The World Cup was supposed to bring world peace

World Cup tickets are going for as high as $45,000. Not in most of our budgets. How did things get so out of hand when the tournament's founder intended to bridge class divides? Today on the show, the origins of the World Cup, from World War I to Mussolini’s fascist Italy, and how it grew into the multibillion-dollar spectacle the world is gearing up to watch. Guests: Jonathan Wilson, columnist at The Guardian and author of The Power and the Glory: A New History of the World Cup Simon Kuper, columnist at the Financial Times and author of World Cup Fever Support shows like Throughline with NPR+. Sign up today at plus.npr.org See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 1930, an ocean liner called the Conte Verde set sail from Genoa. The final destination, Monte Vedejo, Uruguay. Three soccer teams are aboard the ship, one from Romania, another from Belgium, and the third from France, along with some referees. For nearly two weeks, they journey across the sea in close quarters. Everyone's sort of sizing each other up because when they make landfall in Uruguay, they'll be competing against each other in the first ever World Cup.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  The French start training really early in the morning so that they don't disturb the other passengers, running around the deck, running up and down stairs, doing pull-ups on pipes. And then the Romanians see them doing this, think, oh, hang on, maybe we should be doing some of that as well.

• 1:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  But they also have a lot of free time, and sometimes they just hang out.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  They have dance contests.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  It was like a holiday camp, where young men having fun.

• 1:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  And there's one man on the ship, watching it all with deep satisfaction.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  This very dapper man with silver hair, very careful moustache.

• 1:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  He's not a player, not a ref. He's the guy who came up with this whole idea for a World Cup. And in his suitcase is a statue 30 centimeters high, weighing four kilograms, the new World Cup trophy. His name, Jules Romaine. And for him, there's a lot more than just soccer riding on this inaugural tournament.

• 2:10Speaker 04

  The main thing is peace. We need peace. Soccer can bring peace.

• 2:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  He had big dreams for the World Cup, believing it could bring together countries from around the world, people who might otherwise have nothing in common, at least for a little while.

• 2:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Nearly 100 years after that ship set sail to Uruguay, here we are getting ready for the 23rd World Cup. The US, Mexico, and Canada are hosting. And I'm just a bridge away from New Jersey, where some of those games, including the final, will be held. Very exciting. But I'll be honest, I'm also just thinking about the logistics of it all. Will I still be able to make it out to Jersey every week to see my mom? How's the traffic gonna be? Will there be crazy fans everywhere? Okay, you didn't click on this episode to hear about my traffic anxiety, but I stand by it. I also thought about getting tickets to a game, but the prices are wild. We're talking as high as $45,000. So yeah, not in the budget.

• 3:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  The International Federation of Association Football, aka FIFA, the organization that founded and oversees the World Cup, has projected a record-breaking $13 billion in revenue for the four-year cycle leading up to this summer's tournament.

• 3:54Speaker 05

  The United States military continues to carry out large-scale combat operations in Iran.

• 4:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  And on top of this being a super-expensive World Cup, it's also happening while one of the host countries is waging a war against one country and is openly hostile to others.

• 4:11Speaker 06

  President Trump's immigration policies, including travel bans, have created concerns.

• 4:15Speaker 07

  The issue is that four countries in those lists are expected to play in the FIFA World Cup and play matches here in the US. I'm talking about Iran and

• 4:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  Haiti, who are under the full travel ban, and Cote d'Ivoire and Senegal, who are under the partial ban. Meanwhile, Russia is prohibited from participating due to the ongoing war in Ukraine.

• 4:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  Who gets to host? Who gets to attend? How much do money and politics matter? That's all in the background of this World Cup. And, well, a lot of recent World Cups. 2022 was in Qatar, 2018 in Russia. That got us wondering. Did Jules Rimet's dream ever pan out? How did that first World Cup go? And when did things start to get messy?

• 5:01Speaker 04

  The main thing is peace. Soccer can bring peace.

• 5:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm Randa Abdelfattah. On this episode of Throughline from NPR, we'll trace how an idea imagined in a war bunker to promote global peace quickly became a tool for something much darker and eventually grew into a multibillion-dollar spectacle that millions of us are gearing up to watch, complete with catchy music from some of the world's biggest stars.

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  In the much-talked-about new movie, Wicker, Olivia Colman plays a woman who commissions a husband literally made of wicker. Yes, wicker. We'll tell you why the silly and body

• 6:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  Movie is also a nice cozy fall watch. Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 6:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part one, Jules Rimet Dreams of Peace.

• 7:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  Jules Rimet never really liked playing soccer as a kid growing up in Paris in the 1870s. It was an English invention, slowly catching on in France, and he preferred to kick around ideas from the books he read.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  He's a clever boy. They're not rich, and he grows up in this kind of working class, lower middle class neighborhood.

• 7:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Simon Cooper. He's a columnist at the Financial Times and author of several books about soccer.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  He trains as a lawyer, so he's obviously ambitious. He's obviously bright.

• 7:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  And this is Jonathan Wilson. He's a columnist at The Guardian and author of The Power and the Glory: A New History of the World Cup.

