The Fascist World Cup: Mussolini's Football Dictatorship | History of the World Cup

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So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee, and get on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the WISE app today. Be smart. Get WISE. T's and C's apply. This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. Go to mintmobile.com slash history. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required, $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees, extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabytes of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. 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 used 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'll be 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 Pelé and Jairzinho and Gerson and all these great players. The team that won in 1970, 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 Perón. And this is effectively the sequel to that. So we'll be looking at the military junta of the late 70s and how they used the 1978 World Cup and the team of Mario Kempez, 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 Cups 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 Is 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 therestishistory.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 uppermost. 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, I'm a professor of history at University College, Dublin. I'm a professor of history at University College, Dublin. Paul Rouse. Paul, welcome back to the Rest is History. It's great to have you on. Thanks a million, Dominic. Because it's a football story, we've chosen this lovely location. Thanks to Chelsea Football Club, we're here at Stamford Bridge overlooking the pitch. And with perfect timing, impeccable timing, Chelsea have decided today to rip up the pitch and do loads of building work on the stadium. So, 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 working on in University College, Dublin, is the history of sport nationally in Ireland, but also internationally. I teach a second year module on the global history of sport 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 U.S. Donald Trump has tried to take ownership of it. There have been a number of scandals. The Iran players had to move their base from the U.S. to Mexico. Business with the referee not being allowed in this time. Do you think this is something new or an example of how football has always been politicized and used by political leaders of one kind or another? The idea of soccer being politicized is nothing at all new. What is new is the precise manner in which it's revealing itself. In the case of the World Cup, it's the precise manner in which it's revealing itself. In the case of the World Cup, I suppose, the Trumpist focus on immigration and on the projection of America first. And that is in collision with the expressed hashtag. If you look at Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA's Instagram page, he seems to be unable to post without putting the hashtag football unites the world. And unfortunately, you cannot say that football unites the world if at the same time you're denying entry into your country of people because of where they come from, and including in that a referee of the competition. But again, this is not new. The whole way through from 1930 on, like this is a political story. The whole way through the relationship. And there was a president of FIFA, an Englishman in the 50s and 60s, Stanley Rouse, no relation, he had no E in his name. He had this whole notion that sport and politics, and soccer and politics in particular, should. Should not be put into the same wheelhouse, but they've always been there. Yeah. So I agree with you. I think sport's 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 a 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. For our British and American listeners who are clearly going to be divided on this issue, you think it's fair to call football soccer, right? Well, it's. In my world, it's logical to do it. And you're right, there is an amazing internet fight or people running around the internet with pitchforks. It is quite remarkable. But if you look at the word, the word comes from England, it was used in England from the 1890s onwards, all the way through to the 1980s, in research for this series, I went back and I looked at it. I looked at preview shows of the World Cup and 1978 preview show, Kevin Keegan refers to soccer in his ITV punditry. 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 shorthand. I call association football soccer in this, but in the town I'm from, in Tullamore in Offaly, football is Gaelic football. I'm sure lots of people have loads of infuriated 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 in October 1922. They've had the March on Rome, which of course Mussolini 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 labor 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 that do you think comes down to kind of an aura of masculinity, I guess? Well, 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 anew. They present the old world as being failed. They present it as being a dying country full of people who are 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 to what had been there previously. And it led to, when you see the footage now of Mussolini or you see the photographs of him, it's almost cartoonish in its exaggerated nature in the histrionics were there. 