The Fascist World Cup: Mussolini's Football Dictatorship

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Hi everybody, welcome to the Rest is History. So we have a brand new mini-series for you to mark the FIFA World Cup, which is happening in the United States, Canada and Mexico. So what we're going to be doing is looking at some of the history, the deep history of the World Cup, and in particular the story of how dictatorships have used football,

and use the World Cup in particular to bolster support for their regimes. So we're looking at propaganda, we're looking at the personalities of the dictators, we're looking at the stories of the tournaments, and how they reflect public opinion,

and so on, some amazing stories.

In future episodes, we'll be looking at the great Brazilian team of the 1960s and early 1970s. That's the team of Palay and Jezinho and Jess and all these great players. The team that won in 1970s, people say the best team of all time. But this was a point when Brazil had a military dictatorship. So we'll be looking at how the military dictatorship of Brazil,

from 1964, uses football. We'll be looking at arguably the most controversial World Cup of all, which is 1978, Argentina. Some of you may remember we did a series about Eva Perron, and this is a factor of the sequel to that.

So we're looking at the military hunter of the late 70s, and how they used 78 World Cup and the team of Mario Campes, which won against the Dutch in the final. Big big story in Argentina. But we'll be kicking off with Italy,

and with Mussolini's fascist regime and the World Cup of 1934 and 1938. So it's a really, really great subject. Now, we love our listeners. So this is a special treat to mark the World Cup. Normally, this episode would be a bonus episode,

purely for members of the rest of this history club. But because it is the summer of sport,

we are making this first episode in the series,

with the brilliant Paul Rouse available to everybody.

“And if you want to hear the rest of the series,”

which I hope you will, you merely have to go, you know the drill, to the rest is history.com to sign up, and you'll get not only Paul's wisdom about Brazil in the 1960s and 70s, and Argentina in 1978, but you'll get all the usual things.

You'll get early access to series, you'll get bonus episodes, and an unbelievable range of supplementary benefits. So what's not to like? If you're not interested in football, don't worry. The history will very much be up a most.

A great subject needs a great guest. We have the greatest. We have the goat, as we like to call him. The self-styled Irish National Treasure. No.

A professor of history at University College Dublin, Paul Rouse. Paul, welcome back to the rest of this history. It's great to have you on. Thanks for being done. Because it's a football story,

we've chosen this lovely location. Thanks to Chelsea Football Club. We're here at Stanford Bridge overlooking the pitch, and with perfect timing, backable timing.

Chelsea have decided today to rip up the pitch. Until it's a building work on the stadium, Paul, you will be competing with reversing vehicles, diggers, bulldozers, general men in kind of yellow vests, but you're pumped for that, right?

I'm ready. You're ready, brilliant. So Paul, you were masquerading as a historian of Ireland in the last few series that we did. But this really is your home turf, isn't it?

Because you're a historian of sport. Is that right?

“That's what I spend most of my time teaching”

and I'm working on in University College, Dublin is the history of sport. Yeah, nationally in Ireland, but also internationally I teach a second-year module on the global history of sport.

Yeah. Across the last 250 years in particular. Lots to talk about here. And obviously it's very much in the news at the moment. The World Cup and politics.

Because the World Cup is being held in the US. Donald Trump has tried to take ownership of it. There've been a number of scandals. The Iran players have to move their base from the US to Mexico. Business with a referee not being allowed in this time.

Do you think this is something new?

Or an example of how football has always been politicised

and used by political leaders at one kind or another? The idea of soccer being politicised is nothing at all. New. What is new is the precise manner in which it's revealing itself in the case of America,

as opposed to the Trumpist focus on immigration and on the projection of America forced. And that is in collision with the expressed hashtag. If you look at Gianni and Fentino, the head of FIFA's Instagram page.

unites the world. And unfortunately you cannot say the football unites the world. If at the same time you're denying entry into your country of people and you're denying entry into your country of people. And you're denying entry into your country of people.

And you're denying entry into your country of people. You're denying entry into your country of people. You're denying entry into your country of people. You're denying entry into your country of people. You're denying entry into your country of people.

You're denying entry into your country of people. You're denying entry into your country of people. You're denying entry into your country of people. You're denying entry into your country of people. You're denying entry into your country of people.

You're denying entry into your country of people. You're denying entry into your country of people. You're denying entry into your country of people. You're denying entry into your country of people.

But they've always been there.

“Yeah, so I grew, the I think sports always been political.”

It's always been used by, you know, going back to the Victorians. It's always been used by people in authority and power to project. The values they want to project. Now, one thing I do notice is that you've used the very controversial word a couple of times. That some of our British listeners will already be bridling about.

Even though it's in origin, a British word. And that word is the dreaded word, soccer. So for our British and American listeners who are clearly going to be divided on this issue. You think it's vertical football soccer, right? Well, it's in my world.

It's logical to do it. And you write there is an amazing internet fighter. People running around the internet with pitchforks. It is quite remarkable. But if you look at the word comes from England that's used in England from the 1890s onwards.

All the way true to the 1980s in research for this. series. I went back and I looked at preview shows of the world cup. And 1978 preview show Kevin Keegan refers to soccer. Yeah.

And his ITV pondetry on the title page of Matt Busby's autobiography from 1973. soccer and football is used interchangeably. This is something that changed in the 1990s. But in a world where we consider that there are sports which exist beyond this island. The island on which we are filming.

There are other football games. So as your hand, I call association football soccer. In the town I'm from Tolamore and Afli football is gay league football. I'm sure as people have loads of infuriate comments about this one way or another. So we'll let them argue about it.

But let's get into our story. So today's episode is about Italy and the 1930s in particular. And Mussolini. So if we start with Mussolini and Italian fascism. Mussolini comes to power down October 1922.

