Neither Asia nor Europe: Israel, Managed Liminality, and International Football, 1954–1991

Between the 1950s and 1990s, Israeli football existed in sustained institutional limbo—expelled from the Asian Football Confederation yet repeatedly denied Union of European Football Associations entry. International sports federations sustained this prolonged uncertainty through procedural delay and improvised compromise rather than principled resolution. Managed liminality, a condition of institutional in-betweenness produced by strategic deferral of politically contentious decisions, shaped Israeli debates over national belonging and regional orientation. Cold War-era sports governance prioritized organizational cohesion over definitive action, transforming political conflict into administrative drift. Israel’s two-decade search for continental affiliation reveals how postwar institutions negotiated the boundaries of international inclusion through sustained ambiguity rather than fixed geography or formal rules.