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 from the beginning he wanted war. But sport was part of the whole projection of what he was trying to do in creating. And he saw it and knew Italy. So there are sort of two elements to that, aren't there, I think. One is, I mean, you 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 twofold. They did it in a way that was not the case. It was threefold, really. There's the projection of Mussolini himself as the country's greatest sportsman. This imagery of him out skiing bare-chested and out riding horses. And there's images of him. He looks terrible on a bicycle, but there's a brilliant photograph of him standing on a balcony 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 was a small, fat man when it comes down to it. And he was not. Remember that, Paul? No, no. He was athletic 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 through the late 20s into the 30s, an extra 3,000 sports fields built around Italy. Because 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 there were women involved in sport who would be able to people an 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, but really that the best Italian sports people would be able to compete in cycling and in boxing and ultimately in soccer and in 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 kind of dictatorship? So there have been dictatorships before, but in the 1920s and 1930s, what you see in the USSR, in Italy, obviously in 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 and all the other central parts of this. You know, if you've got a new sports hall in your village or you've got a new running track or a cycling track or whatever, you know, how much do you think that is? It's simply what governments do. It's part of national welfare that's promoted everywhere 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, or in school and sleeping, if you take that chunk of time for a lot of people as an engagement in sport. It's both 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 either the 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 and leisure movement, more broadly, and an adult one, which attempted 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 note from your notes, and it's actually runs through all three of the stories we'll do is involvement in the army. Because the army in Italy are trained in the army. They're training 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 in Argentina using the 1978 victory. So do you think there's an obviously militaristic side to this? And would that have been obvious to Italians in 1930 or something? - Well, the teachers who were being trained were being trained by army instructors who were brought in and you can see by these army, officers who trained the physical fitness instructors who were going around the place produced by 1936, there 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 in 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. - That's so interesting. So much of it comes back to this, 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 go 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 sport is part, or they were exported, I mean, and part of that is what happened in South America after the war. - Now, you talked about one big element of 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 are taking root and whatnot. The Italians, I mean, they're wearing black shirts at the Olympic Games, things like that. There's an obviously fascistic element to this, and there's an element that even in the '20s, Mussolini is trying to use sporting triumphs 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. There was a change that happened, a lot of change, but it happened through the '20s. So you have by the end of the 1920, 1928, Landro Ferretti, 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 fourth. So this is a movement that is really gathering momentum in terms of Italian prestige on the world's 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 Carnera, the Italian boxer, won the world heavyweight championship in 1933, and his fame was promoted through newsreels and through radio, which was then beginning to broadcast live fights across the population, reaching into people's homes as well as in squares. And of course, in cycling, you had the Giro d'Italia. Cycling was the biggest sport in Italy in the 1930s, and the Giro was hugely important. So you have between that and the modern sport of motorcar 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 Montevideo and took a ball with them or whatever. How well established is football in Italy at 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, but in Italy, it took off in the 1920s. Now, there had been soccer played from the 1890s And you're right, it's the story of expats and traitors traders and soldiers and sailors bringing it wherever they went. But it's also the story of Italians who went to work in England. So you see some of the main people, we'll see it with Pozzo, the great Italian manager of the 30s. 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 ended up befriending Manchester 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'll adopt 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 get 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 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 acknowledgments of professionalism, 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 as inauthentic. They are made-up teams, contrived teams. You know, the authorities have forced different clubs to amalgamate. So I was astounded to read Fiorentina, Roma, Napoli. These are all basically. These are all basically made-up clubs in the 1920s and 30s. Top-down. Top-down. And it could have gone either way. It's like you look at what happened to Welsh rugby after clubs were forced together in the wake of professionalism in the middle of the 1990s and the struggles of Welsh rugby to drive itself forward again. The complete opposite was experienced in Italy where clubs were forcibly merged under fascist leadership, but they provided a spectacle that was only in the making at that stage. Right. You must remember. You must remember that that world of the 1920s, it's not like there was generational devotion to a particular club. What this is, is a new world which has been forged, 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 and Cup and the fact that there was a rail system which allowed people to travel the country, both to play games and to support. to support the teams that were representing their city. You know, infrastructure promotes the act of supporting, doesn't it? You can't support your team home and away unless you can get to Napoli or Florence or wherever. And I guess that without that, that wouldn't have been possible. Without it, you just couldn't do it. And look, 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 advertises these games, reports on them, creates that celebrity culture around the best sports so 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 and 80s, I didn't go to games. There weren't that many games on TV. For me, it was actually. This is a weird thing to say about football. It was a kind of. It was a 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. 