"The brand St. Pauli FC is an identification mark. The totenkopf-t-shirt means that you share values with the club. Like me!" (Leni, social worker, Gemeinwesenarbeit (GWa) St. Pauli eV).

This presentation stems from an ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2023 in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg, Germany, where the local football club, St. Pauli FC, which competes in the 2. Bundesliga, is based.

In the project to which this fieldwork belongs, we examine how traces of formative intervention methods and interactions (bildung) become evident in private football organizations, and what significance this potential pedagogical work holds for the social and community anchoring of football clubs in the local neighborhoods. In this chapter, we are particularly interested in how St. Pauli, both as a district and a football club, leaves its mark on the people who inhabit the area and engage with the fan club or attend matches weekend after weekend. Here, we experience how the place is saturated with values that connote the local belonging of these individuals and become a form of formation that takes root in their bodies and consciousness, thus contributing to their corpus of understanding, their repertoires of action, and their way of being in the world. This is also why we approach our informants from a perspective of bildung when speaking with them.

This presentation seeks to unfold our analytical construct "Paulitics", understood as the seemingly underlying tone of left-leaning political values, constant lurking activism, apparent resistance to authority, and a stick-it-to-the-man attitude, which runs as a distinct community-building and highly diversity-bearing thread throughout the Altona/St. Pauli district in Hamburg. Paulitics is our own analytically constructed concept stemming from a theoretical foundation that understands social innovation as a collective purpose, which, through the reinforcement of social relations and a strong local community anchoring, creates less inequality and more social justice based on the unique history associated with the area (Moulaert, MacCallum & Hillier 2014, 31). Therefore, we understand Paulitics as a unifying collective approach to how the aforementioned social relations and local community anchoring act as a catalyst for the continuous development of communities and the significance of creating these communities for the residents of the local area and their opportunities to become, belong, and undergo formation through their interaction with the area's people, phenomena, ideas, things, and affairs (Rømer, 2019: 5; Tanggaard, 2021: 20, 23-24).

Through spontaneous, unstructured conversations, semi-structured interviews, and neighborhood walks with local social workers, social pedagogical workers, and employees in more formal positions within the football club, our research interest is primarily met by narratives and practices that all revolve around the immediate uniform values ​​of the neighborhood and the football club, as evidenced by the introductory quote in this introduction by Leni.

The project aim to explore social and leisure educational interventions through anthropological fieldwork with a focus on football communities and their special significance in a local community for both the individual young fan and the fan group. In the club, strong partnerships between private, civil and public actors are seen, and the research project is concerned with uncovering how the different groups can coexist with their focus on both social and economic value creation. We want to get closer to what participation opportunities are made available to young fans and how these opportunities can be seen as developing young people's bildung and participation in local communities. Through this, we hope to uncover the significance of the club and the neighborhood for the bildung of the fans and the ambiguities this entails. We claim that by understanding "Paulitics" as a phenomenon of bildung, we can better grasp how and, importantly, why the otherwise distinct yet ideological and sometimes fluctuating value sets symbolized by the environment and the club imprint themselves on the individuals who subscribe to such logics and doxa.

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