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

How did Benito Mussolini’s regime in the 1930s use sport to spread his ideology and prepare Italy for war? What infrastructure and propaganda strategies did he use to make the 1934 World Cup a showcase for fascism? And, did this form of propaganda actually work? In this brand new The Rest Is History Club mini series, Dominic is joined by Paul Rouse to talk about dictatorships’ connections to football World Cups. Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠⁠restishistory.com⁠⁠. To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠⁠ _______ Advertise with us: ⁠[email protected]⁠ _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:03Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 2:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Jezinho and Jéssen and all these great players, the team that

• 2:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Peron, 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 78 World Cup and the team of Mario Kempes, 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

• 3:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  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

• 4:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 4:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Professor of history at University College Dublin, Paul Rouse. Paul, welcome back to The Rest Is History. It's great to have you on.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Thanks, William Dominic.

• 4:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  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?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  I'm ready.

• 5:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  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?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  That's what I spend most of my time teaching and working on in University College Dublin is the history of sport.

• 5:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Nationally in Ireland, but also internationally, I teach a second year module on the global history of sport.

• 5:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Across the last 250 years in particular.

• 5:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Lots to talk about here. And obviously, it's very much in the news at the moment, the World Cup and politics. Because the World Cup is being held in the US, Donald Trump has tried to take ownership of it. There've been a number of scandals. The Iran players 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 politicised and used by, you know, political leaders of one kind or another?

• 6:08Speaker 02

  The idea of soccer being politicised is nothing at all new. What is new is the precise manner in which it's revealing itself. In the case of America, 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 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 not new, the whole way through.

• 6:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  From 1930. And like, this is a political story. The whole way through the the relationship and there was a president of FIFA, an English man 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 not be put into the same wheelhouse, but they've always been there.

• 7:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so I 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?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Well, it's it's in my world, it's logical to do it. And you're right, there is a 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's 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 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

• 8:35Speaker 02

  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, Tullamore and Offaly, football is Gaelic football.

• 8:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, whatever they are in the early nineteen twenties. So Labour unrest, there's the scars of the First World War, there are a lot of disaffected veterans and so on.

• 9:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  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?

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Well, Mussolini was promising a new world. And he looked for a distinction from what he considered the failed regime. This is, this is a tried and tested technique across the world from regimes who, 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, to what had been there previously.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  And, and it led to, when you see the footage now of Mussolini, or you see the photographs of him, it's almost, it's, it's almost cartoonish in its, in its exaggerated nature, in the histrionics were there. But it, 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 new Italy.

• 10:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, 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.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  The way they did it was twofold, 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.

• 11:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Nothing wrong with that, Paul.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  No, 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 3,000 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, although there were women involved in sport, who would be able to people an army.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  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've 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 are absolutely 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?

• 13:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  And how much is it distinctively, well, either totalitarian or distinctively fascist?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  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, it's an engagement in in sport. It's both an opportunity to channel people in certain directions, but also an opportunity to channel their behaviour 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 colonisation of organisations that were run by the communists in Italy or by the Catholic Church and their identification with the new regime.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  And one element of this, actually, I know 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 training into 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? Would that have been obvious to Italians in 1930 or something?

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Well, the teachers who were being trained were being trained by army instructors who were 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 Argentinean 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.

• 15:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 at which, even in the twenties, Mussolini is trying to use sporting triumphs abroad to bolster his regime at home.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  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 twenty, nineteen twenty-eight, 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 thirty-two, the Italians are parading at the Olympic Games in L A 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 fourth. So this is a movement that is really gathering momentum in terms of Italian prestige on the world sporting stage.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  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 Carnera, 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 dispersed them 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

• 18:13Speaker 02

  you see the whole creation of an international sporting presence for Italy, which had not previously been the case.

• 18:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 and months of a day and took a ball with them or whatever. How well established is football in Italy at this point in the 20s?

• 19:00Speaker 02

  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 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

• 19:43Speaker 02

  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 eighteen nineties and before the war you'd you 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,

• 20:24Speaker 02

  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 the into various organizations, was to essentially take control of Italian soccer by organizing the establishment in 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,

• 21:09Speaker 02

  the acceptance, though not the outward acknowledgements 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.

• 21:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 the authorities have forced different clubs to amalgamate. So I was astounded to read Fiorentina, Roma, Napoli. These are all basically made up clubs in the nineteen twenties and thirties, top down.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Top down, and it could have gone either ways. 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 to drive itself forward again. The complete opposite was experienced in in Italy, where clubs were forcibly merged under fascist leadership, but they provided a spectacle that was only in the making at that stage.