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 Rover. Roy the Rover, yeah. And everything that goes with that. And Roy the Rover is famously the most unlucky man in sport. Yeah. So many plane crashes. And they could not go on a South American tour without arriving to see that there was a new Junta in place. There would have been kidnaps. It was really difficult. And then to lose a leg in a bomb explosion was, for a soccer player, quite challenging. Exactly. Now, actually, you mentioned steamships and international travel. One aspect to this, I'm slightly jumping ahead. Does the Italian League have foreign players in the 1930s? Yes, it does. And the story 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, Enrico Maroni, who was a very wealthy businessman, was in Argentina on a business trip and he saw a player called Julio Libonatti, who was the son of Italian immigrants. And he went and he said, I'm bringing this guy back to my club. He had played for Argentina, won the Copa Sudamerica for what became the Copa America. And he said, I'm bringing this guy back to my club. 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 arrive. Well, that's like they decided to go. They were headhunted 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, the sons of Italian emigrants, because, of course, Italian emigration to South America had been enormous at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century. So these were brought in. These were the rimpatriati, the sons. So this way, so you have a problem if you're a fascist in 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 dynamic. So how do you square that with the bringing in of people from abroad? And what you do is you find the children of Italian emigrants and you bring them home and they're acceptable because their parents are Italian. Now, I know it's risky asking this of an Irishman who must have supported Jack Charlton's Ireland team in the 1990s, which, of course, was full of Englishmen. But are they inventing Italian ancestry for these people, Tony Cascarino style? Because that's what you guys did with Tony Cascarino. I think that's Tony Cascarino's biography, autobiography, made that claim. But I think it subsequently was proven afterwards that he did actually have the entitlement to a passport. Now, it is absolutely true that the Irish FA, Football Association of Ireland, courted foreigners. Not foreigners, but people born to the diaspora who may not have had a deep connection. A creative attitude to genealogy, I think. So 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 that have produced people over the last. I wish Tom was 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 in 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, you know, a massive international event. People are travelling by steamboat across the Atlantic, England, of course, don't go. Argentina and Uruguay play out the first final, which Uruguay wins in Montevideo. There's the famous stories about people crossing the river plate on ships. And going last in the fog and not 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, I suppose, in some ways, of something we'll talk about in a little bit, which is the 1930s. This is going to be a showcase for fascism. Basically, they want to ensure that Italy win, 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 it, of the competition. So Giorgio Vaccaro, who was the head of the Football Federation in Italy, said that the World Cup was a chance to show the organisational efficiency of fascist sport in general and football in particular. And he talked about the fact that this opportunity to display also Italian manhood on the world stage. So the Italian newspapers who covered it, they put it on their front pages because they were instructed to do so by the propaganda ministry and the Italian diplomatic corps went into 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 Cover Channel and beside the Fiorentina, in Fiorentina and that stadium still stood but that was built at the time the one in Bologna 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 they wanted people to come and to see what Italy was like so they basically invented tourist packages for people to to come to the World Cup and subsidize travel uh to Italy and and between the cities on the rail within Italy they arranged this a brilliant radio infrastructure so it so so radio was pushing into people's homes by the early 1930s but the Italians did more than that they in they 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 relayed 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 was everywhere it was put on tickets and the tickets were designed and printed to a really high standard so that people could bring them home with them so this is the construction of a memorabilia this iconography of the World Cup and 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 Mussolini put himself at at the center of the imagery of this he he kind of ordered the construction of the artist the the fabrication of the Coppa del Duce this trophy that was six times bigger than the trophy that was to be given to the World Cup winner so the Coppa del Duce will be presented to the winners alongside so that's a bit like Donald Trump's FIFA Peace Prize yes right one of the most ironically titled awards in history yeah so let's get to the um the finals themselves again England 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-flagellating way that we love to do is oh this was a sign of insularity and arrogance you don't necessarily think that I I think that it would be a fool who would argue that there wasn't a certain element of insularity and and arrogance in it there was a belief in the power still of of British football of the importance of the home international championship played every year and there was a certain arrogance involved in that but I don't think that's the defining thing I don't think that's the defining thing 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 we see an event the way it is now and we project its importance backwards but in 1930 