The Real History of Football - Jonathan Wilson

25:39When the people you're stealing the flag from are just sort of, you know, two 45-year-old accountants from Norwich. They'd probably given it to you if you'd asked.

25:46Francis Foster:I guess what I'm getting at is, is there something particular about football? Because I'll be honest with you, I remember even in the 2000s going to Chelsea games. I lived in London at the time. And there were times when I felt like I was not, sounds like a really kind of Gen Z or millennial thing to say, but I was genuinely uncomfortable being there. The level of vitriol, particularly if the team was losing. I remember one game against Everton. I was an Everton supporter in the Chelsea stands and I was not going to let anybody know that I was happy about what was happening on the pitch remotely because it felt like that.

26:21Francis Foster:I go to American football games in America. I go to NBA games. I've been to cricket, rugby, all sorts of. You never see anything like it. So I guess what I'm getting at, is there something particular about football that attracts this? Yes and the answer is complicated So I think And this is almost a slightly romanticised answer I'm slightly cautious about saying this But there is an extent to which Well in fact no this isn't over romanticised This is actually what I think It's the link to violence that I think is over romanticised So I think the football club Provides an identity for people who otherwise lack one And I would include myself in that I'm from Sunderland When do we see Sunderland on the national news?

27:04When do we see... When there's a riot. When there's a riot. And the fascinating thing there, I mean, this is another stage removed. How many people doing the rioting wore football shirts? How many people doing the cleanup wore football shirts? And both trying to say, you know, this is actually the real sort of, you know, we are expressing our Sunderland-ness. And we're consciously adopting the uniform of Sunderland to say that I am somehow representative of Sunderland whether I'm rioting or whether I'm cleaning up. Either way, you come to the same conclusion that the football club is the way that the city projects itself.

27:41And I think, actually, Sunderland, the football club, is pretty conscious of that and pretty good at it. I think some clubs find it very awkward. I guess it kind of depends what the people who are projecting the club as the identity, what they believe in, as to whether the club can sort of go along with that or not. But I think particularly, I mean, this is very much a British answer, but from post-industrial northern British cities, particularly the one club cities, the football club is the most representative element of that city. So you see when Sunderland, Newcastle, Leeds play at Wembley, their fans will take over Trafalgar Square or Covent Garden.

28:19And that's a gesture of we are still here. Don't forget us. and so I think that sense of fighting for an identity however misguided the violent aspect may be, I think that is very real and very true. There's also I think this is particularly true in South America I think it's true in Italy, I honestly don't know the case in Russia, it's often co-opted by organised crime and it does big in Russia so in South America particularly certainly in Argentina the various barras as they call there the ultra groups, the hooligan groups they will be organized crime and they will it can be as simple as sort of charging for parking around the stadium, it could be gambling on the game it could be merchandise or it can be much more sinister stuff to do with running drugs you saw it in Yugoslavia and again this is slightly over romanticized but equally if you want muscle on the street who are the people who are used to taking over the street, used to fighting with police who are disciplined it's the ultra groups and so Arkhan the warlord Zabdhan Losevic puts him in charge of the Zvezda ultras the Red Star ultras the Dilya I mean essentially to kind of calm them down and discipline them but then they become a fighting force and they are at least complicit and probably guilty of many of the atrocities during the Civil War equally the Bad Blue Boys they use the English name the Denama Zagreb fans were a very organised force because if you go to the Maximilien Stadium in Zagreb there's a statue of them what do you call it the inscription underneath says something about our fans marching off to war and that there are people from both the Deleer and the Bad Blue Boys who would see a riot at the Maximilien at a Zagreb-Zesla game in 1990 as the first battle of the war and I think they're massively over-romanticising that but equally it is true that those two sides did go off and they did fight and Jonathan I want to explore a little bit the relationship between hooliganism politics but also racism because so i'm from south london and i grew up i was born in 82 and when i was a little boy you know if you there were there were certain fans who had a notorious reputation millwall was one and particularly at millwall and west ham and chelsea to a certain extent you would get people handing out an nf leaflet so then that's the national front that's a far-right organization in the uk at the time which no longer exists but that was open wasn't it and then they were associated with hooligans as well yeah i mean that was very much i think an 80s thing um i think it's actually then there have been odd odd elements of it but it's actually i think it's it's striking how little traction the racist far-right has made in football so the football lads alliance was the thing four or five years ago disappeared i don't know what's going on with it now so i think there were attempts to harness that you absolutely see racist abuse of players after games um but i think that's a i mean it's not a downplayed significance but i think it's more ad hoc thing i don't think it's a it's like the national front so yeah i mean this i guess is another one of what you're asking about the violence certain clubs and certain fan groups at certain clubs attract a reputation for violence or for for racist beliefs and so people rally to them who have no connection with the club where they think, actually, I quite enjoy fighting.

31:45I mean, that's the thing that a lot of people don't get about hedonism. A lot of people just enjoy it. Why do they do it? Because for them, that's fun. They enjoy the rush of it. Or if you feel a particular affinity to a far-right politics and you think, yeah, actually, I want to join this group that's going to take a more sort of direct action, as it were. But that would draw you to particular clubs and particular fan groups. I mean, the North East is the area I know much better. And you had a very bizarre situation that on New Year's Day 1985, Sunderland played Newcastle in a derby. Madness about New Year's Day.

32:22Don't know why they thought that was a good idea. Newcastle win 3-1 and Sunderland's two black players are both sent off, having been horrifically racially abused through the game. And overnight, Sunderland became an anti-racist club. And that wasn't to do with people suddenly kind of thinking, oh, you know what, we should be more tolerant. I went, oh, yeah, actually, I was wrong what I thought yesterday. It was, hang on, Newcastle are racist, therefore we're anti-racist. And, you know, suddenly then had Gary Bennett, who was a black captain who remains one of the clubs most popular players. And I'm sure it was because they'd seen two of their black players sent off and it was an anti-Newcastle gesture rather than a pro sort of tolerance, all races together gesture.