• 22:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, 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.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Without it, you just couldn't do it. And look, the birth of 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 sport, 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.

• 23:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's so interesting, because actually, when I think even about how I experienced football growing up in the seventies and eighties, 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 experience, 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.

• 24:08Speaker 02

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

• 24:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  So many plane crashes.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  So many plane crashes and they could not go on a South American tour without arriving to see that there was a new Hooton place in the

• 24:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  They're always been kidnapped.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Kidnapped. It was really difficult. And then to lose a leg in a bomb explosion was, for a soccer player, quite challenging.

• 24:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. Now, actually, you mentioned steamships and international travel. One aspect of this, I'm slightly jumping ahead. Does the Italian league have foreign players in the 1930s?

• 24:48Speaker 02

  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 Libonati, 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 for Argentina. And he won the Italian Championship for Torino by virtue of his performances. So what you then had was between

• 25:28Speaker 02

  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 of Italian immigrants because of course, Italian emigration to South America had been enormous at the end of the 19th century, in the early 20th century. So these were brought in, these were the Rim Patriate, the sons. So this way, so you have a problem. If you're a fascist in Italy, because you're talking about the blood,

• 26:10Speaker 02

  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 immigrants and you bring them home and they're acceptable.

• 26:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Because their parents are Italian.

• 26:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  I think that's Tony Cascarino's 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.

• 27:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  A creative.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  Not foreigners, but people born to diaspora who may not have had a deep connection.

• 27:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  A creative attitude to genealogy, I think.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Which, 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.

• 27:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 a massive international event. People are travelling by steamboat across the Atlantic. England, of course, don't go. Argentina, Uruguay play out the first final, which Uruguay wins in Montevideo. There's the famous stories about people crossing the River Plate on ships.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  And going last in the fog and not making the game.

• 28:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 1936 Olympics. 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?

• 28:27Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  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 Coverciano and beside the Fiorentina, the Stadio Comunale 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 stadium, 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 subsidised travel to Italy and between the cities on the rail within Italy. They arranged this brilliant radio infrastructure.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  So radio was pushing into people's homes by the early 1930s, 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 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 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 memory, be it this iconography of the World Cup.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  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 centre of the imagery of this. He kind of ordered the construction of the, 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. So the Copa del Duce would be presented to the winners alongside.

• 31:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that's a bit like Donald Trump's FIFA Peace Prize.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  One of the most ironically titled awards in history.

• 31:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  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?

• 31:32Speaker 02

  I think that it would be a fool who would argue that there wasn't a certain element of insularity and arrogance in it. There was a belief in the power still of British football, of the importance of the 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 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, in the 1930s in general, the World Cup was very much in the making. FIFA was an organisation which was still, relatively speaking, an amateur organisation, which was only beginning to gather power.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  It wasn't clear who else was going to play, what really was involved in qualifying, or were you just invited to come? So I think it's wrong to say that this is simply a mark of arrogance and insularity.

• 32:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Some good teams do go. I guess the best team, the most obviously, you might have said the obvious favourites, consider the best team, certainly the best European team of the 1930s, Austria, the Wunder team, as they were called. They were 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. Their manager, legendary figure called Hugo Mizel, 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 have never won the World Cup. Italy win it. Italy's route to the final, there are a couple of incidents, aren't there? I mean, if we actually just go to the semi-final against the Austrians.

• 33:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Austria, the favourites. Would I be being too harsh in saying, now, obviously, there's an issue here, which is that we can't watch the game. So we're reliant on reports. But from as far as we can tell, would I be too harsh in saying Italy kicked their way to victory? In a, in a game that was dubiously refereed.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  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 tar 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 administrative 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

• 34:11Speaker 02

  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 play in the Italian competition. So what did the Italians do? Well, they boasted their squad with five Rim Patriati.

• 34:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, South Americans in Italy, yeah.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  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 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 1-0 victory. And there's been all sorts, all sorts of comment about Eklund.

• 35:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  The referee.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  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 home. 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.

• 35:48Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 36:31Speaker 02

  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 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. 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

• 37:15Speaker 02

  of a conspiracy against it as against the fact that they're simply not good enough.

• 37:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 we're 20 bad 20 minutes ago.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  And hit the post.

• 37:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  And hit the post. But then Orsi, who is actually one of the South Americans.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's Argentinian.

