Umberto Eco and Football

Umberto Eco was an Italian professor of semiotics versed in medieval philosophy and linguistics. As a public intellectual, he was equally at ease writing fiction, contributing mass media journalism and reading the practices of everyday life. Football for him is a metaphor, a motif and a vehicle for interpreting the nuances and excesses of our human fascination with ideals-ideals that are mobilized by culture into obsessions with sports celebrities. For Eco the football fan and Sherlock Holmes of semiotics, the sport blurs the boundaries between 'low' and 'high' cultures. Football is more than a game-it is a sign system that codes experience and gives it meaning on a number of levels. It allows the spectator to read life with the help of the media apparatuses that direct and control our viewing experiences. Umberto Eco and Football engages with Eco the cultural critic and semiotician as he meanders through the signs of culture with a keen and witty eye for the forgotten details of life's great text, its serendipities, its misreadings.