33:05Yeah, because you see within the Italian ultras, which I find fascinating. Number one, the fact that a lot of footballers talk about this. If the team is going through a particularly rough patch, the head ultra then demands a meeting with the captain, and that's just seen as acceptable. So that, number one, is mind-boggling. And number two, particularly in Italy, you see the links between certain fascist groups and ultras, and they kind of open about their fascism, really. Yeah, absolutely. And it depends, club by club. So Lazio have a reputation of being very far right. Livorno have a reputation of being very far left.

33:42I'm not saying all Lazio fans are massively far right or all Livorno fans are massively far left, but their ultra groups identify in that way. And that's absolutely true. And I guess that has its roots probably in Mussolini and street violence and street gangs. That sort of culture permeates through in football is now where it finds its expression.

33:59Francis Foster:And they are very powerful in it. I remember going to see Palermo play Udinese in Palermo. and the moment the game was over you could see the captain of palermo immediately ran over to the ultra specifically and i don't know like clapped along almost like he kind of had to and probably did yeah and it's a i think from from the outside it's a very odd um phenomenon and you have it in argentina as well i think argentina was changing in the 80s it was very much about we want our team to win football matches and now it's about making money from the drug sideline But you have instances of when Maradona went back to Boca in the 90s and the ultras invaded Boca's training base after a series of bad results.

34:40I guess the logic is we'll intimidate the players into playing better, which I'm not sure sports psychology would suggest is the best way to do. But you have Maradona literally having to talk down the ultras going, no, hang on, this is not helping. Our 17-year-old left-back, he's terrified just to play a match in front of the fans, is not going to play better because he was threatened to cut his throat if we don't win next Wednesday. Yeah, because there's that very famous clip of Gascoigne scoring. I think it may have been Paul Gascoigne, he was a legendary England football hero of mine, scoring in the Rome derby for Lazio.

35:14It was 1-0 to Roma, he scored, and then he went absolutely mental when he scored, and so did the players. And they went, that must have been joy, Paul. And he said something like that. No, that was relief. because he was, him and the rest of the players were genuinely worried that if they lost in the Rome derby at home, that they were going to get lynched before they left the stadium. Yeah, I know it's a very, very strange thing. And also, you know, it's, especially in South America, the fan groups get involved in transfers. So there's a story of Marcelo Bielsa, great Argentinian coach, people in England probably know him best from his time at Leeds.

35:55But when he was at Newell's, one of the two big Rosario clubs with a particularly sort of hardcore support. A fan group delegation went around sort of berating about some tactical decision he made in the game. And he had a live hand grenade by his door that as soon as he opened his door to them, he picked up the hand grenade, put his teeth around the pins and sort of said, go away or else I'm pulling this out and we'll all die. And they were like, okay, you're madder than us. Bye. Sorry.

36:23Francis Foster:That's an incredible story. and you mentioned you keep referring to the money side of it that's obviously changed dramatically even within our lifetimes but i mean obviously before you know in the 60s i don't people weren't being paid really much more than normal person right well 1963 was when the maximum wage ends yeah maximum wage is 20 pounds a week for an english footballer right uh now 20 pounds was a bit more than it is now but still it wasn't they were not getting paid loads no it was sort of a a normal working class wage maybe maybe a slightly better than average uh working class wage right to the point now where the top players are making tens of millions a year uh they're making more in a week many of them than the ordinary person will make in a year how does that happen well i mean that's quite a complicated question as well but maximum wage when it was introduced in 1901 is actually i think it comes from exactly the right motives so the victorians are very smart about this the victorians realize if you set up a league if a team wins it will get more fans if you get some more fans it gets more money if it gets more money it buys better players if it gets better players it's going to win again so you're creating a monopoly situation and they think this is terrible the league what we're selling if you think this is a product we're selling competition between teams so it's not like a normal business and this is one of the mistakes people made one of the mistakes i think pretty much every country's main british law makes is treating sport as if it's a normal business.

37:50It's not. Because what you're selling is competition between two clubs. And once that becomes imbalanced, the product becomes less attractive. So you have to maintain that balance. So the idea of the maximum wage is, if we cap the amount players can make, that means that me, the big club, can't go to you, the little club, and say, we'll take your centre forward because we're going to pay him what you're paying plus 50%. So I think it comes from the right motives. Very quickly, it becomes a tool of oppression for the players who were sort of saying, hang on, there's 50 ,000 people here and I'm getting four quid a week.

38:23Francis Foster:How does that work? And so that's why eventually after a series of court cases it's lifted in 1963. And I imagine television is a big part of it as well because now it's not 50 ,000, it's a million people that are... Yeah, and so there's basically two big changes happen post that. So one is the coming of television. So in England, you can say match for day starts 1964. So just after the maximum wage is lifted, which doesn't bring in very much money. but by the time you're getting regular live coverage by the 90s broadcast rights are enormous and then foreign rights on top of that so I think there's 7.6 billion the rights deal for the Premier League and that pertains up to 2003 when Roman Bramwich arrives at Chelsea and suddenly you've got somebody who's taking over the club who is not interested in profit and is not interested in just doing what's right for Blackburn Rovers or Wolframden Wanderers or whatever his local team happens to be, but has motives that are, to be honest, pretty hard to discern.

39:21But money doesn't matter to him. He can pump in whatever money he wants, whether that's just because he likes football or whether there is some sort of soft power directive behind that. And I mean, Arsenal, I think, are the great example of the club who get caught up in that, that Arsenal have been challenging Manchester United through the 90s. They're the big two teams in England. Arsenal stayed in Highbury at a capacity of, like, was it 38 ,000? And Manchester United's 70-odd there. So roughly Arsenal's capacity is half of Manchester United's. So even if they're getting roughly the same TV money, United have a huge advantage in terms of gate receipts, in terms of corporate possibilities.