They've had the march on Rome which was Mussolini. It wasn't, you know, he sits and watches the march on Rome. And then he's come to power. It's a backlash against the sort of the red years or whatever they are in the early 1920s. So Labour unrest.

There's the scars of the First World War.

There are a lot of disaffected veterans and so on. Manliness, virility, national unity.

“These are all parts of Mussolini's agenda aren't they?”

How much of Mussolini and fascism? How much of the appeal of actually think comes down to kind of an aura of masculinity, I guess? Mussolini was promising a new world. And he looked for a distinction from what he considered the failed regime.

This is a tried and tested technique across the world from regimes who seek to start a new the present the old world as being failed. They present it as being a dying country. A full of people who were just weak and Mussolini to an almost cartoonish extent tried to project virility, tried to project energy and dynamism

and discipline and health. And this was in contradistinction too to what had been there previously. And it led to when you see the footage now of Mussolini or you see the photographs of it's almost cartoonish in its exaggerated nature in the histionics where they are.

But it must never be forgotten the extent to which he was a cruel and brutal individual.

Truly ruthless in what he wished to do. And the fact that almost on the beginning he wanted war. But sport was part of the whole projection of what he was trying to do in creating. He saw that new Italy. Most of the two elements that are there, I think, one is, I mean, he mentioned health.

So the idea of the health of the nation, reviving what is a sick and dying country under democracy, failed democracies. And sport becomes a projection or a reflection of the health of society. But also sport is training for war. That sport is training you in the discipline and the competitiveness and the aggression

“that you need to attack Abyssinia or Greece or whoever it might be.”

The way they did it was two-fold with three-fold really. There's the projection of Mussolini himself as the country's greatest sports man. These imagery of him outskying, bare-chested and outriding horses. And there's images of him.

with loads of Italian cyclists waving their bikes in the air.

It's an incredible image.

“And the truth of it is he was anything but Athletic.”

He's a small fat man when it comes down to it. And he was not thrown with that pole. No, he was... He was atletic in no modern sense of the word that you would consider. Although he wanted to project the idea that he was.

But he went for practical policies around it. And you look at the building of sports fields. To delay 20s into the 30s, extra 3000 sports fields built around Italy. And in the woods, he was looking for mass participation in sport. But he also put gyms and sports halls in villages and in towns around the place.

So this was a vast, ultimately, fascist project to create men. And it was directed towards men or the women involved in sport, who would be able to people and army.

And then the third layer was the development of a kind of an elite sporting world,

in which there would be elite sport within Italy. The best Italian sports people would be able to compete in cycling and in boxing. And ultimately in soccer. Where under the Olympic Games, when they went outside the country. So just a question before we move on about this.

How much of this do you think is reflecting a new hand of dictatorship? So there have been dictatorships before. But in the 1920s, the 1930s, what you see in the USSR in Italy, obviously Nazi Germany in the 1930s, is the development of what we'd call totalitarianism.

So the idea that top down politics would invade every aspect of life. And leisure and recreation are absolutely central parts of this. If you've got a new sport hall in your village, or you've got a new running track or a cycling track or whatever, how much do you think that is simply what governments do.

It's part of National welfare that's promoted ever in the 20th century. And how much is it distinctively? Well, either totalitarian or distinctively fascist? I think the scale of it makes it distinct. And you're right, it's an attempt to push into every aspect of life.

“And what better way if you want to look at the hours between when people are working and sleeping are in school and sleeping.”

If you take that chunk of time for a lot of people is an engagement in sport. It's brought an opportunity to channel people in certain directions. But also an opportunity to channel their behavior as well. So you've got in the case of Italy the development of mass sporting movements, which happened in two ways.

First of all, it's the suppression and the other destruction or the colonization of organizations

that were run by the communists in Italy or by the Catholic Church. And their identification with the new regime. And then the creation of a youth sports movement, the sport leisure movement, more broadly on an adult one, which is intended to draw Italians in. To not just develop the body in a certain way, but to get them to identify with the regime,

which was there being constructed by Mussolini. And one element of this actually I know from your notes. And it's actually runs through all three of the stores we'll do is involvement the army. Because the army and Italy are training in physical instructors, aren't they? In Brazil, I mean actually the Brazilian football manager in the 1970s,

Claudio Coutinho was a captain in the Brazilian army. And then obviously the army and Argentina using the 1978 victory.

“So do you think there's an obviously militaristic side to this?”

Would that have been obvious to Italians in 1930 or something? Well, they're teachers who are being trained. We're being trained by army instructors who were brought in and you can see. These army officers who trained the physical fitness instructors who were going around the place produced by 1936 to were 14,000 such instructors produced from these army academies.

And I think it's interesting we'll see this later on. But you look at the Argentinian particular with Peron. He was in Italy in these years. He saw what was happening and he adopted this broader sporting approach to sport and the engagement with the army that he had witnessed in Italy during these years.

So interesting. So much of it comes back to this model. Doesn't it the kind of Italian fascist model that is then copied in South America in the post-war years? It's not as discredited as it is in Europe, maybe I guess. No, but when we got through this later on, you can see these ideas that were replicated.

I mean, what happened in Italy in the 20s and 30s? These notions expanded and the sport is part or they were exported. I mean, and the part of that is what happened in South America after the war. Now you talked about one big element to this. It's not just about internal stuff, but it's about the projection of Italian fascism

abroad using sport to project it. So how does that work? So, for example, this is the era of the Olympic games that are taking root and whatnot. The Italians, I mean, they're wearing black shirts. They're the Olympic games.

Things like that.