• 7:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  So Rimet wasn't a star athlete, didn't have a strong love of the game itself, but he did have an interest in the sports clubs popular at the time, the community aspect of sports, which he saw as being aligned with his religious background.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  So Jules Rimet is a devout Catholic.

• 8:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  Pretty much everyone in France back then was Catholic, but Rimet really took its teachings to heart.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  He's very taken by Pope Leo XIII.

• 8:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  Pope Leo XIII was known as the Pope of the Worker, and he wrote an influential text called

• 8:21Speaker 02

  De Avena Warum, which looks at the plight of the working classes.

• 8:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  It lays out that working people deserve the right to form unions and demand fair wages and safe workplaces in the face of rapid industrialization. Pope Leo also recommended a series of ideas for making working people's lives better.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  And the section of that which enrulces Rimet is the one about sport and how physical activity can help elevate people. And so Rimet is so taken by this.

• 8:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  He sees sports and the growing popularity of soccer as a tool that could uplift the poor and working class, help give them a sense of dignity, camaraderie, and maybe most importantly, morality. After watching players compete on a field and then have a drink with their opponents after, he thought, if only the world were like that.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  So he helps found this club, Red Star.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Which still exists today. And he sets it up to be classless, to try and have no class divisions. Once you're inside the club, you don't talk about politics. Everybody's treated the same. He tries to use it as an educational tool, so he hands out poetry to the members. And they play football together. So this is him using football in the way, you know, the Pope has indirectly instructed him. He says he has this very idealistic vision of football as something that can help bring people together. That can encourage fraternity among nations.

• 9:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  And he's adamant that these players get paid.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  You can't ask poor people to play without pay. And so he separates himself from the amateurism around the Olympics.

• 10:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  Quick aside here about amateur versus professional soccer. In the 1900 Paris Olympics, soccer was played for the first time. And it's kind of like the World Cup in terms of nations facing each other. Except in the Olympics, all the players had to be amateurs. In other words, they couldn't get paid for playing soccer.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  He thinks the Olympics is for people who've already got money. And that's not what he's about in any way.

• 10:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  So while the French soccer team still participates in the Olympic Games, Romaine continues to push for professional soccer in France. Meanwhile, in Paris, an association of seven European countries form FIFA. And Romaine sets his sights on rising to the top of it. A goal that seems within his reach. The future looks bright. Until 1914.

• 11:02Speaker 04

  The big kind of breaking point in his life is World War One.

• 11:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  When World War One breaks out, Romaine is forced to leave his wife and three kids.

• 11:12Speaker 04

  He goes to the front immediately, August 1914. He's at the front for four years.

• 11:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  Four years of bullets whizzing by his head.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  You know, he's in this machine gun nest besieged by Germans.

• 11:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  The sound of bombs going off in the dead of night.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  He's in the worst of the fighting.

• 11:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  The stench of gangrene, wet clothes, fallen friends.

• 11:33Speaker 04

  It's a miracle he survives.

• 11:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  And this whole time, sitting in the trenches.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  He's writing letters home about soccer administration helping create the new French soccer.

• 11:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  Maybe it was an escape, maybe a coping mechanism. Or maybe he was just that obsessed with the idea of a World Cup.

• 11:52Speaker 04

  And he comes out from war like many ex-soldiers, thinking we need peace and we especially need peace between France and Germany.

• 11:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  Peace might have seemed impossible on the battlefield, but if they could achieve peace on the soccer field, maybe it would be a test run for something more lasting.

• 12:12Speaker 04

  And so he becomes president of FIFA very soon after the war. He's president of FIFA from 1921 to 1954. And he picks up the dream that FIFA had from its very beginning, when it was founded in 194, which is we're going to have a World Cup. We're going to have a world championship where professionals complain.

• 12:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  But first, they had to figure out the logistics. Like, where was this tournament going to take place? And how are they going to pay for it?

• 12:41Speaker 04

  They need a country to finance it because FIFA has no money. And what money FIFA has, they lose in the great crash of 1929 because their treasurer, the Dutchman, is a stockbroker and he's put all the money in the stock market. So they're bankrupted in 1929. They need a country that's willing to host the World Cup and pay for the whole thing.

• 12:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  Their options were limited because, keep in mind, they were thinking of it as a World Cup, but really...

• 13:06Speaker 04

  Africa and Asia are mostly colonies. And in the minds of the white men who run FIFA, these white Europeans, colonies have no place in a World Cup. Black and brown people are not thought of as possible participants in a World Cup.

• 13:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Ultimately, they decided on Uruguay.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Uruguay are widely recognized as being the best side in the world. At least if you ignore the British teams who are not going to play or are being difficult about it, at least.

