'Tres veces campeones del mundo': Globality, Modernity and National Identity in Uruguayan Football (1924-1930)

This project explores the role of football during a crucial period of transformation in Uruguayan society in the early twentieth century. Using the sport to probe questions of modernity, globalisation, mass culture and identity at a vital moment in the forging of the Uruguayan nation-state, I explore a triptych of competitions in the development of football: the 1924 and 1928 Olympic Football Tournaments, and the inaugural FIFA World Cup, held in Montevideo in 1930. I argue that Uruguay found in these tournaments a unique opportunity to positively brand itself to a European sporting public which had previously been virtually unaware of its existence, and project itself as a ‘small, model country’ in the words of two-time President José Batlle y Ordóñez. At home, meanwhile, a combination of sporting success, the powerful iconography of the national team and Uruguay’s unique footballing style was mobilised as part of a broader array of efforts to construct a coherent and confident sense of national identity in a country which had been mired in civil war up to the turn of the century. The 1920s represent a tectonic shift in the structure of international football, as the sport’s commercial and media value swelled, and its international reach expanded. Uruguay was at the heart of many of these changes, but has been lamentably overlooked in most popular and academic histories of football. I thus also aim to demonstrate that while football was essential to the invention of modern Uruguay, Uruguay in turn was central to the sport’s emergence as the hyperglobal cultural object it is today.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Huddleston, William

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Conde, Maite
• Young, Christopher

• Uruguay
• Latin America
• Football
• Spanish
• Sport
• Early 20th Century

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/067c3eaf-c4ac-4bfe-84dc-90e874365615/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.119278

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/385810