39:56So Arsenal then blow the bank on building a new stadium. It's an amazing new stadium. Well, it's not new now, but an amazing stadium. It's exactly the right economic logic, except by the time it's built, suddenly those economics don't work anymore. And you have to have this billionaire owner, be he an oligarch, a state or private equity. And that has radically changed the economics of football.

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41:30Francis Foster:And one of the things they do, as you know incredibly well, is they have a draft system, which means that younger players, A, have to get an education, which is good because most players don't make it. And so you force them to get a degree and whatever. But then what it also does, there's a salary cap, obviously. And if you overspend, other teams get the fine that you pay and it's distributed evenly. You basically do not get these decade-long periods of domination by one or two teams. And actually, it all gets rotated around. So the Chicago Bulls, who were great under Michael Jordan, haven't been great since.

42:02Francis Foster:The Lakers, you know, they go through their periods, the Celtics. The big market teams still tend to come out on top, but it's not like anything like what you have in football. And then the other thing is, I have to, my grandfather used to piss the hell out. He pissed me off so much when I was a kid, because I used to be a big football fan. and he would always say to me, Constantine, football is really not that good a sport. I mean, look at basketball. Look at American football. They're so entertaining. And it's true. American football is all geared towards maximum performance and like bite-sized chunks.

42:34Francis Foster:Whereas with football, you might be watching people just run around the pitch for about 70 minutes and nothing happens. Do you think football is a better sport? Do you think it merits its global dominance? Well, there's two different issues there. So let's deal with the second one first. And I think that depends entirely what your personal preference is i like the fact there aren't many goals in football and i like it for two reasons one is the explosion of emotion when you score is way greater than you know if it's finishing your 110 108 then how do you get that excited about any one one point whereas if it finishes one nil that's an incredibly exciting moment and also if it finishes nil nil well that That can also be exciting.

43:17I'm kidding. But you also have the opportunity in football for the weaker team to set out to stop the better team. And I would say maybe in 20 % of the games, the weaker team is able to stop the stronger team. There's obviously a limit. And that is one of the beauties of football, that it's not just about the best team winning. It's about strategising, give yourself the best chance of getting the best possible result. And you can be, well, the day we're recording this is the day after Grimsby beat Manchester United. I suppose you can make a case that Manchester City are no longer better than Grimsby, but still, a four-flight team beating a top-flight team, I'm not sure any other sport in which that can happen.

43:55And that is a very good thing. The first point I think is more interesting. And I don't know what my answer would be if I hadn't grown up within a British model. but the british model is you play sport at your local club and your local club caters to its local community and it can enter competitions and it can grow and if it keeps growing and if it keeps getting more popular and keeps getting more members and keeps getting more money and maybe can start to pay people to play for them it can enter the pyramid and it can go all the way up in theory can go all the way up to the top and so that club is very representative of its local community and that is a tiny fraction of clubs who can do that but the clubs are all joined in this mass pyramid and you have social support for people who want it and you can pick your level you can play at any level from being the highest level professional to being the level club cricketer that i was that's you know you can be hopeless at it but if you want to do it you can do it in the u.s professional sport is not based on that pyramid it's not based on clubs that are very much rooted in their community is based on franchises and it's based on making money from the off.

45:03And if you look at the history of the NASL, franchises are changing all the time. Oh, hang on, the LA Gatos have become a Miami Toros overnight and they've moved from... How do you support that team when suddenly they're playing 3 ,000 miles away with entirely different cast of players? So sure, if you want a closed system with no promotion and relegation, then yeah you can put in place all these controls, all these caps. It's designed to make money for the owners which maybe you see sport purely as a product to be sold. If you see it as having a community value and as representing its community and providing facilities at some level for the most hopeless players then I would prefer the European model.

45:47So they're just two different models. Now the other problem about Clare's model is you have no relegation so if you have a bad start to the season that's it it's over whereas at least in European leagues or South American leagues you're fighting

46:01Francis Foster:into relegation it's not something to play for well in fact sorry Francis just to in fact in a closed system like the the US one you're actually heavily incentivized to perform badly once you've it's clear you're not going anywhere because then you'll probably get you'll get the best chance of having the best players from next year's draft and the draft has become a major problem for US soccer because if their players finish their university education, great, they've got a degree, brilliant. They're 21. If you're an English player in the same position you've been playing since you're 16, 17, you've got four or five years of high-level experience.

46:34Francis Foster:That's not going to work for football because there's a global market for football, whereas for the NBA and the NFL, that's not really an issue. Exactly. It can only work. Maybe that's why the tweaks of the laws introduced to whatever games they took up in the 19th century made sense on a local level, but it makes it very hard to integrate And I think you see with women's soccer, I think you're seeing the US approaching a crisis point because they were dominant for a long time. So you have legislation in 1971, I think, early 70s anyway, that says you have to have equal opportunity in all things in universities for men and women.

47:09In practice, what that means is because there are no women's American football teams and because they're incredibly costly, the American football team takes almost all the funding for men's sport. the women's sport have this funding they can distribute much more freely they invest in in soccer their soccer programs become very good and so that's by the mid-70s they're producing high numbers of highly accomplished women soccer players and so america becomes the dominant power now that europe is beginning to catch up it's benefiting from the fact that you have an english league a spanish league a dutch league an italian league a swedish league a danish league also competing with each other you're getting best practice and they are now catching the us and And the US has got this problem that they're not developing teenage players.

47:51They're developing 21-year-old players who are already four or five years behind their development by the time they hit professional level. I also think as well, fan culture in European leagues, particularly in the English league, is just far superior to American. They've got no banter is what I'm saying.