• 13:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  Okay, that's kind of a whole other story. But for all you Arsenal fans wondering where was England in all of this? Let me give you a quick recap. England opted out of FIFA and the first World Cups, in part because of the ongoing professional amateur debate. And also because there's this sense that it's an English game, that they'll keep playing in England. It's kind of like, what do we have to prove? We invented this game. Anyway, back to Uruguay, which ironically had deep ties to the UK at this time. UK firms owned a lot of Uruguay's train infrastructure and is credited with importing, you guessed it, football, soccer.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  So they are the best team in the world. There's a sense where we should reward them for that. But also, their government was prepared to fund it and prepared to subsidize travel for teams to go to Uruguay.

• 14:28Speaker 04

  We'll put them up in style in Uruguay.

• 14:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's a pretty good deal for FIFA and the competing nations, but it's also not a deal without motives. Uruguay's leaders feel like hosting the World Cup in 1930, which coincided with the 100th anniversary of the country's independence, was a great way to flex its nationhood.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  And the reason for that is partly that football has been so successful at promoting Uruguay as a nation. When they win the Olympic gold in 1924, they say, thousands of dollars of investment in propaganda could not achieve what we have achieved by winning this gold medal. Everybody in Europe knows who we are now. Everybody's talking about us. They know that Uruguay is a country in its own right, that we're not just a province of Argentina.

• 15:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  So Uruguay had a little bit of a chip on its shoulder, sandwiched in between Brazil and Argentina. It was ready to shine on the global stage.

• 15:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  Of course, the first World Cup was a small affair compared to what it's become today. In 1930, only 13 teams, which included the US, participated. And of that number-

• 15:37Speaker 02

  There's only four European countries make the journey.

• 15:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  Compared to today's sleek national jerseys and tight game schedule-

• 15:44Speaker 04

  It's enormous chaos.

• 15:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  There were game day debates of what ball would be used.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  Uruguay is still building stadiums at night after the World Cup has kicked off.

• 15:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  And there was no strict uniformity to the teams' kits. Players wore different colored shirts and one player even played in a colorful beret. But overall-

• 16:04Speaker 04

  It's considered a success. People like it.

• 16:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  And Jules Romaine was loving every minute of it. In his diaries, he writes-

• 16:12Speaker 07

  All of them recognized a link, a reciprocal symbol of affinity, football. And right away, the- was broken. Considering the speed with which friendly relationships were formed between these people who had never laid eyes upon each other before, you might think that they were members of a big household, scattered around the world and happy to find each other again at a family reunion.

• 16:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  So, Reme had a pretty rosy outlook on this first World Cup. But at the end of the day, it was still a competition. There were winners and losers, not just between teams, but between countries. And that competition was fueled by national pride. Nowhere was that tension more present than in the 1930 World Cup final between the host country, Uruguay, and their longtime rival, Argentina.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  There are rivals outside of football as well. I mean, all kinds of reasons. They're next door to each other. They're both great exporters of meat. Yeah. There's obvious reasons why neighboring countries will be rivals. But this manifests particularly in football.

• 17:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  Argentina was still pretty sore about having lost the Olympic gold in soccer to Uruguay in the 1920 Olympics. How did their smaller neighbors keep besting them? And Uruguay was tired of Argentina thinking of them as less than. All of that was playing out on the field.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  It's taken incredibly seriously in Uruguay and Argentina.

• 17:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  In July 1930, the two teams took the field.

• 17:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  In some video footage of the game, you can see the stadium is teeming with fans, mostly men, cheering.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  There's huge crowds.

• 18:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Jules Reme was in the crowd, too. Recalling the overwhelming noise of the crowd, he wrote:

• 18:08Speaker 07

  The Argentinian fans' clamor, intended at times to encourage their team, at others to counter the Uruguayan cheers, combines with the latter to create a hellish din that persists throughout the entire match. Rising and falling in balanced alternation depending on whether one team or the other is on the verge of scoring a goal or has just missed one.

• 18:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  Argentina leads the game 2 to 1 at halftime. They've got the momentum, but Uruguay is not ready to admit defeat. In the second half, Uruguay scores three more goals. The fourth and final goal.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Is scored by a forward called Hector Castro, and he only had one arm. He'd lost the lower part of his right arm in a bus stop accident in his early teens.

• 19:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  The crowd explodes.

• 19:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  Uruguay has beat Argentina 4 to 2 in the first ever World Cup. Fans quickly start to take the field.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  There's a pitch invasion. And so there's massive chaos and the Uruguayan players are actually running around the field waving a cup. But it's not the World Cup. It's a cup that they'd won in some previous tournament, maybe the Olympics, maybe something else. They already have a cup.

• 19:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  Already have a cup? Jules Rimet is like, wait a second.

• 19:33Speaker 04

  He's standing there with the World Cup. He's had a special trophy made in Paris. It's a very beautiful cup with Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, with outstretched wings. And he goes onto the field and there's fans everywhere cheering and celebrating. And he pushes his way to the Uruguayan Football Federation president. And Rimet just kind of shoves the cup into his hands. So that is the presentation of the cup for the first World Cup.

• 20:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  Not exactly the pomp and circumstance you might expect, but that's how it went. And while the end wasn't this huge ceremonial presentation, Jules Rimet was still happy with the final.

