Football and Film: Comrade President – Center-Forward

The paper is the first in the planned series of texts on football in films and TV programmes in Yugoslavia (Serbia and Croatia). The film Comrade President – Center-Forward (1960, directed by Žorž Skrigin), labelled as the genre of “film humoresque”, presents a ramifying and intertwined story about a small provincial town. The narrative is structured around a celebration of the agricultural cooperative and an important football match played by the local team. Through these two narrative lines the film speaks about the invention of traditions, modernization and industrialization, clothes, arts, popular music, and the elements of romantic comedy and the events surrounding the football match present the media through which the messages are conveyed about the phenomena in a small Serbian town and wider, in the society of the 1950s.