
128 TVR, v, 6, 8, 28, 34, 35, 39, 51,
Socialist ethic, 104 67, 69, 75, 76, 91, 99, 101,
Social situation, 15, 36, 41, 105, 111, 115
116, 118, 119 TV set, 2, 20, 33, 35, 39, 42, 52,
Soft power, 95 54, 70, 71, 74, 77, 80, 90, 91,
Southern-Transylvania, v, 13, 14, 86, 99, 107, 111
87, 109, 112 Yugoslav, 10, 87, 91, 105
Soviet, 20, 25, 32, 33, 37, 41, 42,
55, 63, 96, 100, 104, 114, 116,
125 U
Stalinist, 5, 125 Urbanisation, 7, 48
Steaua, 3–6, 8, 117, 125
Strong ties, 66
Supporters, 23, 24, 69, 78, 80 V
Szeklerland, v, 13, 14, 22, 23, 25, Valentin Ceaușescu, 4, 125
28–30, 48, 67, 82, 87, 90, 109, Verdery, Katherine, 25, 128
114, 115 Voice of America, 103
162 INDEX
W World Cup, 21, 39, 113, 114

Willis, Paul, 49
Worker Culture, 49–51
Working class, 13, 50, 62, 65, 97, 125 Y
Workplace, 37, 50, 64, 66, 69, 74, 75, Yugoslavia, 76, 102, 104, 117
80, 83, 87, 109, 110

PETER, Laszlo - Forbidden Football in Ceausescu Romania

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GLOBAL CULTURE AND

More information about this series at

Global Culture and Sport Series

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017960426

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: Modern building window © saulgranda/Getty

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This book discusses the ethnographic description and the sociological

r­ eaching mass proportions, grew into a social institution of a penetrating

Cluj-Napoca, Romania László Péter

1 Introduction to the Ethnography and Research

2 Ciumani: The Sport Takes the Community

3 Bălan: Angry Men in The Night 47

4 Cluj: Big City Versions of the Football Gatherings 61

5 Southern-Transylvania—Further Faces of the Extended

6 The Social and Political Significance of Football

 Football Gatherings in Eastern-­Transylvania, Romania

Abstract The first, introductory, chapter identifies the central questions

Keywords Romania • Football • Football gathering • Propaganda •

© The Author(s) 2018 1

FC Steaua Plays Up in the Mountains—1987

evening matches. The usual TV programme had already been narrowed

i­ts effects were felt on people’s everyday lives. Part of the population in

­ revention of this feeling of ownership, and bizarrely becomes an anti-

Championship organised in Spain was not broadcast by state television.

and dissident publics formed on the occasions of the common events on

Epistemological and Methodological Aspects

The phenomenon was characteristic over a large area, in various loca-

Transylvania, one of the three historical regions of Romania, consists

s­ eparated according to age: middle-aged people, who were in their teens

The Organization of the Book

Chapters 2–5 present relevant case studies. I am focusing on the natural

Giulianotti, R. (2004). Football. A sociology of the global game. Cambridge: Polity

Ciumani: The Sport Takes the Community

Abstract The second chapter presents the natural history of football

© The Author(s) 2018 19

concludes that the examined phenomenon grew into a social institution of

Keywords Szeklerland • Sport movement • Community capital • Trust

The population is homogeneous from an ethnic and religious perspective:

Sports Movement Producing Community Capital

Most of my interviewees belong to this layer. The “infusion of compe-

The activities organised around ice hockey gradually pointed beyond

The Daciada was given another meaning by those rooting in Hungarian,

The Natural History of Football Gatherings

t­ echnical conditions. In what comes, I shall describe these stages, present-

of the phenomenon appeared here for many of the students studying in

scarce resource only but a few possessed. Romanian car manufacturing

According to the accounts, policemen frequently picked on drivers, sub-

eastern corridor to catch the signal from Soviet-Moldavia. He built sev-

Hungarian commentary. The TVR only broadcast the qualifying matches

a photograph taken at the time). Such conditions could not be ensured on

curious to follow the performance of the Hungarian national team with

Therefore there… people often remembered, it practically frequently surfaced in

The entire phenomenon had an undeniably accented ethnic connota-

The musical produced in 1983 became part of popular culture. It was

In this way, the practice of football gatherings, in effect, became an

includes the message that match watching was lived by everybody as an

Bălan: Angry Men in The Night

Keywords Bălan • Mono-industrial town • Inter-ethnic relations •

© The Author(s) 2018 47

The Research Location

machines and in the defence industry (Hunya et al. 1990). Exploitation

The Patterns of Local Worker Culture

r eaching mass proportions, grew into a social institution of a penetrating

Cluj-Napoca, Romania László Péter

1 Introduction to the Ethnography and Research

2 Ciumani: The Sport Takes the Community

3 Bălan: Angry Men in The Night 47

4 Cluj: Big City Versions of the Football Gatherings 61

5 Southern-Transylvania—Further Faces of the Extended

6 The Social and Political Significance of Football

Football Gatherings in Eastern-Transylvania, Romania

its effects were felt on people’s everyday lives. Part of the population in

revention of this feeling of ownership, and bizarrely becomes an anti-

s eparated according to age: middle-aged people, who were in their teens

t echnical conditions. In what comes, I shall describe these stages, present-

opulation could be oriented towards issues non-political in nature

rogramme policy, by 1980–1981 this state of affairs changed completely.