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

Hi everybody, welcome to the Rest is History. So we have a brand new mini-series for you to mark the FIFA World Cup, which is happening in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. So what we're going to be doing is looking at some of the history, the deep history of the World Cup and in particular the story of how dictatorships have used football and used the World Cup in particular to bolster support for their regimes. So we're looking at propaganda, we're looking at the personalities of the dictators, we'll be looking at the stories of the tournaments and how they reflect public opinion and so on.

Some amazing stories. In future episodes, we'll be looking at the great Brazilian team of the 1960s and early 1970s. So that's the team of Pele and Jesinho and Jerson and all these great players. The team that won in 1970, people say the best team of all time, but this was a point when Brazil had a military dictatorship. So we'll be looking at how the military dictatorship of Brazil from 1964 uses football.

We'll be looking at arguably the most controversial World Cup of all, which is 1978 Argentina. Some of you may remember we did a series about Eva Peron, and this is effectively the sequel to that. So we'll be looking at the military junta of the late 70s and how they used the 78 World Cup and the team of Mario Kempes, which won against the Dutch in the final. Big, big story in Argentina. But we'll be kicking off with Italy and with Mussolini's fascist regime and the World Cups of 1934 and 1938.

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