1934 and the 1930s in general 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 to gather power it wasn't clear who else was going to play what really was involved in qualifying or were you just invited to to come so I think it's 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 favorites consider the best team certainly the best European team of the 1930s Austria the Wunder team as they were called they're famous for something I think called the whirl I don't exactly know what that is but basically they moved the ball very quickly and they were a great team uh their manager legendary figure called Hugo Meisel they beat Scotland 5-0 in 1931 and Scotland were not nothing in those days so impressive but they obviously don't win it because we know that Austria never won the world cup Italy win it Italy's route to the final there are a couple of incidents aren't they I mean if we'll actually just go to the semi-final against the Austrians Austria the favorites 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 from as far as we can tell what I'd be doing is we're going to be doing a lot of research and we're too harsh and saying Italy kicked their way to victory in a 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 who got in in their way and of course the truth of it is that every successful international team has a really good administration of people beside them who make sure are pushed to get a game played in a particular place with a particular 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 Austrian and Hungarian coaches were coming to Italy to coach the players in Italy but no foreign players beyond the Argentine or the South Americans were allowed to play in the Italian competition so what did the Italians do well they boasted their squad with five rimpatriati oh South Americans 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 Pozzo who had devoted themselves to the construction of the teams and although Pozzo wrote a letter after the semi-final to the best Austrian player Sindelar 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 all sorts of comment about Eklund the referee the Swedish referee who also reffed in the 38 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 on the way and this is like so many of the supposed bribery stories in the World Cup or there's so many stories of chicanery it remains case unproven and probably unprovable 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 late long after the game has 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 whatnot and websites love to repeat it and do you think that's a little bit the case with Italy in 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 so first of all it's a knockout competition so they're only playing four 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 chicanery and that are involved in it 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 I'm a big believer in oral history but I like a bit more than one single source um and it's not just that the idea of there being conspiracies is something that's part of the human condition it's much easier to imagine that your team has lost because of a conspiracy that as against the fact that they're simply not good enough yeah so they get to the final they play Czechoslovakia of course not yet dismembered by the Munich agreement and the Czechs actually went one nil up so that's with 20 bad 20 minutes and hit the post and hit the post but then orsi who is actually one of the South Americans yeah he's Argentinian he scores a great beats 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 called skiavio hits the the winner and two one two one bingo they've done it hurrah for Mussolini hurrah for Italy the founder of the World Cup gives them the trophy Mussolini gives them his Donald Trump trophy and the Italian press go absolutely berserk don't they and it's proved this to them is not just a sporting triumph but a moral and political triumph because that uh de la sport uh goes Italy is at the heart of the sports world so this is this is evidence of the greatness of the Italian male right comes to the world stage and you also have ilbarghello coming out and saying that victory was the affirmation of an entire people an 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 do it's not clear either that the game sold out oh my gosh which is which is really interesting because although Mussolini presented himself as queuing for a ticket before one of the games broader public interest a lot of people experience it on the radio or looking at newsreels but actually attending the game was limited in numbers and it's not clear that all the games sold out despite claims to the contrary interesting well this actually gets to the heart of what I was saying 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 newsreels and radio. So most people presumably experiencing this, well, actually three ways. They'll hear it on the radio, they'll see it at the cinema in a newsreel, and they'll also have read about it in the newspaper or in a magazine. Yes, and they will have seen the posters that are up, the visual imagery, these brilliant Italian propagandist posters that are put up and identified and done with such clarity and skill. But the rise of radio 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 '34 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 through with the. It's like the old video printer on. There's stories of people doing that. I mean, it's like the old video printer on. I mean, there's stories of people doing that. There's stories of people doing that in the 1930 World Cup in Buenos Aires. They're so excited and their face is dropping as a Uruguay keeps scoring goals. And the way they did it in 1930 in Buenos Aires was, the tap comes true, but they have a loudspeaker set up outside to project to the thousands of people who've gathered and just these stories of the tears that flowed after Uruguay. Why are you laughing at the Argentinians, Tom? Come on, it's part of it. People would think there was something wrong with me if I didn't. People wouldn't laugh at the Argentinians in the 1930 World Cup final. On the radio issue, so, so interesting that the commentator is called Nicolo Carossio and he replaces English terms then current in Italy, goal kick forward and