• 20:12Speaker 07

  Perhaps the Uruguayans attach an exaggerated significance to their triumph. Yet they shout their joy with such infectious conviction that in this moment, it seems almost to be shared by the entire mass of spectators.

• 20:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  According to Rimet, the victory was one celebrated by all, a testament to the great good of soccer and the World Cup. The reality was a little more complicated.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  There's riots in Buenos Aires and Uruguayan targets are attacked.

• 20:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  Argentinian protesters throw rocks at Uruguay's embassy.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  The Argentinian papers are full of these anti-Uruguayan diatribes. Argentina breaks off diplomatic relations. So there is, you know, real consequences.

• 21:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  And still, Reme continues to believe in the power of soccer and the World Cup to unite instead of divide. He sees the final through a very different lens.

• 21:13Speaker 07

  After all, this inaugural World Cup stands as a triumph for the South American community, given that two of its teams, having both reached the very summit of the competition, have shared the honor of contesting the final.

• 21:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  For him, the World Cup is a success, and others agree.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  On the whole, people think, yeah, it's worth doing again.

• 21:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  And so, four years later, in 1934, the World Cup was held again, this time in Benito Mussolini's fascist Italy.

• 21:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's coming up.

• 21:56Speaker 06

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• 23:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hey, Rand here. We want to try something new on the show, and we need your help. Have you ever had a question about something in the news or culture, or wondered why something is the way it is? We're talking sports, religion, science, politics, everyday quirky things. We want to hear it all. Send your questions to [email protected] or call 872-588-8805. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number, too. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. And thanks.

• 24:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part two, Il Duce's World Cup.

• 24:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  On May 27, 1934, the second World Cup began in Italy. All 16 of the teams played in an eight-game simultaneous kickoff in cities across the peninsula in an automatic knockout competition. The host nation, Italy, squares off against the United States in Rome.

• 24:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thousands of fans watched from the stands, erupting in cheers. Among them, Benito Mussolini, also known as Il Duce, the leader. He'd been the dictator of Italy for nearly a decade by this point. Italy defeated the US 7 to 1. Mussolini's plan to bring the World Cup to fascist Italy had worked.

• 24:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  Sandy next to him, World Cup founder Jules Rimet is less than excited.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  There's some photographs of him and the body language is fascinating. You can almost see him sort of cringing away from Mussolini.

• 25:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  Rimet had never expected what this second World Cup would become: a giant advertisement for fascism.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Mussolini essentially invents sports marketing.

• 25:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Or what today we might call sports washing, leveraging sports to reshape public perception of your country, especially when human rights abuses are involved. So that meant distracting with glitzy charm.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  The tickets are printed on very high-quality cards so that people will keep them as souvenirs.

• 25:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  And commemorative trinkets.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Tea trays, models, things like that, branded with the logo of the World Cup and the logo of the fascist party.

• 25:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  The World Cup stadiums are all placed in cities that boast fascist architecture. And Mussolini makes sure everyone who wants to get to the games can.

• 25:59Speaker 04

  Italy wants to show itself to the world as a welcoming, successful, modern, organized nation. So fans from the Netherlands and France and Czechoslovakia are given cheap train travel.

• 26:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  And once in Italy...

• 26:12Speaker 02

  He subsidizes travel between host cities.

• 26:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  And if they couldn't make it, no problem.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  He arranged live radio broadcasts of every game.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  It's the kind of first World Cup as a mass media event.

• 26:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  I don't know how Rimet would feel about me saying this, but he and Mussolini had something in common. They both saw soccer as more than a game, as a tool to unite people. But for Mussolini, that unity was a vehicle to sell the world on a new ideology that he had pretty much invented: fascism. That word is thrown around a lot these days. What it meant in practice was extreme nationalism, a stifling of dissent and democracy, and a belief in social hierarchy. It's often associated with Hitler, but it started with Mussolini.

• 27:05Speaker 04

  Is very keen on the World Cup because it's a moment where Italy can win. So it shows the virility and strength and glory of the nation. He's going to be there. He's going to claim credit. So at all the games that Italy play, Mussolini is kind of there watching the field obsessively.

• 27:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Rimae wrote that he often had, quote, "the impression during the World Cup that the real president of the International Football Federation was Mussolini."

• 27:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  So let's backtrack here a little to make sense of how the World Cup came to be held in Italy in 1934. In large part, it's because the growing fascist movement saw what Il Duce saw, that soccer had the power to unite and build a nation.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  So in 1926, there's a fascist convene, this big meeting in Via Vecchio, Tuscan Resort, of stakeholders, I guess we call them in football. And they want to set up a national league. And Italy at this point has been unified for, depending exactly when unification would have happened, 60 years.

• 28:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  Italy wasn't a unified country until 1861. So the idea of a national Italian identity was relatively new. And the new soccer league would represent that.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  So if you can say, well, there is this national Italian league, and you can involve people from all over the country, from the south, from the north, from both coasts, then you are helping create this idea of a nation.

