The 1938 World Cup and Legacy

This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. It's easy to ditch overpriced wireless with Mint Mobile . Sign up online at mint mobile. com slash history and get three months of premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. Forty five dollars upfront payment required, equivalent to fifteen dollars per month. New customers on first three month plan only speeds slower above forty gigabytes on a limited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details . This episode is brought to you by TikTok . Believe it or not, history isn't just in textbooks. It comes to life every day on TikTok . Millions of people are exploring the history of music, fashion, food, and art and discovering new facts about the things they love . One scroll could take you from the roots of jazz to the flavors of ancient kitchens . And the next might reveal a quirky fact about how modern traditions came to be . Discover the past in new ways on TikTok where curiosity never gets old. I sold my car in Carbon a last night. Well, that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer, down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think. Wow, you need to relax. I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood? I think it's laminate. Okay, yeah, that's good, that's close enough. Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Car vana. Pick up these means like 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 Cu p 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 personal ities 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 nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies . That's the team of Pale and Gezigno and Jess and all these great players . The team that won in nineteen seventy people say the best team of all time , but this was a point where Brazil had a military dictatorship. So we'd be looking at the milit howary dictat orship of Brazil from nineteen sixty four uses football. We'll be looking at arguably the most controversial World Cup of all, which is nineteen seventy eight Argentina. Some of you may remember we did a series about Ava Peron , and this is effectively the sequel to that. So we're looking at the military junta of the late seventies and how they used the seventy eight World Cup and the team of Mario Kempez, which won against the Dutch in the final. Big story in Argentina , but we'll be kicking off with Italy and with Mussolini's fascist regime and the World Cups of nineteen thirty four and nineteen thirty eight. 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 Restors 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 Brazil in the nineteen sixties and seventies and Argentina in nineteen seventy eight, 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 great est. We have the goat, as we like to call him , the self styled Irish national treasure. No Professor of history at University College, Dublin. Paul Rouse, Paul wel,come back to the rest of History. It's great to have you on. Thanks for William Donick. 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, impeccable timalling , Chelsea have decided today to rip up the pitch and do loads of building work on the stadium. He said, Paul, you will be competing with reversing vehicles, diggers, bulldozers, general men in kind of yellow vests, but you're pumped for that, right 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. Yeah, nationally in Ireland, but also internationally I teach a second year module on the global history of sport across the last two hundred fifty years in particular. Lots of 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 have been a number of scandals in the Iran players had 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 politicized and used by political lead ers 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 America, I suppose the drumpest focus on immigration and on the projection of America first . And that is in collision with the express hashtag. If you look at Gianni infantino, the head of FIFA's Instagram page. He seems to be unable to post without pulling 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 this is not new the whole way through from nineteen thirty and like this is a political story the whole way through the relationship and there was a president of FIFA, an English man in the fifties and sixties, Stanley Rouse, no relation. He'd no E in his name. He had this whole notion that sporting politics and soccer and politics in particular 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 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. There are 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 eighteen nineties onwards , all the way through to the nineteen eighties . In research for this series, I went back and I looked at preview shows of the World Cup and a nineteen seventy eight preview show, Kevin Kegan refers to soccer in his ITV punditry. On the title page of Matt Busby's autobiography from nineteen seventy three, soccer and football is used interchangeably. This is something that changed in the nineteen nineties, 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 Tulamore in Afley, football is gaelic football. And 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 nineteen thirties in particular and Mussolini. So if we start with Mussolini and Italian fascism. Mussolini comes to power in october nineteen twenty two. 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 nineteen twenties. 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 trident 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 contradist ion to what had been there previously. And it led to when you see the footage now of Mussolini or you see the photographs of them, it's almost it's almost cartoonish in its exaggerated nature in the historionics 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 in the beginning he wanted war . But sport was part of the whole projection of what he was trying to do in creating as he saw it and knew Italy. So there's 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 fail, ed 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 aggress ion that you need to attack Abyssinia or Greece or whoever it might be. The way they did it was twofold. It was threefold really. There's the projection of Mussolini himself as the country's greatest sportsman, these agery of him out skiing, bare chested and out riding horses. And there's images of him. He looks terrible on the 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 hing wrong with that pole? No, he was 