so on. The word daisy cutter with Italian terminology because of the Italianization of the game, I guess. Yeah. And this Italianization, it was 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, there's a, this is an echo back to Calcio Fiorentina, the medieval game that was played or the early modern game in Florence, still like reenacted now with new teams and how important was there was this construction of a mythology that that itself was a recreation of harpist and the old Roman game. So this is, Italy remaking in the thirties, what had been already there in the early modern period, which itself was an extension of, of the old Roman world. So it's not alone that we kinda, we've been at this game for thousands of years, but we're not having the mere English with their words coming infecting how our commentary, which is reaching into homes because this is about Italy. Yeah. Cause 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 out. You want them to think this is an ancient Roman game with the heirs to the Roman empire. You know, we are taking up the baton from our predecessors and whatnot, which they have to be. I mean, they've won the world cup. Yeah. Football came home. Yeah. Right. 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, 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 World Cup? So even within fascism, there's an ambiguity around soccer and you can see it by the invention of a game by the national secretary of the fascist party, Augusto Turatti, who set 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. Sort of quidditch. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Quidditch without the broomstick as you go along. And that just, just did not take off. So that's within the party itself. You then have that addition of the rimpatriati, which of course is made really more difficult for those people who brought them in by the fact that some of those rimpatriati disappeared from the country in '35 and then into '36, when the invasion of Ethiopia and everything that came like that, and there's military service on the way. So that creates a problem. And then you have the idea of Karlo Levy writing in 1934, lamenting the fact that sport is now being used as propaganda, lamenting the fact that it's infantilizing a nation into acceptance of a regime, which he utterly opposes and which 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 in Italy. He wrote later of those years saying he had been at the matches. He was at the final in which the Czechs were beaten. And he said of that, he was disdainful. This is a communist who was disdainful of the idea that it was a fascist enterprise. He said, no one ever became fascist because they supported Vittorio Pozzo's Italian team. And he went on and he questioned, he said, these words of opium for the masses or the corruption of consciousness and souls. And then 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 use sports and culture to brainwash the masses and the masses duly fall into the line. They love a bread and they love bread and circuses. And that's just how it works. And this is a basically this entire series that we're doing is a quite a simple top-down story of nasty generals using sports to control the public. And you think it's, that's not correct, that it's more complicated than actually the public. Either are not interested in the, they don't see the political angle, it's irrelevant, they're not, they're not interested, or they resist it, or they can, they simultaneously, the people are more complicated and people can support Argentina winning in 1978 while still hating the regime, let's say. I suppose I don't like a history which is a mass ascription of either motivation or impact onto great swathes of people within any country. But that would be my starting point. Now it would 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 a more nuanced understanding of how this actually worked. And I think there are a series of questions that are worth asking in, in relation to this. So in what way would Italy and Italian society and fascism have behaved differently if the World Cup had not been played and won in '34 and in '36 or '38? We were in '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'll talk about how that manifested itself, Dominic, 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. 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 eaten bread soon forgotten 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 these things. 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, they're in fascist stadiums, there are lots of fascists there. But that doesn't mean that they're all complicit in the regime, although they have swallowed the 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 think that's right. That's, in a nutshell, that's it. Yeah. Okay, 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 the story of the World Cup. But Italy win, as you said, they win the football gold medal. at the 1936 Olympics, and for Mussolini, he takes this job as seriously as the world cup would you say i i think the fact of going to germany and that kind of developing relationship with hitler which comes after 36 onwards and and everything that happens in the way italian society is 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 of italian policy so the 36 olympic games was played there was a soccer competition which was won by the italians with a group of students and again this is looking forward the italians had staged the world student games twice under mussolini so this is about the creation of a new generation who are coming in imbued with these ideas that would not just be italian students who are thinking these things but also students who come from around the world to come to it italy to see the success of it and bring home to their countries a benign understanding and indeed a kind of a certain awe of what has been created in this new rome which is shown on the newsreels that we see around the place so he sends a team there an italian olympic team they come forward but they win the soccer and they play they play really really well and 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 olympics the olympic games is restricted to amateurs whereas in the world cup it's professionals so the next world cup 1938 uh this