This session takes the 2015 theme “Contradictions: Envisioning European Futures” as an opportunity to rethink the study of sports by exploring football’s impact on everyday lives and dynamics of identity/alterity within Europe. Football is one of the most well-loved and most widely shared expressions of popular culture. It has been one of the most important focal points for identification in Europe and South America, and its importance is gradually increasing in the US. Football is intertwined with questions of politics, economy, governance, and social inequalities. But why does football have a social role that stretches way beyond the stadium? Thereby, the football phenomenon is not only perceived as being related to class relations and subculture, but at the same time as a symbolic domain that produces social identities at various levels. The “Vanity Fair of European Football” thus constitutes an ideal laboratory for the social scientist, where performances, representations, and governance assist in the “doing” of football subjectivities in an Enlarged Europe.