Even in the 20s, Mussolini is trying to use sporting tribes abroad to bolster his regime at home. It's not that Mussolini arrived in 1922 and there was the immediate creation of a fascist state. This was changed that happened a lot of change, but it happened through the 20s. So you have by the end of the 1928, Landro Ferreti, who is the head of the Italian Olympic committee, talked about this idea of using the movement to create courageous soldiers in wartime.

By 32, the Italians are parading at the Olympic games in LA, wearing black shirts.

And they did really well. They came second in the medals table, which is a huge step forward.

And even in 36 in Berlin, the Italians came forth. So this is a movement that is really gathering momentum in terms of Italian prestige on the world sporting stage. Probably the most famous person in the world in the 1930s was the World Heavyweight Champion. Whoever that was at a particular year, and Primo Carneira, the Italian boxer won the World Heavyweight Championship in 1933. And his fame was promoted through newsrails and through radio, which was then beginning to broadcast live fights and dispersed them across.

The population reaching into people's homes as well as in squares. And of course, in cycling you had the zero, the Italian cycling was the biggest sport in Italy in the 1930s. And the zero was hugely important. So you have between that and the modern sport of modern car racing, where Italian drivers, Italy isn't just staging races. It's sending out some of the best drivers in the world. So you see the whole creation of an international sporting presence for Italy, which had not previously been the case.

So you've talked about boxing, cycling, I mean they're very emblematic sports of the 1920s and 1930s, but not yet as you would call it soccer. I mean the great irony of course is that Mussolini does not himself like football, but he's very good at using it.

“Is that because it's already very popular and very well established in Italy, or is the development of football in Italy something?”

I mean obviously football has been spread by the British in the late 19th century sailors railwaymen, you know, the classic story, the sons of industrialists who went to public schools and then just did a few, you know a few months in months of a day and took a ball with them or whatever. How well established is football in Italy in this point in the 20s?

The story of the game on European soil is the story of incredible explosion across much of Europe in the 20s and in the 30s it was hugely popular.

We'll say in Hungary in Austria and because of but in Italy it took off in the 1920s. There had been soccer played from the 1890s and your right is the story of expats and traders and soldiers and sailors bringing it wherever they went, put it's also the story of Italians who went to work in England. And so you see some of the main people will see it but puzzle the it's great Italian manager of the parties. He loved the game and he got it because he was sent by his family textile trade to work in the north of England.

“He's been sending mans United players and managers but that connection of commerce and of finance of trade is important and you get an anglophilia of people who just think England is the most modern country in the world.”

We let up the game and then there's the joy of playing.

So you had the first clubs in the 1890s and before the war you had Italian clubs being established playing games with each other hugely influenced by England but after the 1920s.

You had an explosion of interest in the game you got the broader commercialization with the building of grounds because such was the interest in people not just playing but also now watching others play and crucially. The identification of clubs with areas and with towns and with cities and it became a matter of civic pride to have a decent team to represent you to compete in the championship and what Mussolini did. It was to oversee through his men who were out into various organizations was to essentially take control of Italian soccer by organizing the establishment in no particular order of the amalgamation of some clubs in some cities so they would have a really strong presence.

Number two, the establishment of an Italian league, number three, the devotion of greater focus to the Italian national team and number four, the acceptance though not the outward acknowledgment of professionals and it said that you could have non amateurs playing in your clubs. So this is the shift from amateurism to professionalism all of which took place in the 1920s.

“So interesting and a couple of elements of this I think are really interesting so one is the teams that we now regard as the canonical Italian teams.”

Some of these are Mussolini-era creations. They are the one thing that football fans now hate is inauthentic. They are made up teams, contrived teams, you know, the authorities are forced different clubs to amalgamate. So I was astounded to re-fiorantina, Roma, Napoli, these are all basically made up clubs in the 1920s and 30s.

The complete opposite was experienced in Italy where clubs were were forcibly merged under fascist leadership, but they provided a spectacle that was only in the making at that stage.

You must remember that that world of the 1920s. It's not like there was generational devotion to a particular club, what this is as a new world which has been forged at that world of commercial sport based around associational culture as well where people are joining clubs. And it becomes more of a modern thing to do in the 1930s, in particular from the early 1930s onwards with the establishment of the Italian League in Cop and the fact that there was a rail system which allowed people to travel the country, both to play games and to support the teams that were representing their city.

You know infrastructure promotes the act of supporting doesn't you can't support your team of home and away unless you can get to Napoli or Florence or wherever. And I guess that without that wouldn't have been possible. Without it you just couldn't do it and looked at the birth of modern sport, the construction of all of these things is made possible by the modern technologies of transport and international sport is not possible without the steamship and then the airplane. But it's also about new media technologies. So it's newspapers and the dedication now of the sporting press in Italy which advertisers these games reports on them creates that celebrity culture around the best sport or people can read the preview read the report get the creation of stars and identify during the week with the team which they see play at the weekend.

“That's so interesting because actually when I think even about how I experienced football growing up in the 70s natives, I didn't go to games. The word that many games on TV for me was actually this is a weird thing to say about football.”

It was a kind of it was the experience of reading experience. I read about games in the newspaper and I followed the narrative every day and it was a kind of continuous textual narrative rather than something that I had to see a game on TV was very exciting because they weren't on very often.

And presumably you had the comic books as well. It's Roy the Roy the Ravens and everything that goes with that and Roy the rovers famously the most unlucky man in sport.

So many plane crashes so many plane crashes and they could not go on a South American tour without arriving to see that there was a new hunter in place and there was many people. Bomb explosion was for a soccer player quite challenging. Exactly. Now actually he mentioned steam ships and international travel one aspect to this I'm slightly jumping ahead. Does the Italian have foreign players in the 1930s?

“Yes it does and the story of of how this happened is I suppose it's the birth of an international transfer market in a significant way.”