is held in france final in paris uh fifa had chosen france over germany to host the world cup i mean that's an interesting alternative history isn't it where the world cup 1938 is actually in germany but anyway it's in france france not for most of the 20th century actually well indeed for almost all the 20th century france not a big footballing nation at all bigger in rugby much yeah rugby and cycling i guess uh france's sports i mean some mad teams actually cuba are there the dutch east indies are there uh italy of course are there again one of the big european teams not there because it doesn't exist anymore austria and austria you might say germany will be brilliant in the 1938 world cup because they've absorbed the austrians but actually the angelus turns out to be a sporting problem rather than an asset because it's very difficult for them to integrate the austrians 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 a sports team knows just how difficult that is but it is so striking the 36 berlin olympics final italy beat austria 2-1 and austria doesn't even exist by the time of the 38 world cup when it comes to playing they're absorbed into it and this world cup this 38 world cup is really interesting it is 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 boo the italian team when they arrive into into play their games in france and i think that's that's a reminder i think that no country is ever one thing or another at a particular time and that although you may identify with with the national team and how it wins you can also use it to display your displeasure as well as your pleasure yeah it's but the italians win again with a completely different thing yeah just two players left from the from 34. so that is a tribute to vittorio potter the manager who's obviously a genuinely you know 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 and to play together for italy and to try and win and you know all this talk about oh the brazilians were bought off in in 38 they didn't play their best player leonidas in the in the in the semi-final who he scored a hat-trick in six five he's supposed to have had a calf injury though so it's it's so easy to look backwards and and say the reality of it is italy when the final four two there were a really really uh strong team there's just a lack of specificity about the supposed chicanery that went on yeah because again there's a claim hungary basically through the claim is that hungary went all the way to the final then through the final madly because they were hoping for italian help in revising the treaty of trianon which just seems utterly implausible to me i know the treaty of trianon is a big deal in hungary because basically hungary loses a lot of territory that thinks it's entitled to in transylvania and stuff but again it's such an unspecific and vague claim that the players somehow miraculously scored two goals but managed to throw the rest of the game it seems unlikely to me it seems to me that it would be difficult to uh bring home that bribe if uh if indeed you had been bought off on the strength of it yeah yeah exactly if you're if you're like the right back in the hungarian team you get home to budapest and you say well bad news is we lost the final the good news is i'm pretty confident that in a few years the italians will help us get transylvania back so it does seem very unlikely okay so let's just before we as we wrap up we're going to have a little bit of a talk likely okay so let's just before we as 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 denazification process that you get in west germany so the italians don't have a great bout of self-flagellation and soul searching there's no sort of de-fascistification of italy they're happy to continue celebrating these world cup wins they didn't see them as at all and inverted commas problematic do they no and it continued through to the stage of the 1990 world cup where you see angelo schiavio who scored the winning goal in the 34 final he gave an interview to gazette de la sport before where he said before those finals where he said i sincerely don't remember much of that day the final that he's talking about i actually learned the details i had forgotten only by reading the newspapers that talked about it for example that mussolini was present uh they said he was going to come but i hadn't noticed that from the field then the next day when we went to palazzo uh palazzo venezia at the 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 his hand in the air greeting us with the romans it was me who had 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 1990 six million people watched the documentary uh sorry a film that they made called il coloro uh de la vittoria which was the color victory about the 1934 world cup and it completely underplayed the fascistic context of the competition as indeed does the national football museum in in cover channel in florence so you and pozzo wrote a an autobiography didn't really mention the fascist element of of the success and of course jules remé himself 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 maybe posterity overblows the fascistic nature of this and actually if you were a player you might you know you're so fixated on you i mean 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 tarnished by association 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 of elite 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 in a kind of a interlocking fragments okay great and very last question before we wrap up of course next time we'll be talking about brazil callum our producer wants to know why italy's so bad right now why haven't they qualified for the last three world cups it comes down i think to the collapse of the italian league italy even we will all remember we watched soccer in the 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 which they are now the collapse of the italian club teams the ability to attract the very best players in the world has limited the success of the lead has 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 at bay because he was so overexcited anyway if you've enjoyed this first episode head to the rest is history.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 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