Out of Bounds: Israel, European Football, and the Making of Continental Belonging

This article uses Israel’s prolonged effort to join the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) to examine how post-war Europe negotiated the institutional and symbolic boundaries of continental belonging. Drawing on FIFA archives, diplomatic correspondence, and Hebrew-language media, it traces how football became a stage where affiliation was both asserted and tested by those seeking entry and those empowered to grant it. UEFA’s rejection of Israel was framed in geographic terms, yet its eventual inclusion followed neither territorial logic nor legal reform, but a quiet politics of accommodation: informal gestures, deferred decisions and precedent-setting exceptions. Within Israel, the campaign served as a proxy for broader debates over the country’s geopolitical direction between Asia and Europe. By linking institutional deliberations to domestic discourse, the article argues that Europe’s post-war map took shape less through design than through the incremental negotiation of memory, strategy and symbolic positioning.