The president of Torino FC and Rico Maroni who is a very wealthy businessman was in Argentina on the business trip and he saw a player called Julio Libonati who was the son of Italian immigrants and he went and he said I'm bringing this guy back to my club. He played for Argentina won the Copa Sudamerca for what became the Copa America for Argentina and he won the Italian Championship for Torino by virtue of his performances. So what you then had was between 1929 and the early 1940s more than 100 South Americans arrived well that's like they decided to go.

They were high-haired hunted from not just from Argentina but also from Uruguay and Brazil and Paraguay and they were brought in to do this and these were the sons of Italian immigrants because of course Italian immigration to South America. The American have been enormous at the end of the 19th century in the early 20th century. So these were brought in, these were the Rinpoche reality. So this way you have a problem in if you're a fascist and Italy because you're talking about the blood.

You're talking about the importance of a kind of an Italy first to project backwards from America.

This idea that the Italian nation must be preserved and developed and rendered more dynamics. How do you square that with the bringing in of people from abroad and what you do is you find the children of Italian immigrants and you bring them home and they're acceptable because their parents are Italian. No, I know it's risky asking this of an Irishman who must have supported Jack Charlton's Island team in the 1990s which course was full of Englishmen.

“But are they inventing Italian ancestry for these people? Tony Cascorino style because that's what you guys did with Tony Cascorino.”

I think that Tony Cascorino's biography made that claim, but I think it's subsequently was proven afterwards that he did actually have the entitlement to a passport.

Creative and important foreigners but people born to the diaspora who may not have had a deep connection.

“Creative attitude to genealogy. Yes, I'm not going to be defensive on this because there is not a country in the world that doesn't do this. Look at the English cricket and rugby teams.”

People over, over the last one. I wish Thomas here to defend what happened in cricket. All right, so let's get to the World Cup.

Italy didn't play in the first World Cup, which is a 1930.

The First World Cup is held in Uruguay. We did an episode about it in 2022, where we talked about the origins of the World Cup. At that point, it's not obvious it's going to become a massive international event. People are traveling by steamboats across the Atlantic. England, of course, don't go. Argentina, Uruguay, play out the first final. Majuraguay wins in Montevideo.

There's the famous stories about people crossing the river plates on ships. We're going to go last in the fog, and making the game. Exactly. But, 1934 is going to be held in Italy. And from the start, the fascist authorities see this as a... This is their equivalent aspect in some ways, something we'll talk about in a little bit, which is the 1936 Olympics.

This is going to be a showcase for fascism.

“Obviously, they want to ensure that it's late, right? So how do they go about doing that?”

So they do a range of different things.

If we look first of all at the purpose of the competition.

So Jarjo Vicarro, who is the head of the Football Federation in Italy, said that the World Cup was a chance to show the organizational efficiency of fascist sport in general and football in particular. And he talked about this opportunity to display also Italian manhood on the world stage. So the Italian newspapers, who covered us, they put it under front pages, because they were instructed to do so by the propaganda ministry and the Italian diplomatic corps, when they'd overdrive around the world, trying to get newspapers around the world to do the same.

Secondly, new stadiums were constructed. I lived in Florence for a couple of years, about 25 years ago, and played soccer on the fields, right beside in Coverchano and beside the... the Fiorntina, the studio culminally in Fiorntina. And that stadium still stood, but that was built at the time, the one in Belania had a statue of Mussolini on a horse.

At the back of the... back of the stadium, looking down across everything, they did a third thing.

They wanted people to come, and to see what it was like. So they basically invented tourist packages for people to come to the World Cup and subsidise travel to Italy and between the cities on the rail, willingly. They arranged this brilliant radio infrastructure, so radio was pushing into people's homes by the early 1930s. But the talented, more than that, they erected loudspeakers on poles, in the main squares of villages and towns and in cities and in their suburbs. And the games were also related to 12 competing countries around the place, so the technology was only developing in terms of international relay, but for European countries it was straightforward.

The fascist symbol was... was everywhere. It was put on tickets, and the tickets were designed and printed to a really high standard, so the people could bring them home with them. So this is the construction of a memorabilia, this iconography of the World Cup, and the Italians were right at the heart, this kind of idea of sporting merch or souvenirs to bring away with them. And of course, Mussonini put himself at the center of the imagery of this. He kind of ordered the construction of the artists, the fabrication of the Copa del Duche.

This trophy that was six times bigger than the trophy that was to be given to the World Cup winners of the Copa del Duche would be presented to the winners alongside the world. So that's a bit like Donald Trump's FIFA piece price. Right. Well, the most ironically titled awards in history. Yeah. So let's get to the finals themselves, gaining and don't go. They turn it down. Interestingly, you don't... we were talking beforehand. You don't think this is a sign of...

I mean, the characteristic thing that people say now in a sort of self-flage-lacing way that we'd have to do is all this was a sign of insularity and arrogance. You don't necessarily think that?

“I think that it would be a fool who would argue that there wasn't a certain element of insularity and arrogance in it.”

There was a belief in the power still of British football of the importance of the whole international championship played every year. And there was a certain arrogance involved in that. But I don't think that's the defining reason. I don't think that's the beginning and end of the conversation because it's that classic thing that we do in history.

The World Cup was very much in the making. FIFA was an organization which was still relatively speaking an amateur organization, which was only beginning together. Power wasn't clear who else was going to play.

“What really was involved in qualifying, or were you just invited to come?”

So I think it wrong to say that this is simply a mark of arrogance and insularity. Some good teams do go. I guess the best team, the most obviously, you might have said the obvious favourites. Consider the best team, certainly the best European team of the 1930s Austria. The Vunder team is they were called their famous something I think called the World. I don't exactly know what that is, but basically they moved the ball very quickly.