• 28:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  In some ways, this isn't so different from Rimae's vision. Soccer united people. In the case of Italy, though, the goal was to unite Italians and only Italians.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  So there's two other things coming out of that conference in 1926. So one is that foreign players are banned from '27, '28 season onwards. Foreign managers are still allowed. So you can still have the educator, but the people being educators are going to be Italian.

• 29:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  Okay, so only Italian men can play on the teams. No foreigners. Put that detail in your back pocket.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  And then the second thing is this sort of ideal that every city should have one club.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  So Italians from all these different cities and even countries are being turned into one country by football. That's what Mussolini is trying to do.

• 29:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  They start building stadiums. And when the World Cup rolls around, they're ready to host.

• 29:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  Everyone knew Mussolini was a dictator, including Jules Rimet. Historians tend to explain Rimet's choice to go ahead with the World Cup in Italy as apolitical. We all know, though, being apolitical can itself be a political statement. And a lot of countries still participated in the World Cup, and a lot of people from around the world came to watch it.

• 30:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  Early on in the World Cup, people started noticing something about the Italian team.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  The football, I think, is Italy are a very physical side.

• 30:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  In other words, they were willing to play dirty. The Italian team, already one of the favorites to win, since Uruguay, England, and Scotland do not attend, has a win-at-any-cost mentality. And as the tournament goes on, more and more games turn violent. Other countries start complaining about the refs, speculating about whether they're rigging games for Italy, and really, for Mussolini.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  And I think there was a perception, certainly from Spain, who they beat in the quarterfinal, and from Austria, that referees are indulging them, that referees could be stricter.

• 31:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  Many felt that Mussolini pressured referees to favor Italy and in some way hand them a win, a controversy that continues to surround the 1934 World Cup.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Is that sour grapes? Is it true? It's really difficult to tell. I think the most neutral view we have on it is the Belgian referee from 1930, Jean Lengnou, and he certainly thinks that referees allow themselves to be intimidated by quite hostile home crowds.

• 31:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's hard to know now exactly what happened, but we do know the atmosphere at Italian games could be intimidating because Mussolini's project to unite Italy was working.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  At games, you know, the population is encouraged into a frenzy, people chant Mussolini's name, and the radio commentary is extremely nationalistic and patriotic. It's all about... These 11 players incarnate the greatness and the glory of Italy, and they are playing for the leader. So, very fascist atmosphere.

• 32:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  And it was working on the pitch, too. Italy beat out all its competitors to make it to the final against Czechoslovakia.

• 32:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Mussolini and Rimet are there for the final match. It's hot, and Italy is not doing well. Czechoslovakia is up 1-0. And then, in the 82nd minute of game time...

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Ramondo Orsi, who's the outside left, who scores the equalizer.

• 32:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  Ramondo Orsi keeps Italy's championship dreams alive. The funny thing is, Orsi was born in Argentina. He's...

• 32:47Speaker 02

  An oviedo, a returner.

• 32:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  Meaning that Italy has gone back on who they consider Italian. After some prodding from coaches that allowing foreign-born players of Italian origin will make the team better, the fascist hierarchy relents.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Italy have decided that foreign players are banned unless you're from South America of Italian descent.

• 33:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  And Orsi's last-minute goal ends up being pivotal. The game goes into extra time, and Italy scores the final winning goal in the 95th minute, beating Czechoslovakia 2-1.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, Rimet is appalled by it. He really hates the fact that Mussolini has done what he's done.

• 33:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  Turning the World Cup into blatant fascist propaganda, essentially rebranding it as Il Duce's Cup, and winning no less, putting Italy and fascism on top. Jules Rimet congratulates them with the World Cup trophy from 1930, a small gold trophy depicting the goddess Nike. But Mussolini had come prepared with his own, much bigger trophy, called La Coppa del Duce, which is awarded to the victorious Italian team. It's more than six times the size of Rimet's trophy. Message delivered.

• 34:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  In the years after the World Cup, fascism continued to take hold all over Europe. Civil war breaks out in Spain. And in 1936, taking a page out of Mussolini's playbook, Hitler's Nazi Germany hosted the Olympics and flexed his power. Not content with just that, Hitler also has his sights set on hosting the 1938 World Cup. Mussolini had set the precedent that FIFA was willing to embrace brutal regimes.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  It comes down to a straight fight between Nazi Germany or France. And that decision is taken at the FIFA Congress in Berlin in the week before the Olympics in Berlin start.

• 34:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was 1936, so two years before the Third World Cup was set to take place.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  So Rimet would have been very aware, walking around Berlin, of what Hitler would have done to the World Cup, because he was seeing what he was doing to the Olympics.

• 35:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  A photograph shows Rimet walking with the FIFA delegation through the swastika-decked streets of Hitler's capital. His French federation had opposed a press campaign to boycott the Nazi Games. But Jonathan Wilson says Rimet himself was wary of letting Hitler do what Mussolini had done: wage a huge PR campaign.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  So, once he knows what an authoritarian, far-right leader can do, he takes steps to stop it.

