Paper short abstract:

Looking at the efforts of qualification of a football club as a common good, and examining how the concept of "value" is translated by actors, I show how value becomes imbued with affect and equivalent with "continuity" while at the same time "continuity" is also seen as the main source of capital.

Paper long abstract:

After the fall of communism, football clubs in Romania were privatized under the umbrella term of "professionalization" and started to be exchanged as commodities between different investors, many of them in search of recognition and public attention. After changing more than five investors, in less than 20 years, a notorious Romanian football club went bankrupt and was disaffiliated from the Romanian Football Federation (FRF) in 2010. Three years later, two new clubs emerged with the same name, same colours, both claiming the identity of the disaffiliated club. The controversy opened a black box, paving the way for a struggle between the two factions (i.e. networks) that divided an entire city. Investors, fans, media, lawyers, political actors, former players, patents, memories, transcriptions, intellectual property rights were enrolled and mobilized by each side, seeking to appropriate the old club's heritage and the football ethos of an urban community. In this process of recommoning, the two networks struggled to qualify (Callon 2013) their own club as a common good, but only one succeeded. By uncovering these efforts of qualification, and how the concept of "value" is translated by actors, I show how value becomes imbued with affect and equivalent with "continuity" while at the same time "continuity" is also seen as the main source of capital.