And they were a great team. Their manager led to a different kind of Hugo Meisel. They beat Scotland 5-0 in 1931 and Scotland were not nothing in those days.

But they obviously don't win it because we know that Austria never won the World Cup.

Italy, win it. Italy's root to the final. There are a couple of incidents aren't there. I mean, if we let you go to the semi-final against the Austrians, Austria, the favourites, would I be being too harsh in saying,

now obviously there's an issue here, which is that we can't watch the game. So we're reliant on reports. But as far as we can tell, what I'd be too harsh and saying Italy kicked their way to victory. In a game that was dubiously refereed. One of the, I suppose, enduring threads of the World Cup and its history

is the claim that almost every country who got there did so by either having accommodating referees on their side, having opponents who'd been bought off or having kicked the tower out of anyone who got in their way. And of course, the truth in it is that every successful international team has a really good administrative people beside them who make sure are pushed to get a game played in a predictor place with a predictor referee. That's understood.

It is also the case that physical fitness and physical strength was absolutely, it is not possible to win a World Cup without being physically ready. And we'll see that when it comes to the Brazilian teams of the 60s and 70s and the Argentinian teams later on.

“So what was it particularly that allowed Italy win?”

There is no doubt that Austria and Hungary were more technically capable than Italy. Austria and Hungarian coaches were coming to Italy to coach the players in Italy, but no foreign players beyond the Argentinian, the South Americans were allowed to play in the Italian competition. So what did the Italians do? Well, they both stood there squad with five rimpatriati.

South Americans in the American, into the Italian team who were brilliant players. And that was crucial. So they had a technical ability that was outstanding.

Second of all, they had themselves a brilliant coach in Pozo who had devoted himself to the construction of the teams.

And although Pozo wrote a letter after the semi-final to the boss-best Austrian player, Cinderella, who does seem to have been kicked around the place during that game, a letter of apology to him, the reality of it was he did what he needed to do to win, which was to make it a really physical game against Austria and to squeeze out a one-nil victory. And there's been all sorts of comments about Ekland, the Swedish referee who also left in the 38th and 1950 finals.

It should be said as well. So this was a man who is devoted to soccer. There's a whole world of difference between pushing to have a referee who suits your style, referee in the final, and buying off that referee and the wayhounds. And this is like so many of these supposed bribery stories in the World Cup.

Are there so many stories of chicaneary? It remains case on Proven and probably on Proven. Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it? We were talking about this before we started recording that so many of the so-called scandals, associated with the World Cup.

So many of the allegations of bribery, corruption, match fixing and so on. When you trace them back, there's often a single source much long after the game is taken place, which is then amplified by subsequent reports. And it becomes, it's kind of like an urban legend that crosses the line into historical fact, because sports historians and journalists and websites love to repeat it.

And do you think that's a little bit the case with Italy in 1934 that perhaps, it's an odd thing to say about a fascist team that's winning for Mussolini, perhaps they've been a little bit hard done by in by posterity?

First of all, it's a knockout competition, so there are only planned for games.

We have no video footage worthy of the name of that survives. The accounts that have been handed down are partial. They are fragmentary and they're utterly unconvincing in their claims of chicaneary. A better involvement. Did they do everything they could to try and win?

Yes, is it more than that the evidence just simply doesn't stack up?

“I think there's two essential points that you made there that I agree with.”

First of all, the sources of these stories that are repeated time and again.

And it's not just that the idea of their being conspiracies is something that's part of the human condition. It's most easier to imagine that your team has lost because of the conspiracy against it as against the fact that they're simply knockout enough. Yeah, so they get to the final. They play Czechoslovakia, and of course not yet dismembered by the Munich agreement. And the Czechs actually went on the lap.

So we're 20 bad 20 minutes to go hit the post and hit the post. But then, or see who is actually one of South Americans. Yeah, it's Argentinian. He scores a great, he's a couple of men scores a great goal. And then it goes to extra time.

The first workout final to go to extra time.

And a guy could skip you, hits the winner. And two, one, two, one. Bingo, they're done. Hurrah for Mussolini, Hurrah for Italy. Jewelry May, the founder of the World Cup, gives them the trophy.

Mussolini gives them his Donald Trump trophy. And the Italian Presco absolutely deserved. And then it's proved this to them is not just a sporting triumph, but a moral and political triumph. Because that a delusport goes Italy is at the heart of the sports world.

So this is evidence of the greatness of the Italian male. Right, it comes to the world stage. And you also have Ed Bargello coming out and saying that victory was the affirmation

of an entire people and indication of its virile and moral strength.

So this is a projection which goes way beyond just a sporting success into the success of a nation. Mussolini delighted. The regime delighted. The obvious question though, which may have occurred some listeners already. I mean, most people don't go to the games, right?

Because you can only fit 60,000 people into a stadium or whatever.

“So how does that clear either that the game sold out?”

Oh my gosh. Which is really interesting because although Mussolini presented himself as cueing for a ticket before one of the games, broader public interest. A lot of people experience it on the radio are looking at newswheels. But actually attending the game was limited in numbers.

And it's not clear that all the games sold out despite claims of the country. Interesting.

Well, this actually gets the hearts of what I was going to say.

How do most people experience this? Because you've already mentioned two seismic technological developments. So important in the politics of the early 20th century. And so vital to dictatorships in particular, which are newswheels and radio. So most people presumably experience in this.

Well, actually three ways. They'll hear it on the radio. They'll see it at the cinema in a news real. And then they'll also have read about it in the newspaper on a magazine. Yes, that's and they will have seen the posters that are up the visual imagery.

These brilliant Italian propagandists posters that are pulled up and identified and done with such clarity and skill.

“But the rise of radio was was so important.”