• 35:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  But according to Simon Cooper, that isn't entirely true. Nazi Germany hosting wasn't off the table, even though by this point, Hitler was already violating treaties, remilitarizing, and ramping up the persecution of Jewish people. And the decision may have been equally shaped by Rimet's longtime dream for France to host the World Cup. In the end, France did win the bid for 1938. Rimet and FIFA hoped that the World Cup would focus less on politics and more on the love of the game. But the politics of the time still bubbled up.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  In France in 38, you have anti-fascist protests.

• 36:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  And when the victorious Italian team plays against France in the quarterfinals, the Italian team responds with their own statement.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  Italy's normal change kit would be white, but on this occasion, they wear black.

• 36:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  They play the fascist anthem and proudly jet their arms out in a Roman salute.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  And that clearly is making a fascist point.

• 36:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  Italy beats France and is once again crowned the world champions.

• 36:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  The 1938 World Cup would be the last one for a while. When World War II erupted the following year, violence engulfed most of Europe and the tournament was suspended. As a result, Italy remained the de facto champion for 12 more years. During this time, legend has it that the president of the Italian Football Federation hid the Jules Rimet trophy in his room, afraid it would be otherwise stolen.

• 37:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  After the war, the world was radically changed. A United Nations was formed with the goal of maintaining international peace, the same dream Rimet had all those years ago. And in 1950, Rimet helped revive the World Cup. He never gave up on the idea that soccer could unite people, even though it also ran the risk of not only being shaped by politics, but shaping politics too. And today, we're still grappling with what that means.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think you look at this World Cup coming up and your natural instinct, the natural instinct is to say, this is the most politicized World Cup there's ever been. And I think that's only partially true. I think the World Cup has always been politicized. I think it's useful to be reminded that this is nothing new.

• 38:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, a conversation about where this year's World Cup fits into the tournament's 100-year history.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Hey, this is Travis Davenport from San Diego, California. You're listening to Throughline on NPR.

• 38:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 38:29Speaker 00

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• 38:53Speaker 05

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• 39:18Speaker 06

  This is Terry Gross. When I was celebrating my 50th anniversary hosting Fresh Air, I asked my guest, roast master general Jeff Ross, to roast me.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  Terry Gross, a barely living legend.

• 39:34Speaker 06

  Still at it. Listen to Fresh Air on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Part Three: Why We Keep Watching.

• 39:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 1950, with so many countries still reeling from the devastating impacts of World War II, Jules Rimet, then-president of FIFA and the founder of the World Cup, revived the tournament. It had been dormant for 12 years by that point. Brazil hosted. Fans were excited to cheer for their teams. The atmosphere was electric. And there was a lot of political drama surrounding it. Germany was barred from participating.

• 40:22Speaker 04

  Is it punishment for war? And so the German players, very unfairly, were seen as more than just soccer players. They were seen as representatives of this German might. And often in football, you're not just playing against a team, you're playing against something much bigger than that. You feel you're playing against the enemy tribe, the enemy country, in an enmity or a rivalry that transcends soccer.

• 40:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hmm, it's almost like recreating war or battle on the pitch.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  Ah, but in a much safer, more pleasant way.

• 40:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  Most of the countries behind the iron curtain, like the Soviet Union, opted not to take part. Uruguay, the first country to ever host the World Cup, wins it all. And the trophy was officially renamed the Jewels Remay Trophy. And as the world turned more towards ideals of diplomacy and decolonization, the nationalism that had taken on a dark tone in those early World Cups was rebranded.

• 41:24Speaker 04

  In Europe in particular, after World War Two, we found ways to be nationalistic, to cheer for our country, to beat other countries that don't involve bloodshed. And so channeling those feelings into soccer was a brilliant solution.

• 41:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Even West Germany found a way to express national pride.

• 41:45Speaker 04

  In nineteen fifty-four, West Germany has been readmitted after being in disgrace after the war. And in nineteen fifty-four, its very first post-war World Cup in Switzerland, it wins.

• 41:59Speaker 04

  This pariah nation wins the final in the mud of Berne against the Great Hungarians. And the West German team goes back to Germany by train. And at every station, they're greeted by cheering, huge crowds. Much of the nation has listened to the game on radio, watched in the very few television sets that existed in West Germany then. And even in communist East Germany, lots of people were listening on the radio and supporting the German team. And this is the moment when the Germans, for the first time since World War II, they're allowed to express nationalism, a love of country. They're allowed to, for the first time, kind of sing the anthem, which is problematic because some of them sing the old, wrong anthem

• 42:43Speaker 04

  with the forbidden words, "Deichung, Deichung, du Ballers", and to cheer for their country, to feel proud of feeling German for the first time since World War II. And this is a very kind of important and difficult moment. And the phrase that Germans use about that World Cup 1954 is: "We are someone again, wir sind wieder da".

• 43:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  I guess that makes me wonder what you see as the sort of function of nationalism is part of, you know, the representation and in the modern era of having nations from all around the world. Is that part of the point? Even if they're never going to win the World Cup, is there something about just being able to express nationalism in this sort of safe or defanged space important?

