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People learn in manifold ways in football clubs. This article illustrates this by examining the manager-licensing system of the German Football Association and initiatives aimed at strengthening the role of volunteers in clubs through special qualification strategies. This article supplements a retrospective text which shows that clubs are an important place of learning and the roots of adult education lie in the domain of clubs.

This article focuses on the example of amateur football to explore the connection between institutional educational socialisation, athletic prowess and habitual educational processes. Involvement in upper-level secondary educational requirements helps create a personality structure which generally speaking is marked by a positive attitude towards performance and which creates a positive linkage between the personal skills acquired and recognition afforded in the educational process in specific fields such as football and personal identity and is able to transform these into general personal skills. Education and football form a constructive relationship.

This article reflects how preparation time for the 2006 World Cup in Germany was packed with daunting learning tasks and learning expectation and education metaphors. A distinction is made between two levels: first of all, with respect to the population at large, the expectation of being a model host inculcating the ideals of friendliness towards foreign nationals and a service mentality. Daunting learning and educational tasks associated with the narrower field of the national football team, in particular between the national team manager and the German Football Association, are explored.

Have the European football competitions fostered a European consciousness and European identity? There are unmistakable parallels between the political and economic integration of Europe and the history of European football competitions, but these do not suffice to answer this question in the affirmative. In the run-up to the World Cup, whose slogan is ”A Time to Make Friends”, the author discusses integration issues emanating from the naturalisation tests of Federal German Länder from an educational-policy standpoint.

This article adopts the PISA study’s staged competence model in the area of football. The authors specify five levels of competency in football literacy to serve as the basis for an adult education curriculum. The motivation for the study is the staging of the World Cup in a country which was the loser in the PISA study: Germany. The general public should be knowledgeable at least when it comes to football.

This article presents the programme ”Football for development”, which like the other ASA programmes of InWEnt allows young adults to take part in development policy educational work in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Southeast Europe for three months. The projects establish a regional educational and cultural programme using people’s love of football. At the same time, the participants from Germany develop an appreciation for experience from the ”South”, helping dispel the traditional image of a transfer of know-how from the North to the South.

This article discusses the Federal German ”Orientation course” and different prototypes for ”naturalisation tests” in the German Länder in the context of comparative integration policy. Integration courses and naturalisation tests have at the same time become a policy tool for promoting integration in a targeted manner in various countries which attract immigration. Following a presentation of the context and the presentation of instruction material in the orientation courses, the authors interpret German development in the European context: under the aegis of the ministries of the interior, the courses under scrutiny do not constitute a basis for participatory or emancipative learning and educational efforts, instead turning into a ”soft weapon” in traditional immigration policy, which is geared towards exclusion and surveillance.