The World Cup was supposed to bring world peace

25:11Part 2. Il Duce's World Cup. 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.

25:43Thousands 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 U.S. 7-1. Mussolini's plan to bring the World Cup to fascist Italy had worked. Standing next to him, World Cup founder Jules Rimet is less than excited. There's some photographs of him, and the body language is fascinating. You can almost see him sort of cringing away from Mussolini. Rimet had never expected what this second World Cup would become. A giant advertisement for fascism. Mussolini essentially invents sports marketing.

26:33Or 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. The tickets are printed on very high-quality cards so people keep them as souvenirs. And commemorative trinkets. Tea trays, models, things like that. Branded with the logo of the World Cup and the logo of the fascist party. 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. Italy wants to show itself to the world as a welcoming, successful, modern, organized nation.

27:18So fans from the Netherlands and France and Czechoslovakia are given cheap train travel. And once in Italy... He subsidized travel between host cities. And if they couldn't make it, no problem. He arranged live radio broadcasts of every game. It's the kind of first World Cup as a mass media event.

27:40I don't know how Rimei 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. He's very keen on the World Cup because it's a moment where Italy can win, so it shows the virilacy and strength and glory of the nation.

28:25He'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. Rimet wrote that he often had, quote, the impression during the World Cup that the real president of the International Football Federation was Mussolini. 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 El Duce saw, that soccer had the power to unite and build a nation. So in 1926, there's the fascists convene this big meeting in Via Reggio, which is a Toscan resort, of stakeholders, I guess we call them, in football.

29:13And they want to set up a national league. And Italy at this point has been unified for, depending on exactly when unification has happened, 60 years. 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. 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. In some ways, this isn't so different from Rimet's vision. Soccer united people.

29:54In the case of Italy, though, the goal was to unite Italians and only Italians. So there's two other things come out of that conference in 1926. So one is that foreign players are banned from 27-8 season onwards. Foreign managers are still allowed, so you can still have the educator, but the people being educated are going to be Italian. OK, so only Italian men can play on the teams, no foreigners. Put that detail in your back pocket. And then the second thing is this sort of ideal that every city should have one club. So Italians from all these different cities and even countries are being turned into one country by football.

30:37That's what Mussolini is trying to do. They start building stadiums, and when the World Cup rolls around, they're ready to host.

30:54Everyone 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.

31:27Early on in the World Cup, people started noticing something about the Italian team. The football, I think, is Italy have a very physical side. 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. And I think there's a perception, certainly from Spain, here they beat in the quarterfinal, and from Austria, that referees are indulging them, that referees could be stricter.

32:12Many 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. 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 Lingenu. And he certainly thinks that referees allow themselves to be intimidated by quite hostile home crowds. 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. At games, you know, the population is encouraged into a frenzy.

32:54People 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. And it was working on the pitch too. Italy beat out all its competitors to make it to the final against Czechoslovakia.

33:24For supplementary, Italia and Czechoslovakia are discussing the final of this World Cup. Mussolini and Rime 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... Raimundo Orsi, who's the outside left, who scores the equalizer. Raimundo Orsi keeps Italy's championship dreams alive. The funny thing is, Orsi was born in Argentina. He's... An oriundo, a returner. 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.

34:14Italy have decided that foreign players are banned unless you're from South America of Italian descent. 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. Yeah, I mean, Rime is appalled by it. He really hates the fact that Mussolini has done what he's done. 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. Jewel's Rimet congratulates them with the World Cup trophy from 1930, a small gold trophy depicting the goddess Nike.

35:01But Mussolini had come prepared with his own much bigger trophy called La Copa del Duce, which is awarded to the victorious Italian team. It's more than six times the size of Rimet's trophy. Message delivered. 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 a sight set on hosting the 1938 World Cup. Mussolini had set the precedent that FIFA was willing to embrace brutal regimes.

35:50It 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. It was 1936, so two years before the third World Cup was set to take place. So Riemann 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. A photograph shows Rimet walking with the FIFA delegation through the swastika bedecked streets of Hitler's capital. His French Federation had opposed a press campaign to boycott the Nazi games.

36:28But Jonathan Wilson says Rimet himself was wary of letting Hitler do what Mussolini had done, wage a huge PR campaign. So once he knows what an authoritarian far-right leader can do, he takes steps to stop it. 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.

37:18But the politics of the time still bubbled up. In France in 1938, you have anti-fascist protests. And when the victorious Italian team plays against France in the quarterfinals, the Italian team responds with their own statement. Italy's normal change kit would be white, but on this occasion they wear black. They play the fascist anthem and proudly jet their arms out in a Roman salute. And that clearly is making a fascist point. Italy beats France and is once again crowned the world champions. 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.

38:05As 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. 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.

38:50And today, we're still grappling with what that means. 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. Coming up, a conversation about where this year's World Cup fits into the tournament's 100-year history.