Because if you think about it, it allowed the voice to reach into someone's kitchen. And increasing numbers of Italians had radios by the mid-1930s. I know radio was beginning to broadcast live sport. By the early 1920s in America and then across Europe into 24 and then across to Australia. But the reality of it was that mass radio ownership was really a product from the mid-1930s onwards.

So by 44, in Italy, more and more Italians had radios. And there is that public square broadcast. So that it could be experienced in a communal way in public squares. By people as well who chose to do that before. That people used to congregate outside newspaper offices and wait for telegrams to come true.

With the tats like the old Vidi printer on this story. People didn't have a 1930 world cup in Buenos Aires. They're so excited and they're kind of faces dropping as a hero. Quite keeps scoring goals. And the way they did it in 1930 in Buenos Aires was the tap comes true.

But they have allowed speaker set up outside to project the thousands of people who've gathered. And under just these stories of the tears that flowed after Europe went, "Why are you laughing at the Argentinean Starmac?" That's going as fun of it. People would think it was something wrong with me if I didn't laugh at the Argentinean Starmac.

“And then I think that's a very welcome final.”

On the radio issue, so so interesting. That the commentator is called Niccolo Corrosio. And he replaces English terms. Then current in Italy, goal kick forward. And so on.

The word "dazicata" with Italian terminology. Because of the Italianization of the game, I guess. Yeah. And this Italianization is really interesting as well. It's even the adoption of the word calcio.

So it's not football or it's not football as it became in South America. But calcio takes on. And of course, this is an echo back to calcio Fiorentina.

Are the early modern game and Florence still like reenacted now with new teams?

“And how important was this construction of a mythology that that itself was a recreation”

of Harperston, the old Roman game. So this is Italy remaking in the 30s. What had been already there in the early modern period, which itself was an extension of the old Roman world. So it's not long to be kinder. We've been at this game for thousands of years.

But we're not having the mirror English with their words. Coming infecting how our commentary, which is reaching into homes, because this is about Italy. Yeah, because if you're Mussolini in the mid-1930s, you don't want people thinking,

this is the game of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, that we're trying for now.

You want them to think this is an ancient Roman game with the airs to the Roman Empire. You know, we're taking up the batten from our predecessors Monarch, which they have to be. I mean, they won the world cup. Yeah, football came home. Yeah, friends.

Well, that's what they'd say anyway.

“Although, it's slightly more complicated, isn't it?”

Because there are some fascists who don't like football. Because it's English. I mean, there's the issue, the fact that, you know, they've got South American players in the team who are. If you believe in blood and soil, Italian nationalism, it's a slight problem that some of your best players are not actually Italian. Then there's also, there are also people who are anti-fascists.

There's a lot of anti-fascists in Italy. How do they react to the 1934 welcome? So, even with infascism, does an ambiguity around soccer? And you can see it by the invention of a game by the National Secretary of the Fascist Party. Agusto Turati, who said up a game which was loosely based around the rules of soccer, but which was called volata.

And it was to be the kind of a fascist, the fascist version of soccer didn't kick off. So, the quidditch of course. Yeah, it's exactly that. Yeah. Quidditch without the broomstick as you go around.

And that just did not take off. So, that's within the parity itself. You then have that addition of the rim patriarchy, which, of course, is made really more difficult for those people who brought them in by the fact that some of those people. By the fact that some of those rim patriarchy disappeared from the country in 35 and then into 36, when the invasion of Ethiopia and everything that came by that military service. On the way, so that creates a problem.

And then you have the idea of Carl Calo levy writing in in 1934 lamenting the fact that sport has no been used as propaganda lamenting the fact that it's infantilizing a nation into acceptance of a regime, which he utterly opposes and which he he fought against.

“And I do think in all of this, you have to remember that it's a real danger that you believe the propaganda.”

So, that is to say, we accept that there was propaganda, but to move from that to say that the propaganda was successful is problematic. And you see it with, for example, Lucio Lombardo Redici, the celebrated mathematician and communist from the 1930s and Italy. Recently, he wrote later of those years saying he had been at the matches, he was at the final in which the checks were beaten and he said of that he was destainful. This is a communist who is destainful of the idea that it was a fascist enterprise.

He said no one ever became fascists because they supported Bitorio Bosos Italian team. And he went down, he went on and he questions he says, this words of opium for the masses are the corruption of consciousness and souls. He says, not at all, please stop talking nonsense. So, this is a really interesting thing, and I know you have a strong view on this. The standard interpretation is that nasty regimes you sport and culture to brainwash the masses and the masses duly fall into line.

They love bread and circuses and that's just how it works.

And this is basically this entire series that we're doing is quite a simple top-down story of nasty generals using sport to control the public.

And you think it's, that's not correct that it's more complicated and actually the public either are not interested in that they don't see the political angle. It's irrelevant, they're not interested or they resist it or they can, they simultaneously, the people are more complicated. And people can support Argentina when in 1978 while still hating their regime, let's say. I said, was I don't like a history which is a mass ascription of either motivation or impact onto great suites of people within any country.

But that would be my starting, but now it will be a fool who would argue that it had no impact. So I'm not trying to argue that in any shape or form what I argue for is a more tempered understanding and more nuanced understanding of how this actually worked. And I think there are a series of questions that are worth asking in relation to this.

If the world cup had not been played in one in 34 and in 36 or 38, wouldn't 36 with the Berlin Olympics when they won the soccer in 38 when they won the world cup again.

“Do we imagine because of that that Italy would not have gone into war with Germany and moved on?”

Would the non-staging of the Berlin Olympics in 36 really have altered the course of Nazi Germany? Similarly, the Brazilian military dictatorship which oversaw the winning of the world cup in 1970. By the end of the 70s, its power was in severe decline and we will talk about how that manifests itself in the next episode.