• 43:34Speaker 04

  Well, I'd say two things. One is, for most countries, winning the World Cup just isn't an issue. There's only about five or six countries that even really dream of winning the World Cup. So at this World Cup, for a country like Jordan, or Uzbekistan, or Canada, you're not there to win, you're there to have a great time, to have a Cinderella experience, maybe to beat a big team, to create a moment that has people talking, to have your whole nation at work, at school, at the bus stop, on social media, obsessing about it, all together. It's a united nation in a way that nowadays, we're all on our own devices, watching our own continent. World Cup, everyone's watching the same thing. So that's part of what a World Cup's about. Winning is, it's only relevant to a very few teams. And the other thing is that, yes, it's about nationalism

• 44:18Speaker 04

  in celebrating your nation, hoping your nation wins, but...

• 44:23Speaker 04

  I know this sounds romantic, but actually it's also an international festival. Where we all appreciate great football. And if a Cameroonian or a Brazilian does something amazing, the whole world will be talking about it. People actually really wanna meet people from other countries and, you know, dance on the streets together and drink in bars together. And swap scarves and shirts. So it's really also a very kind of cosmopolitan festival. You celebrate your own nation, but you also celebrate the kind of the globe. Everyone being there. It wouldn't be the same World Cup if Cameroon and Japan and South Africa and, you know, Brazil weren't there. That's all part of it. You want them there.

• 45:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah.

• 45:08Speaker 04

  And so, and also almost everyone understands the thing about soccer is it doesn't really matter.

• 45:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  There's something very beautiful about what you're describing, but I have to, I have to stop for a second and confront the reality of where it feels like we are right now. Because that all feels extremely optimistic. And I think the feeling around the World Cup this year is confusing, I think, for a lot of people. You have the US, Canada and Mexico co-hosting the World Cup. There have been tensions between those countries. And on top of that, there's so much going on politically. War is being fought and waged by the US, one of the hosts.

• 45:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  If the World Cup is this space in theory of bringing people together and kind of a United Nations. What does this year's tournament reveal? What does it represent?

• 46:09Speaker 04

  It's almost always true that in a World Cup, you have the ugliness of what's happening off the field.

• 46:17Speaker 04

  Politics, repression, the potential of ICE raiding, for example, Mexican Americans watching a game together in Mexican shirts. Yeah. Of World Cup visitors being denied visas or being locked up, of these outrageous prices which have never been charged at a World Cup before, which are making this a World Cup only for rich people. So all that ugliness is there and we journalists are writing about it and we should, and that's part of the story. Hmm. And then when the World Cup kicks off, you get the beauty, you get the beauty on the field, these amazing moments, these heartbreaking last minute goals, uh, some soccer player you've never heard of going through six men and scoring and this, the stuff that you

• 46:59Speaker 04

  remember forever that we all saw when we were eight years old and we still have in our heads. Hmm. And that will live for decades. And the experience of sharing that with the people you're watching with is also magical. So World Cups are this ugliness and the beauty at the same time.

• 47:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  In his own life, the World Cup has encompassed so many feelings. Simon has actually attended the last nine World Cups. That's thirty six years worth.

• 47:34Speaker 04

  I caught the bug when I was eight years old in nineteen seventy eight, watching on TV. Everyone remembers their first World Cup and I was living in the Netherlands. I'm a Holland fan, I'm not Dutch, but I grew up there, that's my soccer. In nineteen eighty eight, the Netherlands reached the World Cup final, took Argentina, the hosts, extra time. So for an eight year old, this is something you don't quickly forget.

• 47:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  Was there a single moment when you realized that football, soccer, for our American listeners, uh, that it was about much more than just a game?

• 48:09Speaker 04

  I still have in my head that when Holland scored in the seventy eight final, so I'm this eight year old kid, they score this late equalizer. And I hear in my mind this noise of cheering coming up from the whole neighborhood, from the neighboring houses. There was this kind of communal sound. And I think, looking back, I realized then that soccer is much more than a game because it can mobilize a whole country. It's something where the, in a country like the Netherlands or England, really, the whole country is emotionally involved and it ties people together like nothing else. And so it becomes this force for nationalism. It becomes a force for thinking about what kind of country are we? What is our team?

• 48:54Speaker 04

  What is our country? Who do we hate? Who is the enemy? Who is the rival? And so since then, I think, I've been thinking about soccer as more than soccer. I mean, I love the game, but it's much more than just a game.

• 49:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  It always has been, right? Leaders have used it as an opportunity to rebrand, to sportswash for a century now. So I asked Simon, what makes this World Cup the same or different in his mind?

• 49:21Speaker 04

  One of the oddities of Trump is that he's not really sportswashing. Because sportswashing is what Russia, Qatar, the Argentinian generals in nineteen seventy eight did, where you present yourself as nicer and cuddlier. And your nation is friendlier and welcoming, that more welcoming than it really is. Russia in twenty eighteen, for the first time, pretty much in modern history, let people with World Cup tickets in without a visa. It was the easiest time in history to travel around Russia.