39:29Hey, this is Travis Davenport from San Diego, California. You're listening to ThruLine on NPR.

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41:23Part 3. Why We Keep Watching

41:29In 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. It was a 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.

42:14You'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. It's almost like recreating war or battle on the pitch. But in a much safer, more pleasant way. 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 Jules Rimet 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.

43:03In Europe in particular after World War II, 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. Even West Germany found a way to express national pride. In 1954, West Germany has been readmitted after being in disgrace after the war. And in 1954, its very first post-war World Cup in Switzerland, it wins. This pariah nation wins the final. in the mud of Bern 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.

43:53Much 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 with the forbidden words, Deutschland, Deutschland, du Baalers. And to cheer for their country, to feel proud of feeling German for the first time since World War II.

44:31And 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. We are like we are.

44:45I 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? 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.

45:27You'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 to unite a 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 only relevant to a very few teams. and the other thing is that yes it's about nationalism in celebrating your nation hoping your nation wins but 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 want to meet people from other countries and you know dance on the streets together and drinking bars together and swap swaps scarves and shirts so it's really also a very kind of um cosmopolitan festival you celebrate your own nation but you also celebrate the kind of um 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.

46:46You want them there. And also almost everyone understands the thing about soccer is it doesn't really matter. There's something very beautiful about what you're describing, but 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 U.S., 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, wars being fought and waged by the US, one of the hosts.

47:33If 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? It's almost always true that in a World Cup, you have the ugliness of what's happening off the field, politics, repression, the potential of ICE raiding, for example, Mexican-Americans watching a game together in Mexican shirts, of World Cup visitors being denied visas or being locked up, of these outrageous prices which have never been charged in a World Cup before, which are making this a World Cup only for rich people. So all that ugliness is there.

48:18And we journalists are rising about it. And we should. And that's part of the story. 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 this stuff that you remember forever that we all saw when we were eight years old and we still have in our heads 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.

49:02In his own life, the World Cup has encompassed so many feelings. Simon has actually attended the last nine World Cups. That's 36 years worth. I caught the bug when I was eight years old in 1978 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 1978, the Netherlands reached the World Cup final, took Argentina, the host, to extra time. So for an eight-year-old, this is something you don't quickly forget. Was there a single moment when you realized that football, soccer, for our American listeners, that it was about much more than just a game?

49:47I still have in my head that when Holland scored in the 78 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 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.

50:28It becomes a force for thinking about what kind of country are we? What is our team? 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. 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? One of the oddities of Trump is that he's not really sportswashing, because sportswashing is what Russia, Qatar, the Argentinian generals in 1978 did, where you present yourself as nicer and cuddlier, and your nation is friendlier and welcoming, more welcoming than it really is.

51:18Russia in 2018, 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. Oh, fascinating. In Mussolini's Italy, they gave special discount rates to World Cup visitors. So you had a great experience, you travel around cheap. Now, Trump is not sports-washing 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 that wars they're fighting the use of ice internally they're not sports washing 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 businesses will make it easy for you to get visas will make it cheap for you to travel around.

52:12That's a really interesting point. And actually, related to that, you mentioned ICE. Immigration is obviously one of the key issues in the U.S. 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 who make up your team at the World Cup?

52:57But then how do you square that with this increased nationalism, the increased anti-immigrant sentiment worldwide? 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 immigrants' 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 1998. Brilliant side, very largely black and brown players from the suburbs of the big cities, like Kylian Mbappé, the captain whose father was an immigrant from Cameroon, whose mother is of Algerian origin, born in France.

53:40And 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 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.

54:27So there's all sorts of debates that a team can provoke. And this is the double-edged sword of nationalism, right? I mean, it can both be a unifying force for a country, and it can also be weaponized, right? Yeah. These symbols like the flag, all of these things, they become very loaded. Yeah, and it becomes a minefield. You know, given all of this, is there anything that might surprise you in this World Cup? Soccer is a place that gets used by dictators, it gets used by dissidents, it gets used for peace, it gets used for internationalism, and it gets used to excite people into nationalism. It's all those things.

55:13and 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 protests 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 U.S. 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. 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 the US.

56:04But I think people will be surprised by the joy. Because once the soccer starts, it becomes joyous. 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. Some soccer player you've never heard of going through six men and scoring. And this stuff that you remember forever that we all saw when we were eight years old. That doesn't eliminate the bad stuff. We should be talking and writing about the bad stuff. But remember the joy too.

56:52That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. ThruLine was created by me and Ramtin Adablui. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Wyman, Casey Miner, Christina Kim, Devin Kadiyama, Kiana Mojada, Irene Noguchi, Liana Semstrom, Julia Redpath, Skylar Swenson. Thank you to Michael Lopatron, Johannes Durge, Cheyenne Butler, Yolanda Sanguene, and Tommy Evans. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

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