But equally, in 78 Argentina won the World Cup by 82 the military dictatorship was gone and this is the thing that must be remembered always about sport.

But sport at its very best is of the moment. It completely captures the emotions in the moment. But what does that mean beyond the moment? What is the legacy of that success? Is it even bread tuned for gotten when it comes to sport?

Sport is unbelievably protein in its aspect. It changes and turns all the time. It is always driving forward. And it is always about the next event. Not the one that has just happened or very quickly becomes about the next event.

Now, I'm not saying that it doesn't facilitate identification, but it doesn't smother all other feelings. And it does not, you cannot deny the multiple identities of a human being when it comes to the things. Yes. I actually couldn't agree with you more.

“I think it's clearly the people who go to the games.”

They've got fascist printed tickets, then fascist stadiums. They're not fascists there. But that doesn't mean that they're all complicit in the regime or that they have unthinking me swallowed. They're propaganda. For me, that's a classy example of historians.

Looking at a great mass of people who are not historians and saying, ultimately, they're easily brainwashed because they're all idiots.

I don't think that's right. And that's, in a nutshell, that's it. OK, so let's, you said sports about the next thing. So is this podcast? The next thing is the 1936 Olympics, which might seem an odd thing to introduce in a story of the World Cup.

But Italy, when, as you said, they win the football gold medal at the 1936 Olympics. And for Mussolini, he takes this just as seriously as the World Cup. Would you say?

“I think the fact of going to Germany and that kind of developing relationship with Hitler, which comes after 36 onwards.”

And everything that happens in the way Italian society is beginning to change. And move closer to Germany, albeit with resistance from quite a number of Italian people who don't like this. They don't like this drift of Italian policy. So the 36 Olympic games was played. There's a soccer competition, which was won by the Italians for the group of students.

And again, this is looking forward. The Italians had staged the World's student games twice under Mussolini. So this is about the creation of a new generation who are coming in and viewed with these ideas that would not just be Italian students who are thinking these things. But also students who come around the world to come to Italy to see the success of them. Bring home to their countries, a benign understanding.

And indeed, a kind of a certain role of what has been created in this new Rome, which is shown under newsrails. But we see around the place where we sense a team there, an Italian Olympic team that come forward with the win the soccer. And they play really, really well. And it is true though, it's at a different level because the soccer in the World Cup by this point is restricted to amateurs, whereas the soccer in the Olympic games is restricted to amateurs, whereas in the World Cup it's professionals.

So the next World Cup, 1938, this is held in France, finally in Paris.

FIFA had chosen France over Germany to host the World Cup. I mean, that's who's an interesting alternative history, isn't it? Where the World Cup, 1938, is actually in Germany. But anyway, it's in France. For most of the 20th century, actually, well, indeed, for almost all the 20th century, France, not a big footballing nation at all. Igor in rugby, much bigger rugby and cycling, I guess, France is sports.

I mean, some bad teams actually Cuba are there, the Dutch East Indies are there. Italy, of course, are there again. One of the big European teams, not there, because it doesn't exist anymore, Austria. And Austria might say Germany will be brilliant in the 1938 World Cup, because they've absorbed the Australians. But actually, the Angeles turns out to be a sporting problem rather than an asset, because it's very difficult for them to integrate the Australians into the German team. Is that right?

Yeah, they try and basically take half of one team, put it with half of the other team. And anybody who's ever managed to support the team knows just how difficult that is, but it is so striking. The 36 Berlin Olympics final, Italy beat Austria 21, and Austria doesn't even exist by the time of the 38 World Cup when it comes to playing their absorbed into it.

It is, I think we have to say it's something of an afterthought from 34. And it's interesting to look at it about what's going to come, but what comes next. And you can see Italian anti-fascist protesters, booty, Italian team when they arrive into play their games in France.

“And I think that's a reminder, I think that no country is ever one thing or another particular time.”

And that although you may identify with the national team and when you can also use it to display your displeasure as well as your pleasure. Yeah, but the Italians win again with a completely different team. Just two players left from the 34. So that is a tribute to Vitorio Potset, the manager, who's obviously a genuinely, you know, he fully, people might say this is rigged that's rigged. He's obviously a fantastic manager if he can create two teams that win these international tournaments.

He seems to have had an extraordinary capacity to motivate people to play together in the unit and to play together for Italy and to try and win. And you know, all this talk about all the Brazilians were bought off in 38. They didn't play their best player Leonidas in the semi-final who it's got a hat trick in 65. He's supposed to have a calf injury there. So it's so easy to look backwards and say the reality of it is Italy when the final four two.

They were really, really strong team. Does it just a lack of specificity about the deposit she can read that went on?

Yeah, because again there's a claim hungry, basically three.

The claim is the hungry went all the way to the final, then through the final. Madly because they were hoping for Italian help in revising the Treaty of Trianol. Which just seems utterly implausible to me. I know the Treaty of Trianol is a big deal in Hungary because it basically hungry loses a lot of territory that things it's entitled to in Transylvania and stuff. But again, it's such an unspecific and vague claim that the players somehow miraculously score two goals, but managed to throw the rest of the game.

It seems unlike it's me. It seems to me that it would be difficult to bring a home that ripe, if indeed you have a good spot off on the strength of us. Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you're like the right back in the Hungarian team, you go home to Budapest and you say, "Well, bad news is we lost the final, the good news is I'm pretty confident in a few years.

The Italians will help us get a chance of going back." See, it does seem very unlikely. Okay, so that's just before we wrap up. How do the Italians end up remembering all this?

Because obviously, in Italy after the Second World War, there's not really the same kind of denotification process that you get in West Germany.

So the Italians don't have a great out of self-vegulation and soul searching. There's no sort of defascistification of Italy. But they're happy to continue celebrating these World Cup wins.

“They didn't see them as a tool and they were to come as a problem ethic, do they?”

No, and it continued through to the stage of the 1990 World Cup where you see Angelo Skiyavio, who scored the winning goal in the '44. Finally, he gave an interview to Gazeta Delosport before he said, before those finals, where he said, "I sincerely don't remember much of that day." Finally, that he's talking about, "I actually learned the details.

I have forgotten only by reading the newspapers that talked about it." For example, that Mussolini was present. They said he was going to come, but I hadn't noticed that from the field. Then the next day when we went to Placio, Plato, Venetia, where the famous balcony is, he said some of us stretched out our hand to shake his.

But this wasn't so good because Mussolini raised his hand in the air, leading us with the Romans. It was me who scored the decisive goal, but I got no special compliment.

“So that's how he remembers it, and he's put out there.”

Also, Rayuno, the main Italian television station in 1996,

million people watched the documentary.

I'm sorry, a film that they made called Illicoloro Delavitorio, which was the call of victory about the 1934 World Cup, and it completely underplayed the fascistic context of the competition. And as indeed, those national football museum in Coverchano in Florence. So you can pose a role to an autobiography.

Didn't really mention the fascist element of the success, and of course, you should remain yourself. The president of FIFA, he himself after the war, was really keen to downplay the notion of connections between FIFA and Italian fascism.

But just a last question on this. Is that them airbrushing history? Or is that reinforcing your point that may be posterity overblows the fascistic nature of this?

you're so fixated on you when we know sportsmen,

“and women are always very, very single-minded.”

Perhaps they, I mean, as mad as it might sound, perhaps they didn't really notice that it was being co-opted by the fascist regime, and therefore it was a surprise to them later on when they were told, actually, your victory has been punished by a cessation of Mussolini.

Oh yeah, but the gap between the obsessive nature of an elite sports person, there's a huge space between that and the wider context. So I think to ignore the wider context, while focusing just on the obsessive nature

and lead sport misses the opportunity to render what is a kind of a much more interesting story, which is neither just a fascist world cup, nor an elite sporting success, but both happen in a kind of interlocking fragments.

Okay, great, and very last question before we wrap up, of course next time we'll be talking about Brazil. Calam, I produce, so wants to know why it's a least so bad.

“Right now, why haven't they qualified for the last three workups?”

It comes down, I think, to the collapse of the Italian League. It'll even, we'll remember, we watch soccer in the 90s and into the 2000s, the strength of the Italian League, the strength of Italian club teams. So the collapse of serious, seriously competitive Italian teams,

the inability of the people, the clubs of Italy, to attract the very best players in the world, has limited the success of the leaders, compressed it, and Italy simply does not produce enough good players themselves. Okay, fair enough, all right.

So I really hope you enjoyed this first episode of the series.

It's been a very exciting recording for us, because right next door is the Belgian player, Eden Hazard. When he looked through the window and he saw Paul Rouse, he's like, Jesus, it's Paul Rouse. And we had to actually keep him a bay because he was so over-excited.

Anyway, if you've enjoyed this first episode, head to therestashistory.com and join Eden Hazard in the rest is history club. He will be listening to the next two episodes in this series and I hope you will too. Hello everybody, now, as those of you who are good children

will know, here in Britain, on the 21st of June, it's Father's Day, but not just here in Britain. It's also Father's Day on the 21st of June in the United States in Canada and in the Republic of Ireland. So those are four countries that are united by dads who love to listen

to the rest as history.

And that is why we are offering an amazing 25%

Father's Day discount on the subscription price to the rest is history club because we are all heart. So treat the Peter the Great in your own life. This Father's Day to early access to full series. You see early access that you get that with a membership.

You get bonus episodes. You get ad free listening. You get access to tickets for live shows. Basically you get an entire host of supplementary benefits.

“And that I think is what a lot of Peter Ux wants, isn't it?”

It absolutely is because I think nothing says happy Father's Day quite like the chance to listen to six solid hours ad free about the First World War. Yeah, that's one most father's want. So head to the rest is history.com.

And click on the word gifts. And that gift. Membership of our much loved, Rest is history club will land straight in your Father's inbox on Father's Day itself.

So if you want to give the best Father's Day gift there's ever been in history ever. And we say this as the presenters of the rest is history. You know what to do. Hello everybody. Now, as those of you who are good children

will know here in Britain on the 21st of June, it's Father's Day, but not just here in Britain. It's also Father's Day on 21st of June in the United States in Canada and in the Republic of Ireland. So those are four countries that are united by dads who

love to listen to the rest is history.

And that is why we are offering an amazing 25%

Father's Day discount on the subscription price to the rest is history club because we are all heart. So treat the Peter the Great in your own life. This Father's Day to early access to full series. You get bonus episodes.

You get ad free listening. You get access to tickets for live shows.

And that I think is what a lot of Peter Wants is now.

“It absolutely is because I think nothing”

says happy Father's Day quite like the chance to listen

to six solid hours ad free about the First World War.

Yeah, that's what most fathers want. So head to the rest is history.com and click on the word gifts. And that gift membership of our much-loved Rest is history club will land straight in your

Father's inbox on Father's Day itself.

“So if you want to give the best Father's Day gift”

there's ever been in history ever. And we say this as the presenter of the rest is history. You know what to do.

Finally on day eight of the World Cup

England played tonight.

“We've assembled a top team to work out how we win it.”

Harry McGuire and Micaritches at the back. Georgia Stanway, Jenkins in midfield and it's sheer and Lenika up top. Come and join us on the rest is football. On Netflix available right now.