• 49:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oh, fascinating.

• 49:49Speaker 04

  In Mussolini's Italy, they gave special discount rates to World Cup visitors. So you had a great experience, you traveled around cheap. Now, Trump is not sportswashing in that he's not pretending to be nicer and kinder than he really is. He's overtly brutal and unfriendly to the world. He's not pretending anything different. So although what's happening in the U.S. on many levels is outrageous, you know, the wars they're fighting, the use of ice internally, they're not sportswashing in that they're not trying to hide it. In fact, Trump is, it seems to me, very proud of these things that he's doing. And the U.S. is not trying to say, oh, we're a country that wants lots of visitors. We'll make it easy for you to get visas, we'll make it cheap for you to travel around.

• 50:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's a really interesting point. And actually, related to that, you mentioned ICE. Immigration is obviously one of the key issues in the US right now, but really around the world. And there's this kind of contradiction, right, between the policies of many countries to try and keep immigrants from coming in right now. And when it comes to soccer, football, you have so many national teams that are shaped and reflective of their immigrant communities. You have France, England, the US, right? So many of them depend on immigrants. What does it mean then to cheer for immigrants on the field

• 51:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  who make up your team at the World Cup? But then, how do you square that with this increased nationalism, the increased anti-immigrant sentiment worldwide?

• 51:28Speaker 04

  I mean, it's very double-edged for a lot of people. And so some are not happy that their team is full of people of immigrant's origin. I live in France. France is a brilliant team. They've reached four of the last seven finals of World Cups. They've won two World Cups since 98. Brilliant side, very largely black and brown players from the suburbs of the big cities, like Kylian Mbappe, the captain, whose father was an immigrant from Cameroon, whose mother is of Algerian origin, born in France. And a lot of French people say, I don't like it that our team has so many non-white players. And the biggest party in France, quite likely to win the presidential elections

• 52:12Speaker 04

  next year, is the far-right, anti-immigrant Rassemblement National, which has been very critical often of the black players in the team. So when you see on TV those 11 young men in their plastic shirts, often of different colors, representing your nation, at that moment, they're kind of the nation-made flesh. It's a very tangible symbol of who are we? What is the US, or France, or Argentina, or Jordan? And you say, that's what we are. It can be a way to debate what your country is, what your country should be. So there's all sorts of debates that a team can provoke.

• 52:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  And this is the double-edged sword of nationalism, right?

• 52:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  It can both be a unifying force for a country and it can also be weaponized, right?

• 53:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  These symbols like the flag, all of these things, they become very loaded.

• 53:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it becomes a minefield.

• 53:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  You know, given all of this, is there anything that might surprise you in this World Cup?

• 53:22Speaker 04

  Soccer is a place that gets used by dictators, it get used by dissidents. It gets used for peace, it gets used for internationalism, and it gets used to excite people internationalism. It's all those things and soccer is eminently political in all these ways. And people who say soccer have nothing, has nothing to do with politics haven't been paying attention. I think that this World Cup will be a World Cup of protest, will be Americans against Americans in the sense that all the host cities in the United States are democratic voting, like almost all cities in the US are. And Donald Trump is very unpopular. And I suspect that there'll be a lot of anti-Trump singing, chanting, people wearing T-shirts.

• 54:07Speaker 04

  So I think the World Cup will be a very contested space, much more at this World Cup than in any recent World Cups of anti-Trump America kind of making its voice heard, partly just because of which places this World Cup is taking place in in the US. But I think people will be surprised by the joy.

• 54:34Speaker 04

  Because once the soccer starts, it becomes joyous.

• 54:39Speaker 04

  When the World Cup kicks off, you get the beauty, you get the beauty on the field, these amazing moments, these heartbreaking last-minute goals. Uh, some soccer player you've never heard of going through six men and scoring. And this, this stuff that you remember forever, that we all saw when we were eight years old. That doesn't eliminate the bad stuff, and we should be talking and writing about the bad stuff. But remember the joy too.

• 55:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Wyman.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  Casey Minor. Christina Kim. Devin Kadyama. Kiana Mulholland. Irene Noguchi.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  Leanna Semstrom. Julia Redpath. Skylar Swenson.

• 55:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thank you to Michael Lopatron, Yohanna Sturgie, Cheyenne Butler, Yolanda Sangueni, and Tommy Evans. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes

• 55:53Speaker 07

  Navid Marvi.

• 55:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected]. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number, too. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.

• 56:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements

• 56:27Speaker 05

  and messages from our sponsors. This week on Here and Now Anytime, in the closing days of the midterm elections, we're in Iowa and Arizona, two states where independent voters will decide who controls Congress for the next two years. Even though we're in a red district, we will get out the Democratic and independent vote. We will. Here and Now Anytime. Listen on the NPR app or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

• 56:54Speaker 00

  Happy fall. Yes, the days are getting shorter and colder, and the rain can be a drag. But this is also the perfect time of year to get cozy. Life Kit has lots of ideas so you can embrace the change of seasons with episodes on everything from making soup to exercising outdoors. Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.