48:07Francis Foster:But that's a cultural thing. It's nothing to do with football. Oh, it's terrible. You go there, you go, let's go Dodgers, let's go. I went to an LA Dodgers game and I looked at my friend because I went to the game with him I went, is this the best you can do? In West Ham we stand up and we sing to the Liverpool fans stand up if you've got a job. You know, but there's a genuine thing there that I love about it which is the humour element the fan culture. It's something very unique to English football and I think is what makes English football so special. Yeah, I would agree with that up to a point.

48:41I think again it's... No, I...

48:43Francis Foster:I've just spent about 40 minutes talking about hooliganism, which is the flip side of this coin. Yeah, but one other thing, and I'm very conscious again, this is the environment I grew up in. When I go to, say, Germany or Italy, you see the ultras, and it's great, they make noise, they keep going, and it's all pre-programmed, they're not reacting to the game at all. And that, when you see it for 30 seconds, you say, God, that's amazing. and then 10 minutes I say hang on but you haven't there's a really bad foul there you should have been booing that the referee's never going to be intimidated unless and English fans or British fans react to the game and I think the humour of it I think is a big thing that okay a lot of it's quite formulaic but within the formula sometimes you get very good jokes that relate to things that have happened in the game or things that have happened in the past week and that spontaneity I think is something it's not it's not that common but when it happens it's a great thing and yeah that's yeah it's that more organic feel to it that it's uh this is not pre-scripted it's not everybody sets out for flares after 43 minutes or whatever it's you allow the game you have a sort of a symbiotic relationship between the game and the fans even to the point where um there was a it must be what 10, 11 years ago now when an Everton surge against relegation begins with a bad challenge by Phil Neville because suddenly everybody gets up because he's put in a huge challenge and that atmosphere changes the nature of that game and they end up getting a point or getting a win that they weren't going to get and they then get points in the next half dozen games and they stay up.

50:19And that I think maybe it's just what I'm used to but I think that is a good thing. Yeah and what's really interesting particularly football across our lifetime look you can say the first celebrity footballer was a Manchester United player, George Best, who was dubbed the fifth Beatle, and, you know, he was cool, he had a rock star, good looks, and he was an incredible footballer, arguably one of the best of all time. But then you've just seen footballers just ascend to the point where they're now arguably some of the most famous people in the world. Like, I would say Lionel Messi is, what, top 10 famous people, or Cristiano Ronaldo?

50:51Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Or, I mean, even scale it down a bit, go out in the street, pick a random person, say, name 20 Brazilians, And you're getting 19 footballers. I mean, all due respect to nobody saying Klaus Luspecter. And why is that? Why has suddenly football become footballers, certain footballers, transcended the sport and become celebrities? I don't even think it's certain footballers. I think all footballers. I think all footballers are famous. So I'll give you a concrete example of this. In 2015, I was in Ethiopia. I was in Lalibela, where the Rock Churches are. And it was when Mourinho was falling apart at Chelsea.

51:27Chelsea were playing Liverpool that day in the lunchtime kick-off I went for lunch and the owner of the restaurant I went to she was a Scottish woman she was a Motherwell fan she distributed Motherwell kits to local kids which actually was a little bit weird seeing local kids walking around in Motherwell shirts and I got talking to her and I said where can I watch this the Chelsea-Liverpool game today and she went oh look the restaurant manager will be going so just wait for him when he's finished his shift he'll take you to this cafe where they've got a screen okay great so we go to this cafe paid the 10 beer or whatever to get in and there's 200 people in this room watching this tv massively engaged know what they're talking about very educated audience they clearly watch a lot of football and then the rest of the one just says do you want to come watch swansea arsenal later this afternoon yeah okay we'll go to a proper locals place and it's this sort of um it's like a muddy bank they've hammered benches into the bank there's screens at the front there's a tarpaulin over top it's it's five beer it's half the price of a cafe and everybody is watching, there's 500 people there watching this game and he said oh yeah there's five places like this plus a couple more cafes and I worked it out there's something like 40 % of the adult male population of that village in rural Ethiopia are watching the Premier League on any given Saturday.

52:41I don't know if you've come across David Goldblatt, a great football historian, so he wrote a book called called The Age of Football and he tells the story of a village in Uganda, a remote village where nobody really bothered with time. They get up when the sun comes up, they go to bed when the sun goes down, they move their cattle about according to the seasons, that's it, that's their lifestyle. And then suddenly everybody starts getting watchers and the reason is they know the football kicks off at 4pm or whatever and so they need to know when it's 4pm so they can go back to watch it. The cultural phenomenon of the Premier League, the very bold question of why does football matter it matters now because it is the most popular cultural phenomenon there has ever been that the number of people who watch the premier league is extraordinary i push back on that i don't think it's football i think the world cup and we're going to talk about the world cup because you wrote a great book about it but i think it's the premier league i don't see people doing the same for i don't know getafe versus sevilla or livorno versus udine yeah that's true The Premier League is definitely the world.

53:44I mean, I think in South America, or Spanish-speaking South America, maybe La Liga does still dominate. But yeah, the Premier League has been marketed exceptionally well, exceptionally cleverly. I think you've got to give Richard Scudamore, the first CEO of the Premier League, huge credit that initially he effectively gave away the foreign rights because he wanted it to be. If you go into a bar or a cafe, whether you're in China or Nigeria or Canada, it'll be on. And then people start watching it. People become engaged in it. and David Goldblatt's most recent book Injury Time he says he makes the point that football is now or the Premier League is now the world's soap opera and he points out that in 2001 it was a Liverpool-Barcelona game it was the day that EastEnders BBC soap opera revealed who had shot Phil Mitchell one of the biggest characters and they persuaded UEFA to delay kickoff in this game by 10 minutes so we could have a 10 minutes extended EastEnders so we could find out who'd shot Phil Mitchell.

