FREE (Football Research in an Enlarged Europe) is a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project which seeks to understand the impact of the most popular and most widely shared of all expressions of popular culture, football, on identity dynamics, perception patterns and cultural change in Europe. The project seeks to explore an apparently non-political, but fully existing sub-cultural European public space of communication: the European football scene in the largest sense.

FREE brings together researchers from nine universities in eight different European states and from a range of scholarly disciplines (including anthropology, history, international relations, political science, sociology). In a truly interdisciplinary perspective, FREE adopts different approaches to this European public space: