Fascist Football Foundations PCQ
This article discusses the ways Italy wanted to restructure its approach to the game of football. The government sought to use football as a way to unite the nation through the cultural bond of sport, while also recognizing football as a vehicle for political cohesion. Football in Italy after 1926 not only represented physical dominance over other teams, but also was publicly viewed as fascism’s way of displaying its confidence.
Calcio-chaos: The Road to Viareggio
This section talks about some of the difficulties faced when the popularity of football or calico began to rapidly increase. Teams began to see their number of fans steadily increase and also fans began to travel to games just to further support their home teams. Teams made it easy for such devoted teams to travel through travel aids that allowed for larger groups to afford the trip. The popularity of football led to the idea of traveling to see teams play to be a common and widely accepted means of spending leisure time.
“Confronted with hostile and disruptive interventions from players, fans and officials, their ability to control matches was questioned for the first time.” (54)
“When you want to cleanse the football world of the germs of indiscipline and intolerance that are the most serious threats, you need to rid the field of protests and cases that infuriate.” (55)
I wanted to point these two quotes out to demonstrate the level of passion that football had begun to generate with the masses in Italy. While football through the government’s point of view could be seen as an important and influential tool towards more wide spread unity, it seemed like the passion for the sport and for certain local teams had become so great that it was in fact casting a negative shadow on a game of sport. when officials and players are no longer able to control crowds and officials do not know how to make the right call due to being afraid of violence and physical harm, something about the way passion is being brought into the game has to change. On page 56 it even talks about how referees and the sporting association recognized that football had connected a bunch of different issues that had become incorporated into the game. The management of football was under fire and it became a national crisis because it threated the look in feel of the game throughout the nation.
Many games also had become very lopsided due to the richer teams being able to field more highly skilled players than most of the poorer teams. These games were not only unfair they were humiliating to the poorer teams who were clearly out matched and incapable of truly competing. It made it so that the football season didn’t really become an attractive thing to watch until the playoffs where the more skilled teams faced each other more frequently. Due to financial limitations these poorer teams instead of attempting to compete had to worry about maintaining enough fans to be able to afford to field a team.
“Calcio needed to subordinate its activity to Fascism’s new concept of physical education, while the clubs themselves had to impose more self-discipline to end the sort of incidents that had stimulated the crisis in the first place.” (58)
The new concepts that Fascism brought to the table were more physical education and for teams to be more cautious in the ways they carried themselves. This new restructure helped games become more civil again and allow for both officials and players to better regulate the game play that had at one point gotten out of hand. This new direction also led to the creation of different divisions where the more competitive teams would play in division one while division two existed for teams who could not yet compete with some of the top teams in the area. Teams who could win games and excel in division two were promised the opportunity to move up to the higher division but this was harder than originally advertised.
Shooting for Italy: Foreign Bodies on Foreign Fields
This section discusses the Italian national team’s victories starting with the World Cup victory in 1934 which they later retained when they won again in 1938 in France, these wins plus another victory in 1936 in the Olympics helped solidify Italy as one of the top international talents in the world.
“With Fascist foreign policy proving disastrous or embarrassing at best, there was a huge source of pride to be exploited in calcio’s European domination, especially as the movement and Mussolini’s regime constantly proclaimed national greatness, measured in terms of international prestige.” (174)
This quite helps sum up some of the topics in this section of the reading, the Italian national team needed to perform well so that the proclamations made by Mussolini and his advisors would hold weight. The Italian government saw football as a way to further promote fascism by becoming one of the world’s top football programs internationally. International sport and competition was continuing to become more important and countries began to see sport competition as way of exerting physical dominance over their opponents, victories on the football field extended much further than just the sporting world. Players however were attempting to play the game in the name of sport, while their actions began to hold political meanings as their victories did, players were wearing their nation’s colors and competing against other teams for the sake of winning football games, everything else was attached without their control. With every win the players won the press and Mussolini used it to further spread fascism and place significantly more meaning behind each game.
Questions:
- If the Italian national team had won games, how would Mussolini and his advisors have adapted to the situation?
- Once the division two teams realized it would be more difficult than promised to move to division one why didn’t they reject the new system in place?
- If the players weren’t part of the political aspects behind the national team victories why did they agree to wear all black jerseys instead of the originally planned white ones?