54:43And UEFA agreed. And yet, I think it was 2019, EastEnders was cancelled entirely to show an ethical fifth-round game because football has now become bigger than the soap operas. In the old days, soap stars were on the front page of the tabloids all the time. Now it's footballers. Football, the Premier League, is the world soap opera.

55:03Francis Foster:And Francis mentioned the World Cup. You've obviously got a great book out about it. Remind everybody of the title so they can go and grab a copy. It's called The Power and the Glory. And one of the things that many, many people, I think, will say very often is, I'm not really a football fan, but I watch it when the World Cup is on. And if sport is ritualised combat, which I've always thought it is, especially team sport, then the World Cup really is the epitome of that, isn't it? Teams from countries coming together and fighting it out for who's top dog. Yeah, absolutely. And you see that right from the start, right from 1930 when it begins.

55:37That is true. who is the FIFA president who sets up the World Cup. He thinks football will encourage fraternity among nations. I would say by 1934, when Mussolini's got his hands on it, it's already true that's not going to happen. But yeah, if you look at, say, the England-Argentina relationship in football, it's even before the Falklands, there's a sort of Oedipal relationship there. Okay, Argentina was never part of the empire. It was part of the informal empire that Britain essentially ran the economy there from 1870 through to 1910, for the sake of easy numbers. There's a sense, when they first started playing friendlies in the 1950s, of being people against master.

56:20By 66, when they play in a very violent World Cup quarterfinal, a hugely controversial game, that's full-on sort of, we have to beat the quasi-colonial power. Or look at when Senegal played France in the opening game of 2002 World Cup. How can you see that as anything other than the coloniser against the coloniser? Yeah, that's what I love about the World Cup, is that you watch the teams, and the teams actually sort of embody the stereotypes that you give their countries. You look at the Japanese fans, who I would argue are the most beautiful fans in terms of behaviour. they literally clean up after themselves and they show japanese players after they leave the dressing room the dressing room looks immaculate yeah is that a bit performative i don't know maybe well

57:09Francis Foster:switch it either way i mean the argentines who francis his mother's from venezuela so he knows latin america pretty well he always says the argentinians are the the english of of south america uh i universally hated uh and one of the things through i don't know if this is a stereotype but they do have a reputation for being kind of, you know, dirty, and dirty as players, dirty as a team. Is that a fair assessment? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, probably. But even that's quite, you know, that's a fascinating question. And, you know, I could talk for an hour on this. If you give me two minutes. Yes. So the British retreat from Argentina, and there's a big question in Argentina, this immigrant nation, you know, the indigenous people have essentially been driven off or killed.

57:55and so you have this country that's a mix of Spanish, Italians, Arabs, Jews, British, Germans, Irish, French and they all come from very different places, very different ideas how you do things and it suddenly fakes to this question once the British get out of hang on, who are we? What is it to be Argentinian? And so there's a series of lectures in 1912 in the Audion Theatre attended by the President and all this cabinet and all the great and good of Argentina And Leopoldo Lugones, the great poet of the age, he gives these lectures on que es agendinidad. And he concludes that the spirit of Argentina is to be found in the gaucho, in the lone horseman of the panthers.

58:34That combination of virtuosity but also self-reliance, that is characteristic of the Argentinian. It's a romanticised image, but fair enough. The great Argentinian epic poem, Martin Hierro, is about a gaucho. But you then have this issue, well, Buenos Aires is growing rapidly. Argentina has become a much more urban society. And so by the 1920s, people are starting to say, well, it's all very well to have these big asados and everybody becomes dressed as gauchos, but you are in a city and you do kind of look ridiculous. So Borges is very funny on this. In El Graphical, the great sports magazine, selling over 100 ,000 copies a week at its peak, based in Buenos Aires, they start to say, well, how do you express this gaucho spirit in the city?

59:17and they say, well, the true spirit is actually the Pee Bay, the urchin, the kid from the street. He's playing on the potreros, on the vacant lots. And he also has that virtuosity because he's playing in these games of 15, 20, 25 a side in a small space on a hard, uneven pitch. He's got to have great ball control, great technique, but he's also got to have that self-reliance. He's got to be streetwise. He's got to be able to look after himself. He's got to be able to use his elbows. And they realise this is in complete contradistinction to the British who've taught them a game because they're playing on big, grassy pitches in schools.

59:47So their game's all about stamina and running. They've got a teacher with a whistle if things get out of hand. There's no teachers with a whistle on the potreras. You've got to be able to handle yourself. And so Boricotto, who's actually Uruguayan, but he's a sort of honorary Argentinian, he's the editor of El Graphico. In 1928, he writes this incredible piece where he says, if we were to erect a statue to the spirit of Argentinian football, it would depict a Pibé with a shock of dark hair, with his teeth worn down by eating yesterday's bread, and he goes on about how he's got holes in his shirt, he's playing with a rag ball, he's not rich enough to have a proper ball, and he's all about the dribble.

1:00:21And the Argentinian word for dribble is gambeta, which is the, it's a gaucho word, meaning the running motion of an ostrich. And the thing is, if he took that description and gave it to somebody without context, said, who is that? 100 % of people would say it's Maradona. So 49 years before Maradona makes his international debut, his coming is foretold. And that's why when Maradona gets there, when he turns up, when they're seeing him in youth competitions, is that this is him, this is El Pibidoro, the gold merchant, the Argentinian hero who's coming as being prophesied. And then why does the gaucho culture come to an end?

1:00:56It comes to an end because the British introduced barbed wire. Once you have barbed wire, you don't need a cowboy. You just put a fence up around your cows. If you look at Argentinian newspapers from the 1870s, one of the biggest celebrities is a bull, a British bull called Tarquin. and the reason Tarquin is so prized is if your cows mate with Tarquin then they they're going to give good meat yield because you can do selective breeding if you've got a fence if you've just got a cow where you can't stop the bulls you know going with whichever cows they want so even if you want to do things the traditional way if you're if you're a farmer if you're an estanciero and you're trying to do it with the gauchos you're going to make less money than your neighbour who's put up barbed wire.

1:01:38So the British have killed the Gaucho. And that's why when Maradona scores his two goals against England in his greatest single performance, 1986 World Cup quarterfinal, four years after the Falklands, that's why that is the Gaucho's revenge on England. And look at his two goals. The first one, the cunning of the street kid. The second one, the virtuosity of a street kid. It's the perfect game for Maradona. And it is this sense of the Gaucho finally getting his own back on the British.

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1:03:17Francis Foster:Well, now you can start taking advantage of them as well. If you have over$50 ,000 in your retirement account, you need to contact our friends at Augusta Precious Metals. visit triggergold.com or text trigger to 35052 today your future self will thank you why do you think and this is quite a leading question but i firmly believe it to be true why is it the majority of the best players are south american um i well i think it probably is that culture of playing on the streets i think um certainly in terms of forwards i think that's really valuable uh to have that i realize i didn't fully answer your question so i'll come back to that there is something of a street footballer which is anarchic, it's individualistic, it's hard to predict.

1:04:01I think players who've grown up in academies can become quite predictable. I think you've seen, for instance, Germany in the last sort of 15, 20 years since they overhauled our academy system, they produce loads of great midfielders. They don't produce centre-forwards anymore. So I think that learning our own way of playing I think is quite important. And Arsenal, for instance, now, although they've got incredible facilities, they have at least one session a week where they just let the kids play. They don't coach them. I mean, they're doing it on beautiful astroft pitches with balls that have been properly blown up.

1:04:31So maybe they're not going to develop in the same way. But I think that is why. I think there's also a sense of if you grew up in poverty and football is your way out, then possibly you are more committed, more ruthless. I mean, I remember speaking to Philippe Toucet, a French coach who coached a lot in Africa. He was a Japan coach in 2000 when I spoke to him. and him saying that he found Japanese football incredibly frustrating because it's technically very good. The players are very disciplined, very obedient. They look after themselves. They're very fit, but they don't have the hunger and the edge that he'd found in African players.

1:05:03So your question about why...

1:05:05Francis Foster:There is a saying in the NBA, I can't remember which coach used to say, but you never recruit a player from a two-car garage, from a home with a two-car garage. Yeah, yeah.

1:05:18So why... Why Argentinians dirty, Jonathan? So partly it's that self-reliance, but what you see is this technical skill is really privileged. And Argentinian football turns professional in 1981. The Argentinian league in the 30s is incredibly well-followed, huge crowds. The football's very beautiful, very individualistic. There's all kinds of myths and stories about it. La Machina, the great river plate side of the 40s, massively celebrated. Their famous five-man forward line. You look at it, they hardly win anything. I think they win two of the five championships when they played together. But they play this beautiful football, and that's what's privileged.

1:05:54Argentina go to the first World Cup 1930. They lose in the final. In 1934, they send the amateur team and lose to Sweden in their first game. They don't go in 1938. They've fallen out with the Brazilians in 1950, and they don't go and they try to say it's because of Peronist isolation. They just fell out with the Brazilians. Brazil hosted in 1950. They can't afford to send a team to Switzerland in 1954. They finally go to the World Cup again in 1958. It's the first time they send a proper professional team for 28 years. And their football has been incredibly beautiful through this 25, 28-year period.

1:06:20and they think they're the best in the world. As you suggested, there is a self-confidence about Argentinian culture. I don't think that's remotely what I suggested, but well done. In 1957, they win the South American Championship with this great forward line. The Karasukius, the Dirty Faces forward line. So again, the Dirty Faces side is urgent ideal. Problem is, three of those players are sold to Italy before the World Cup, and they won't pick them when they're playing in Italy. But they get there. They brought in Adolfo Pednero, who's been this great place, 39. So he's old, he's overweight.

1:06:51But they still say, oh, he's so skillful, that'll be enough. And they get beaten 6-1 by Czechoslovakia. And immediately they think, hang on, this technical, beautiful world, this doesn't work, we've got to be physical. And this, I think, is something you see repeatedly in Argentinian culture, not just in football, but in everything. Because it's this tabula rasa, because it attracts these sort of dreamers, you get this utopianism, but the flip side of that is cynicism. So you try to build utopia, oh, it's gone wrong, let's be really cynical. And you can even say the history of Cous is like that.

1:07:24Oh, Perron, it's great. Work as you turn. Oh, it's gone wrong. Off you go. And that cycle keeps going. And I think you see it in the football. You get this very sort of bifurcated vision of either the incredible attacking beauty or the incredible cynicism. And those are manifested in two great coaches. In Cesar Luis Minotti, who wins the World Cup with them in 78, who plays the beautiful football. a former communist who wins it under the Hunter, which is very complicated, and Carlos Bilado, who is this cynical coach who has Maradona's team when they win it in 86. It's even the sort of intellectual culture of Argentina, it loves a theory, so it loves to say everybody falls on one of these two theories.

1:08:06And of course it's not true. I don't even think Menotti is Menottista. I think he's much more mixed, but it suits them to come up with these ideals. so it's a whole mixture of where the football culture comes from the fact it's created in contradiction to the british the intellectual culture of the time the defeat to czechoslovakia in in helsingborg in 1958 the violence is legitimized there in a way that it wouldn't

1:08:31Francis Foster:be elsewhere that's really interesting and speaking of cynicism one of the things that i would argue we've seen particularly in recent decades is a lot of countries that have a a desire to impact their image on the world stage have cottoned on to the fact that actually the world cup is probably the biggest thing that you can possibly do to affect your image and so you see russia and qatar i mean i don't know the details but i wonder whether those two countries got the world cup through entirely you know above board methods yeah i think you're not the only one who wonders that yeah i really do wonder that and it wouldn't surprise me if it was the case well i mean look at the exco who voted on the 24 person exco and executive committee executive executive executive committee in those days vote on who got the roll cup yeah and i think it's 15 over 24 have been convicted of corruption others have died before into each trial they are not a they're not the most upstanding group of people no no clearly not and so i guess what i was going to ask is it in in inevitably anything with power it's like the ring of power it corrupts and it becomes used by corrupt people and politicians and countries what do you make of the the inevitable infusion of politics and geopolitics into the World Cup?

1:09:45Well, I think it's always been there. So why do Uruguay want to host in 1930? In part, it's because they've won the Olympics in 24 and 28. They know they're really good at it. And they think this is, you know, they recognize that suddenly people recognize Uruguay as a country in its own right, not just a province of Argentina. Uruguay winning the Olympic football in 24 and 28 is a big thing for Uruguay's self-projection into the world. So how do you magnify that when you host the first World Cup? It happens to be 100 years, it happens to be the centenary of Uruguay's declaration of independence in 1830, which is why the big stadium where the finals played is the centenario, this centenary stadium.

1:10:21Juan Campistigui, the president of Uruguay, he's batlista. Batli Donas has been, in 1901 he comes to power and I think pretty enlightened. He reinvests the profits from the meat industry in education, in health, in... He promotes physical education in school. He sees that as really important. It's one of the reasons why Ugoi are so good at football. And this is supposed to be a celebration of battleismo. And when Gil Rime, the president of FIFA, gets there, and he's, you know, who is Gil Rime? He's just a French bureaucrat. He's not important. On his first day there, he's going to a barbecue with the president.

1:11:01So straight away, politics is trying to co-opt football. By 1934, Mussolini is much more overt than... I mean, Campisci didn't do any good. He was toppled in the queue the following year because of the Wall Street crash and lack of money. But yeah, Mussolini in 1934, he takes hold of a World Cup in a way that even Qatar and Russia haven't, that he introduces his own trophy, a Copa del Dice, which is three times bigger than the official World Cup trophy. But he's also quite smart about it. So he subsidises travel for fans, which try and get them to, because part of the point is not just we want Italy to win the World Cup and prove we're this muscular, athletic, modern nation.

1:11:38And, you know, if you think of Mussolini, he's constantly projecting himself as a sportsman. You know, he's riding horses, I guess a bit like Putin, riding horses bareback. He's always been pictured skiing. When Engelberdolphus, the Austrian chancellor, goes to see him at Riccione in, was that 33, I think? And it's sort of emergency talks. Will Mussolini provide the troops just in case Hitler decides to go in. And Muslim makes sure that when Dolphus arrives, he's out in the sea swimming. And so Dolphus is there. He's an Austrian diplomat. He's dressed in this ridiculous three-piece suit. It's 30 degrees or whatever.

1:12:13Dolphus is tiny. He's 4 '11", Dolphus, the millimeternik, as they called him. And so you then get these pictures because Dolphus is saying, oh, now I better go and get a skiff and row out to him. Obviously, he's terrible at rowing. He's his little 4 '11", diplomat. Why would he be able to row? You have these pictures of him walking up the beach. And Muslini's, what was Muslini, five, seven? He's not tall, but he's much taller than Dolphus. He's wearing these trunks, he's a big, muscular bloke. And there's Dolphus, this little man in a three-piece suit with his, you know, he's taking his jacket off, but he's obviously hot and sweating.

1:12:44And the iconography of that, there's powerful, muscular, modern Italy, an old, fussy, impotent Austria. It's incredibly powerful. So Muslini's trying to put that into a welcome context. But it's also about showing Italy is not the disorganized, ramshackle country of myth. It's a modern country that can host this big tournament. The trains run on time. So Mussolini's one of the first people to sort of think of sports merchandising. He has all this quite cheap but well-produced merchandise, all with the Fasquez, with the fascist logo on. The match tickets he has printed on lovely cardboard. They're very well designed, so people will keep them as souvenirs.

1:13:25again with fascist detailing and so from Buscellini's point of view, the World Cup's a great success because Italy win it and Italy hosts it really, really well and all, every foreign journalist who goes sort of has to write, yeah, this was actually a really great tournament that the stadiums are great there's been this great wave of stadium building in the late 20s, early 30s a lot of it with loans from the government or local municipalities there's been You know, from 1926, there's been a conscious movement to make Italy better at football. They've banned foreign players. In a lot of cities, they would amalgamate smaller clubs to make one big club per city to make it a proper national league.

1:14:06There's a lot of very sort of forward-thinking, sort of clever planning comes together in 1934. So whatever's happened recently, Mussolini got there first. But yeah, I think the difference in 2018 and 2022 is that Russian Qatar, the benefit for them was to host the tournament. They didn't think they had any chance of winning it. But hosting the tournament, putting on a good show, showing they're part of this sort of international community. And you have that, the opening game in 2018 when Russia beat Saudi Arabia 5-0. And you have those images in the VIP box where you have Putin, Janine Fantino, and Mohammed bin Salman sitting next to each other engaging what looks like the most awful stilted banter.

1:14:50But the three of them are pictured there together. And the weird thing is, what's that ball bloke in the middle doing? Why is Gianni Infantino, this Swiss diplomat, why is he there? What's he got to do with this? But somehow the president of FIFA operates on a level where he's dealing with the most important people in the world.