• 37:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  He scores a great, beats a couple of men, scores a great goal. And then it goes to extra time. The first World Cup final to go to extra time. And a guy called Skjavio hits the winner. And

• 37:47Speaker 02

  Two one.

• 37:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Two one. Bingo. They've done it. Harafa Mussolini, Harafa Italy, Jules Rimet, 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.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Gazetta della Sport goes, Italy is at the heart of the sports world. So this is, this is evidence of the greatness of the Italian male when it 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.

• 38:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Mussolini delighted, the regime delighted. The obvious question, though, which may have occurred to 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

• 38:48Speaker 02

  It's not clear either that the game sold out.

• 38:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  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 experienced 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.

• 39:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 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 then and they'll also have read about it in the newspaper or in a magazine.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  So by 34 in Italy, more and more Italians had radios and there is that public square broadcast so that it could be experienced.

• 40:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  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 with the it's like the old Viddy printer on.

• 40:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's stories of people doing it in 1930 World Cup in Buenos Aires. They're they're so excited and they're kind of their faces dropping as Uruguay keeps scoring goals.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  And the way they did it in 1930 in Buenos Aires was the tap comes through, but they have a loudspeaker set up outside to project to the thousands of people who've gathered and and the just these stories of the tears that flowed after after Uruguay win. Why are you laughing at the at the Argentinian stomach?

• 41:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Go on, it's part of it. People would think there was something wrong with me if I didn't laugh at the Ashen Stadium in the 1930 World Cup final. On the radio issue, so, so interesting that the commentator is called Niccolo Corosio and he replaces English terms then current in Italy, goal kick, forward and so on. The word daisy cutter.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  With Italian terminology because of the Italianisation of the game, I guess.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and this Italianisation 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, 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 harvest on the old Roman game. So this is Italy remaking in the 30s, what had been already there in the early modern period, which itself was an extension of, of the old Roman world.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  So it's not alone to be kind of, we've been at this game for thousands of years, but we're not having the mere English with their words.

• 42:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Coming, infecting.

• 42:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  How our commentary, which is reaching into homes because this is about Italy.

• 42:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, because if you're Mussolini in the mid 1930s, you don't want people thinking this is the game of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain that we're trying to have. 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.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, football came home.

• 43:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, 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. Slight problem that some of your best players are not actually Italian. Then there's also, there are also people who are anti-fascists. So there's a lot of anti-fascists in Italy. How do they react to the nineteen thirty four World Cup?

• 43:40Speaker 02

  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 that kind of a fascist, the fascist version of soccer, didn't kick off.

• 44:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sort of quidditch of.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Yeah. Quidditch without the broomstick as you go around. And that just, just did not take off. So that's within the party itself. You then have that addition of the Rim Patriate, which of course is made really more difficult for those people who brought them in by the fact that some of those Rim Patriate disappeared from the country in thirty five and then into thirty six, 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 Carlo, Carlo Levy writing in, in nineteen thirty four, lamenting the fact that sport is now being used as propaganda,

• 44:41Speaker 02

  lamenting the fact that it's infantilizing a nation into acceptance of a regime which he utterly opposes and which he, he fought against. And I do think in all of this, you have to remember that it's a real danger that you believe the propaganda. So that is to say, we accept that there was propaganda, but to move from that to say that the propaganda was successful is problematic. And you see it with, for example, Lucio Lombardo Radici, 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 disdainful of the idea

• 45:25Speaker 02

  that it was a fascist enterprise. He said, no one ever became fascist because they supported Vittorio Pozzo's Italian team. And he, he went down, he went on and he questioned, he said, 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.

• 45:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 bread and circuses, and that's just how it works. And this is a, basically, this entire series that we're doing is quite a simple, top-down story of nasty generals using sport to control the public. And you think 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 simultaneously, the people are more complicated,

• 46:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  and people can support Argentina winning in 1978 while still hating the regime, let's say.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  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 34 and in 36 or 38? In 36, with the Berlin Olympics, when they won the soccer, and 38,

• 47:20Speaker 02

  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 seventies, its power was in severe decline and we'll talk about how that manifested 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

• 48:05Speaker 02

  the moment? What is the legacy of that success? Is it eaten bread, soon forgotten when it comes to sport? Sport is unbelievably protean 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.

• 48:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, 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 or that they have unthinkingly 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.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  I think that's right. That's, in a nutshell, that's it.

• 49:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Okay, so 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?

