This thesis examines the nature of textual practice and translation within football club museums, aiming to gain a deeper understanding of how clubs construct their identities. Football’s huge popularity and integration into global and local cultures render it an important component of everyday life across the globe. Club museums therefore offer a rich seam for research as they represent the official portrayal of clubs’ self-image. While there is a strong body of scholarly research concerning museums’ social functions, and football clubs’ roles in community identities, research intersecting these two issues is relatively sparse. To address this research gap, the thesis examines a textual sample taken from six English and German club museums (Arsenal, Chelsea, Bayern Munich, Hamburg, St Pauli and Werder Bremen) – offering insight into the effect of different club ownership models in the two countries.

Due to the complexity of football’s embeddedness in local cultures, worldwide media networks and global commerce, ideas from a range of research fields are drawn together. The interdisciplinary theoretical framework includes input from cultural studies, heritage studies, sports history, language, and translation studies. Thematically these fields inform project understandings around fan behaviour and consumption practices, the cultural effects of media technology and global broadcasting, impacts of globalisation on local cultures, and how languages enact cultural exchange. After conducting fieldwork at the sample museums, a corpus of texts was created for the purposes of this project. Subsequently, detailed qualitative coding was undertaken, aimed at drawing out the social functions of the texts through pattern identification. Key thematic and textual aspects emerge – relating to club success, narrative cohesion, attitudes towards local supporters, social representation, and commercial outcomes. In particular, there are reflections of corporate museum output in the club museums’ practices – taking on a key role in expressing the clubs’ brand identities.