1:15:05Francis Foster:Look, he has the power, right? So actually, objectively, he's entirely merited in being in that box because he has the power that these other two people want. Yeah, he has something that he can give them. How often has he been in the Oval Office? He's always there. He's always giving Trump something. I think for the first time, actually, last week, you saw a flicker of doubt on Infantino's face as Trump was talking about moving the draw from Las Vegas to the Kennedy Center in Washington. You can see Jani's face. Hang on, I'm not sure. Have I agreed to that? But obviously he can't do anything. So, yeah, he's become a facilitator for the soft power ambitions of the MBS of Trump and Putin.

1:15:48So, Jonathan, we've been talking about corruption off the field and FIFA notoriously have had numerous scandals. What about corruption on the field? How much can we trust that the results on the field are actually organic and fair and haven't been manipulated by the players or referees? I think at the highest level, I think we can be almost 100 % confident. And the reason I say that is gambling. So I'll give you the Premier League as the example because it's the one I know best. but the betting companies are very strictly regulated that if they get the slightest hint of unusual betting patterns they raise a red flag and so you had an instance it was an Oxford D-Arsen FA Cup game the last season of the season before when there was an unusual number of bets being placed on a particular player to get booked and it turned out I think the player was actually acquitted but the amount they were talking about was four bets worth a total of£1 ,200 so next to nothing and that was enough to trigger an investigation.

1:16:48Francis Foster:That could be like four blokes in a pub, one of them spreads a rumour and they go and put a bet on, basically. It could be that. But even at that level, your point is, even at that level, they're going. So it's in Nobi's interest for it to be fixed at the top level because the betting companies make huge amounts of money because they have margins. The margins operate if a game is fair because they have their very complex, very sophisticated algorithms that work out the odds. and okay maybe one in a thousand times there's a very strange result that costs them money but nine in 99 out of a thousand times they're making money look at the profits of gambling companies on football they're enormous they have absolutely no incentive to to allow the game not to be fair uh also look at how much players players are paid how much money would you have to offer a player for them to risk their career.

1:17:43So we've got an example of this. There was a Singaporean match fixer called Wilson Raj Peromal, who in 1995, mid-90s anyway, he doesn't really know what he's doing. He flies to the UK, Birmingham playing Liverpool in a League Cup game. He's been fixing games in Singapore because it's pretty easy because nobody's got any money. So he bongs him$100, they'll fix it for you. So he thinks, right, I can do this in England, and the returns will be much greater because it's much greater interest. So he goes to Birmingham City, and he says, oh, yeah, I'm a journalist from Singapore. And they're like, oh, OK, well, welcome.

1:18:22And it's not like now where you'd have to show a press card and you'd have to book three weeks in advance or whatever to get an interview. And he goes into the car park, and he goes over to the Birmingham goalkeeper, Ian Bennett, and he says, I want you to fix the game against Liverpool. You're probably going to lose anyway, but just make sure you do. And Ian Bennett says, no. What are you going to offer me? Oh, 20 grand. No. No, I get more than that a week. Why would I take that to risk being banned for life? So, and that was 30 years ago. Now they're getting paid way, way more than that. So at the top level, I think you can be pretty confident.

1:18:57I think lower down, there's much bigger problems because players earn less, the scrutiny is less. I think you've got to ask why the bookmakers offer odds on youth team football where three people are watching. you know makes no sense why do they offer odds on really easy manipulable markets like the first throw-in so there was a spate in the 90s uh where you could um put spread bets on when when this first throwing going to be so obviously players think well hang on if i take the cake off and kick it out of play and i've sold on the spread i'm going to make a profit so they start doing that and that's sort of an open secret but yeah pretty soon you know people crack down on that that doesn't happen anymore.

1:19:38So the modern game at the highest level, I think you can be pretty safe. I think the World Cup, there's a couple of games recently, I think there were question marks over. Really? Really? Which games? I can't say that, but there's a last 16 game in 2006, I think looks pretty suspicious.

1:20:00Francis Foster:Oh, I remember this. Which World Cup? It's the World Cup? Yeah, it's the World Cup 2006 and one that Italy won. In where? is it Korea Japan is that one no it was in Germany in Germany but it's um the the the games that are vulnerable are when you have a a team of players with less money right in a game they're expected to lose yeah that makes sense and they still think well I'm gonna lose either three or four nil might as well be four for an extra x amount yeah yeah I'm very good at thinking like and also I think in countries where maybe they can't guarantee they get the bonus they've been promised and so there's an element of bitterness i think that also may may sort of help break down the moral boundaries jonathan it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show we're going to ask you a bunch of questions from our supporters uh in a second before we head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where everyone can follow that conversation what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be middlebrow detective drama so middlebrow detective drama on TV is phenomenally popular.

1:21:03Not just on the mainstream channels. You've got...

1:21:06Francis Foster:Define it first, because I don't know what you're talking about. Inspector Morse, that type of thing. Yeah, Morse and its followers. Morse is probably the first of that real sort of hour and a half plus ads, so two hours in total. And so you've now got things like Karen Pirie, or you've got the Chelsea Detective, or you've got Midsummer Murders, all the Marple and Poirot adaptations. Why is that so popular? Why is this one of Britain's biggest cultural exports? Why is it proliferating? Why do I watch so much of it? Why is that the way... Why is murder the way that I relax? And I understand the logic of the golden age of detective fiction in the 1930s.

1:21:46And Martin Edwards has written a very good book on it. And it's sort of supposed to be in the turbulence of the interwar years. This is sort of a... Yes, violence happens, but then order prevails. But why are we obsessed by it now? Why is there so much middle-grade detective drama? Do other countries do it? And why can the Americans not do it well?

1:22:06Francis Foster:There we go. Lots of questions for you. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where we ask Jonathan your questions. Please inform me who is winning the upcoming World Cup so I can bet my life savings. Thanks in advance.

1:22:38We'll see you next time.