• 49:25Speaker 02

  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 and 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 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

• 50:06Speaker 02

  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 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 Olympic Games is restricted to amateurs, whereas in the World Cup it's professionals.

• 50:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the next World Cup, 1938, this is held in France, final in Paris. 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 a, for most of the 20th century, actually, well, indeed for almost all the 20th century, France, not a big footballing nation at all.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  Bigger in rugby.

• 51:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Much, yeah, much rugby and cycling, I guess, are France's sports. I mean, some bad teams, actually Cuba are there, the Dutch East Indies are there, Italy, of course, are there again. One of the big European teams not there because it doesn't exist anymore, Austria. And Austria, you might say Germany will be brilliant in the 1938 World Cup because they've absorbed the Austrians. But actually, the Anschluss 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?

• 51:45Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  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 wins, you can also use it to display your displeasure as well as your pleasure.

• 52:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but the Italians win again with a completely different team.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, just two players left.

• 52:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  From the.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  From thirty four.

• 52:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that is a tribute to Vittorio Pozzo, the manager, who's obviously a genuinely, you know, for all you people, 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.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  He seems to have had an extraordinary capacity to motivate people to play together in a 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 thirty eight. They didn't play their best player Leonidas in the, in the, in the semi final, who had 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 win the final four two. They were a really, really strong team. There's just a lack of specificity about the supposed chicanery that went on in thirty eight.

• 53:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Triennon, which just seems utterly implausible to me. I know Treaty of Triennon is a big deal in Hungary because it basically. Hungary loses a lot of territory that things is 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.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  It seems to me that it would be difficult to bring home that bribe if indeed you had been bought off on the strength of it.

• 54:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. 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 that's just before we, as we wrap up. How did 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 don't see them as at all, in inverted commas, problematic, do they?

• 55:10Speaker 02

  No, and it continued through to the stadium, the 1990 World Cup, where you see Angelo Schiavio, who scored the winning goal in the 34 final. He gave an interview to Gazetta dello 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. 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, Palazzo Venezia, where the famous balcony is, he said, "Some of us stretched out our hand to shake his,

• 55:54Speaker 02

  but this wasn't 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, Raiuno, the main Italian television. Station in nineteen ninety, six million people watched the documentary, sorry, a film that they made called Il Coloro della Vittorio, 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 in Corvacciano in Florence. So you can,

• 56:34Speaker 02

  and Pozzo wrote a an autobiography and didn't really mention the fascist element of of the success. And of course, Giudice Rimae himself, the president of FIFA, he himself after the war was really keen to downplay the notion of connections between FIFA and Italian fascism.

• 56:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 it. 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 its association with Mussolini.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  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 a kind of a interlocking fragments.

• 57:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  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?

• 58:08Speaker 02

  It comes down, I think, to the collapse of the Italian League. Italy even, we all remember, who watched soccer in the nineties and into the 2000s, the strength of the Italian League, the strength of Italian club teams. So the collapse of serious, seriously competitive Italian teams, the inability of the people, the clubs of Italy, to attract the very best players in the world has limited the success of the league, compressed it. And Italy simply does not produce enough good players themselves.

• 58:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 over excited. Anyway, if you've enjoyed this first episode, head to therestishistory.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.

• 59:20Tom Holland?

  Hello, everybody. Now, as those of you who are good children will know, here in Britain, on the 21st of June, it's Father's Day.

• 59:30Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 59:46Tom Holland?

  And that is why we are offering an amazing 25% Father's Day discount on the subscription price to The Rest is History Club because we are all heart.

• 1:00:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  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?

• 1:00:25Tom Holland?

  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.

• 1:00:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that's what most fathers want. So head to therestishistory.com and click on the word gifts. And that gift, membership of our much-loved Rest is History Club, will land straight in your father's inbox on Father's Day itself.

• 1:00:58Tom Holland?

  So if you want to give the best Father's Day gift there's ever been in history, ever, and we say this as the presenters of The Rest is History, you know what to do.

• 1:01:17Speaker 04

  There we are getting a statement from Number 10 on that flight with 350 passengers on board.

• 1:01:25Speaker 05

  The Great Game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian. Holding the Russians accountable is World War III. They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 1:01:44Speaker 05

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 1:01:57Speaker 05

  We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO. A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia? Yes. New from GoLhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom Macduff, Duffy! An audio drama journey like no other. Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons. Devised as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller. We have two tight friendly key. Where Britain plays its strongest hand. He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Go, do it Duffy! Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.