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 twenties into the thirties, an extra three thousand sports fields built around Italy in the world 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 the best Italian sports people would be able to compete cycling and in boxing and ultimately in soccer and in the Olympic games when they went outside the country. So just 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 nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, what you see in the USSR in Italy, obviously in Nazi Germany in the nineteen thirties is the development of what we'd call totalitarianism. So the idea that top down politics will invade every aspect of life and leisure and recreation are absolutely central parts of this. If you've got a new sport s 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 twentieth 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 is an engagement in sport , it's both an opportunity to channel people in certain directions, but also in an opportunity to channel their behavior as well. So you 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 either the destruction or the colonization of organisations 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 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 know from your notes and it actually runs through all three of the stories we'll do is involvement in the Army because the Army in Italy are training physical instructors aren't they in Brazil, I mean actually the Brazilian football manager in the nineteen seventies Claudio Coutino was a captain in the Brazilian army. And then obviously the army in Argentina using the nineteen seventy eight victory . So do you think there's an obviously militaristic side to this? And would that have been obvious to Italians in nineteen thirty or something? Well, the teachers who were being trained were being trained by army instructors who were brought in and you can see by thesem Ary officers who trained the physical fitness instructors who were going around the place produced. By nineteen thirty six there were fourteen thousand 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 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 twenties and thirties, these notions expanded and the 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 ele ment that even in the twenties, Mussolini is trying to use sporting triumphs abroad to bolster his regime at home. It's not that Mussolini arrived in nineteen twenty two and there was the immediate creation of a fascist state. This was change that happened, a lot of change, but it happened through the twenties . So you have by the end of the nineteen nineteen twenty eight, 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 thirty two, 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 thirty six 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 nineteen thirties was the World Heavyweight Champion . Whoever that was at a particular year and Primo Carnea, the Italian boxer won the World Heavyweight Championship in nineteen thirty three and his fame was promoted through newsreels and through radio, which was then beginning to broadcast live fights and disperse them across the population reaching into people's homes as well as in squares. And of course , in cycling, you had the Italian, cycling was the biggest sport in Italy in the nineteen thirties and the Giro was hugely important . So you have between that and the modern sport of motor car racing where Italian dri vers, 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 nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties , 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 nineteenth 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 twenties. The story of the game on European soil is the story of incredible explosion across much of Europe in the twenties and in the thirties . It was hugely popular we'll say in Hungary and Austria but in Italy it took off in the nineteen twenties. Now there had been soccer played from the eighteen nineties and you're right is the story of expats and 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 will see it with Pozzo, the great Italian manager of the thirties . 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 mas ited players and managers, but that connection of commerce and of finance of trade is important and you get an Anglophil ia 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 eighteen nineties and before the war, you had Italian clubs being established playing games with each other, hugely influenced by England. But after the nineteen twenties , 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 establish 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 acknowledgement 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 nineteen twenties. 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 amalgamy. So I was astounded Forentina ,, Roma Napoli , these are all basically made up clubs in the nineteen twenties and thirties. Top down. Top down. And it could have gone either way. Like you look at what happened to Welsh rugby after clubs were forced together in the wake of professionalism in the middle of the nineteen nineties and the struggles of Welsh rugby to drive itself forward again, the complete opposite was experienced in Italy where clubs were forcibly merged fascist leadership, but they provided a spectacle that was only in the making at that stage. Right? You must remember that that world of the nineteen twenties , 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 nineteen thirties in particular from the early nineteen thirties 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 the teams that were representing their city. Infrastructure promotes the act of supporting, doesn't it? You can't support your team home in a way 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 seventies natives, 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 experienced 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 Roads. Yeah, and everything that goes with that and Roy the Rover is famously the most unlucky man in sport . Yeah So many plane crashes. So many plane crashes and they not go on a South American tour without arriving to see that there was a new junta in place in the kidnapped where they were kidnapped. They just was really difficult and then to lose a leg in a bomb explosion was for a soccer player quite challenging . Exactly . No , actually you mentioned steamships and international travel. One aspect of this, I'm slightly jumping ahead. Does the Ital enik foreaign players in the nineteen thirties ? 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 is a very wealthy businessman, was in Argentina on a business trip and he saw a player called Julio Libonati, who was the son of Italian immigrants, and he went and said, I' hem bringing this guy back to my club. He had played for Argentina, won the Cup of Suit America for what became the Cup of America for Argentina . And he won the Italian championship for Torino by virtue of his performances. So what you then had was between nineteen twenty nine and the early nineteen forties, more than one hundred South Americans arrive , well, that's like they decided to go. They were head 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 emigration to South America had been enormous at the end of the nineteenth century in the early twentieth century. So these were brought in. These were the Rimpatriati , the sun. So this way you have a problem in 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 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 immigrants 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 Island team in the nineteen nineties, 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, you 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 the Irish FAA Football Association of Ireland courted foreigners creative support not foreigners, but people born to the diaspora who may not have had a deep connection c.reative A attitude genealogy I think is which in fair but 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 deep from your team's people over the last one. 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 nineteen thirty. The First World Cup is held in Uruguay. We did an episode about it in twenty twenty two 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 traingve byll steamboat s across the Atlantic . England of course don't go . Argentina and Uruguay play out the first final Madruguay wins in Montevideo. These famous stories about people crossing the river plate on ships and again lasting the fog and making the game. Exactly. But nineteen thirty four 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 nineteen thirty six Olympics. This is going to be a showcase for fascism. It's 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 of the purpose of it, of the competition , so Giorgio Vicaro, who is the head of theotb Fallo 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 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 twenty five years ago and played soccer on the fields right beside incover channel and beside the Forentina, the Stadio Caminale in Forentina. 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 city looking down across everything. They did a third thing. They wanted people to come and to see what Italy was like. So they basically invented tourist packages for people to come to the World Cup and subsidize travel to Italy and between the cities on the rail within Italy . They arranged this brilliant radio infrastructure. So radio was pushing into people's homes by the early nineteen thirties, but the Italians did 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 relayed to twelve 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 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 the Italians were right at the heart of this kind of idea of sporting merch or souvenirs to bring away with them. And of course , Mussolini put himself at the center of the im agery of this, he kind of ordered the construction of the artist the fabrication of the Copa del Duce , this trophy that was six times bigger than the trophy that was to be given to the World Cup winner the. So cope with Del Ducci 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 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 think that it would be a fool who would argue that there wasn't a certain element of insulity and arrogance in it. There was a belief in the power still 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 reason. I don't think that's the big 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 nineteen thirty, nineteen thirty four in the nineteen thirties in general, the World Cup was very much into 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 considered the best team certainly the best European team of the nineteen thirties Austria. The Vunda team as they would call 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 legendary figure called Hugo Meisel. They beat Scotland five Nil in nineteen thirty one and Scotland were nothing in those days, so impressive , but they obviously don't win it because we know that Austria have never won the World Cup. Italy win it. Italy's route to the final there are a couple of incidents aren't there? If we actually just go to the semifinal 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 swatch the game. So we're reliant on reports . But from as far as we can tell, would I be'd too harsh in saying that 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 a tar out of anyone who got in their way. And of course , the truth of it is that every success international team has a really good administrative people beside them who make sure or push 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 will see that when it comes to the Brazilian teams of the sixties and seventies 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 Argentina the South Americans were allowed playing the Italian competition. So what did the Italians do? Well, they bolstered their squad with five Rim Patriati. South Americans in 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 puzzle who had devoted himself to the construction of the teams . And although Puzzle wrote a letter after the semifinal to the best Austrian player Cindylar 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 nill victory. And there's been all sorts, all sort s of comment about Eckland , the referee, the Swedish referee who also refed in the thirty eighth and nineteen fifty 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 in the Wayhouse. And this is like so many of the supposed bribery stories in the World Cup are the so many stories of chicanery, it remains case unproven and probably unprovable. Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it? And 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 corrupt, ion, match fixing, and so on. When you trace them back , there's often a single source much later long after the game has taken place, which is then amplified by subsequent reports and it becomes 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 nineteen thirty four 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 posterity. 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 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 it more than one single source . 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 the conspiracy against it 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 they'll up so that twenty bad twenty minutes hit the post and hit the post . But then Orsi who is actually one of the South Americans Argentinian. He scores a great reads a couple of men scores a great goal and then it goes to extra time. The first World Cup finals go to extra time and a guy called Sciarvio hits the winner and two one two one Bingo the Dunner. Hurrah for Mussolini, hurrah for Italy, Jules Rime, the founder of the World Cup gives them the trophy. Mussolini gives them his Donald Trump trophy . And the Italian press go absolutely burred, don't they? And it's proved this to them is not just a sporting triumph, but a moral and political triumph. Gazette de la Sport goes, Italy is at the heart of the sports world. So this is evidence of the greatness of the Italian male rights comes to the world stage . And you also have Il Bargelo 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. Muslin delighted the regime delighted. The obvious question though which may have cured some listeners already . I mean, most people don't go to the games, right? Because you can only fit sixty thousand people into a stadium or whatever. So how do I 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 are looking at news reels , 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 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 twentieth century and so vital to dictatorships in particular which are news reels 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 then and 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 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 nineteen thirties. I know radio was beginning to broadcast live sport by the early nineteen twenties in America and then across Europe into twenty four and then across to Australia. But the reality of it was that mass radio ownership was really a product of from the mid nineteen thirties onwards. So by thirty four in Italy, more and more Italians had radios and there was 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 old video printer on the stories of people did in the nineteen thirty World Cup in Buenos Ares, they're so excited and they're kind of their face is dropping as the Uruguay keeps scoring goals. And the way they did it in nineteen thirty in Buenos Ares was the tap comes true, but they have a loud speaker set up outside to project to the thousands of people who've gathered and just these stories of the tears that flowed after your choir wind. Why are you laughing at the Argentinian stamak oin as one of us people would think there was something wrong with me if I didn't laugh at the Archon's place in the nineteen thirty World Cup final . On the radio issue, so interesting that the commentator is called Nicolo Cor oscio 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 Italian ization of the game, I guess. Yeah. And this Italianization was really interesting as well. It's even the adoption of the word calcio. So it's not football or it's not it's not football as it became in South Americ a, but Calcio takes on. And of course, there's a this is an echo back to Calcio Forentina, the medieval game that was played or the early modern game in Florence still like re enacted now new teams and how important was there. It was this construction of a mythology that that itself was a recreation of harpest on 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 the old Roman world . So it's not alone that we kind of 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, because if you're Mussolini in the mid nineteen thirties, 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 bat on from our predecessor's monarch, which they have to be. I mean, they've won the World Cup . Yeah, football came home. Yeah, friends. But 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 nineteen thirty four welcome . 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 Turati 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 fascist the fascist version of soccer didn't kick off. So the quidditch of Yes, exactly . Quidditch without the broomstick as you go along and that just did not take off. So that's within the party itself. You then have that addition of the Rimpatriot, which of course is made really more difficult for those people who brought them in by the fact that some of those Rim Patriati disappeared from the country in thirty five and then into thirty six when the invasion of Ethiopia and everything that came out of his military service on the way. So that creates a problem. And then you have the idea of Carol Carol Levy writing in nineteen thirty four , 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 propagand a . 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 Redic i, the celebrated mathematician and communist from the nineteen thirties 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 dis dainful 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 down, he went on and he questions and says, These words of opium for the masses are 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 sport and culture to brainwash the masses and the masses duly fall into line. They love they love Bretonir Ccus . And that's just how it works. And this is basically this entire series that we're doing is a quite a simple top down story nasty generals using sport to control the public . And you think that's not correct, that it's more complicated and actually the public either are not interested in the they don't see the political angle. It's irrelevant, they're not interested, or they resist it or, they can they simultaneous that people are more complicated and people can support Argentina winning in nineteen seventy eight 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. 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 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 thirty four and in thirty six or thirty eight Run thirty six or the Berlin Olympics when they won the socc er thirty eight 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 ' thirty six really have altered the course of Nazi Germany. Similarly, the Brazilian military dictatorship, which oversaw the winning of the World Cup in nineteen seventy , by the end of the seventies, its power was in severe decline. And we'll talk about how that manifests itself dominic in the next episode . But equally, in ' seventy eight, Argentina won the World Cup. By eighty two, 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 it 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 lots of 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 or that they have unthinkingly swallowed their 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' thinkt that's right. 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 nineteen thirty six 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 nineteen thirty six 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 thirty six onwards and everything that happens in the way Italian society is beginning to change and move closer to Germany , albeit with resist ance from quite a number of Italian people who don't like this. They don't like this drift of Italian policy . So the thirty six 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 Italy to see the success of it and bring home to their countries a, benign understanding and indeed a kind of a certain a e 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 and the World Cup by this point is restricted to amateurs where,as soc thecer in the Olympic Games is restricted to amateurs, whereas in the World Cup it's professionals. So the next World Cup nineteen thirty eight , this is held in France , final in Paris . FIFA had chosen France Germany to host the World Cup. I mean, that's an interesting alternative history, isn't it? Where the World Cup nineteen thirty eight is actually in Germany. But anyway, it's in France . France, for most of the twentieth century actually, well indeed for almost all the twentieth century, France not a big footballing nation at all. Bigger in rugby, much big, much 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 you might say Germany will be brilliant in the nineteen thirty eight World Cup because they've absorbed the Austrians. But actually the Anchalus 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 thirty sixth Berlin Olympics final Italy beat Austria two one and Austria doesn't even exist by the time of the thirty eight World Cup when it comes to playing. They're absorbed into it and this world cup, this thirty eight World Cup is really interesting. It is it is, I think we have to say it's something of an afterthought from thirty four . And it's interesting to look at it about what's going to come, about what comes next . And you can see Italian anti fascist protesters boo the 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 at a particular time and that although you may identify with the national team and that wind, 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 thirty four. So that is a tribute to Victoria Potter, the manager who's obviously a genuinely you know, for you 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 the Brazilians were bought off in thirty eight. They didn't play their best player Leonidas in the in the semifinal who he'd scored a hatcherick in six five years supposed to have had a calf injury though. So it's so easy to look backwards and say the reality of it is Italy win the final four two there were a really, really strong team. There's just a lack of specificity about the supposed chicanery that went on because again there's a cl aim 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 Triano, which just seems ly imp ablsolauteusible to me. I know the treaty Trion was a big deal in Hungary because it basically Hungary loses a lot of territory that things 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 bring home that bribe if indeed you're being bought off on the strength of it. Yeah . Yeah, exactly. If you feel 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 parent back. So it does seem very unlikely. Okay, so that's just before 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 denotification 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 fascistific ation Italy . They're happy to continue celebrating these World Cup wins. They don't see them as at all and adverticom as problematic, do they? No, and it continued through to the stage of the nineteen ninety World Cup where you see Angelos Ciavio who scored the winning goal in the thirty four final. He gave an interview to Gazette Delosport 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 . They said he was going to come, but I hadn't noticed that from the field. Then the next day when we went to Palazzio Palazzo Vinzia , where the famous balcony is, he said some of us stretched out our hand to shake his but,t this wasn' so good because Mussolini raised 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 nineteen ninety, six million people watched a documentary sorry, a film that they made called El Coloro Dela Vitorio, which was the color of victory about the nineteen thirty four World Cup and it completely underplayed the fascistic context of the competition, as indeed does the National Football Museum in Cover Channel in Florence . So you and Pozzo wrote an autobiography and didn't really mention the fascist element of the success and of course Juliet Rime 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 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, sport smen and women are always very, very single minded . Perhaps they 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 Angel, your victory has been tarnished by its 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 Leedsburg 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. Callum, our producer, wants to know why Italy is 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'll all remember who watched soccer in the nineties and into the two thousands, the strength of the Italian league, the strength of Italian club teams. So the collapse 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 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 history dot 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 twenty first of June, it's Father's Day, but not just here in Britain. It's also Father's Day on the twenty first 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 Restorsist Hory. And that is why we are offering an amazing twenty five percent 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 say 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 patriarchs want, 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 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 Restorsistory Hub Cl 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 that's ever been in history, ever . And we say this as the presenters of the rest is history, you know what to do . This episode is brought to you by Google Chr