Fabien Archambault. Soccer & Society. Volume 21, Issue 6, 2020.
Introduction
According to a fairly widespread cliché, football is said to have become the national sport in Italy because of the support it received from the Fascist regime which made it one of its prime vectors for its policy of controlling the masses and creating consensus in the 1920s and 1930s. Such a vision results from a dual misunderstanding of the importance of football in Italian society between the Wars and of the instrumentalisation of sport in general and football in particular by the Fascist regime.
Regarding the first aspect, any retrospective illusions should indeed be avoided. Football only became the most popular sport in Italy in the 1960s in terms of being the broadcast and disseminated sport and the sporting event most people followed. Until then, cycling was the favoured sport of the masses which is hardly surprising in a country in which the majority of the population remained rural until the years of the economic miracle marked by an acceleration of the industrialization process, mass rural exodus and large-scale migrations within the country. For the millions of country people who moved to cities and towns, football represented the symbol of a new way of life and acted as a transition ritual between their former world and a new world stamped with modernity. What then was football in Italy during the Fascist ventennio? Clearly it was an important, booming sport which was a distinctive practice of the urban population particularly among the middle classes and industrial elite but it was far from being of majority interest throughout the country. Industrialists ensured football spread and developed in connection with an authoritarian political power which planned to remodel all aspects of Italian society and therefore intervene in all areas including, obviously, football.
This ambition to construct a State which managed everything totally—and was ‘totalitarian’ in the literal sense of the term according to Benito Mussolini’s own words in 1925—asks questions about the degree of fascization of Italian society and the modalities of its effective implementation. In this sphere, as in many others, the Fascist powers did not bulldoze the whole society into accepting it and its demiurgic will, and instead had to work with the social forces it relied on to govern. In the years of major social disputes after the First World War, this initially concerned the liberal bourgeoisie whose members saw the Fascist regime as a lesser evil which they ended up accepting thanks to permanent transactions and compromises. In this perspective, Mussolini and the men around him could not just make a clean sweep of the past—and it is not even sure that was their intention—and clearly had to deal with reality. In the field of sport in general, the Fascist regime had to work with a system which was already coherent having structured itself between 1906 and 1914 and possessed significant resources in terms of technical, economic, social and cultural capital. Immediately after the War, the dynamics which were already in effect before 1914—identified by Felice Fabrizio as involving ‘rationalization, standardization, institutionalization, specialization’ and ‘spectacolarisation’ processes—vigorously spread contributing to a first wave of initial democratization of sporting practices, a boom in sporting events and consequently a first form of massification of sporting cultures. Football was part of this framework and strongly participated in this, managing to make a place for itself in the national sporting system. It certainly came behind cycling, boxing and athletics but was nonetheless a top-level sport.
As the works of Pierre Lanfranchi4 and Stefano Pivato have shown, the introduction of football based on a dual Anglo-Swiss and Austrian model was particularly successful in Italy, probably because the liberal and nationalist bourgeoisie of the Risorgimento made the sport a summer activity which was complementary to gymnastics in the winter. This was different from how the sport developed elsewhere in Europe, in France and Germany particularly. In 1908, fifteen years after the foundation of the first club in Genoa, the term calcio was adopted which, through reference to the calcio storico fiorentino, preserved the fiction of the game’s past in Italy using a classic acculturation process mechanism by which the success of the appropriation of an imported cultural practice almost systematically involves a phase of nationalization. As soon as the following decade, the modes of expression of the tifo—an Italian neologism which appeared around 1920 and cannot be translated but is immediately understandable as referring to being a football supporter in Italy—began to pass on expressed local cultures thus ensuring continuity with parochial or campanilista traditions. This partly contributed to the sport spreading widely geographically and in all strata of urban societies. The clubs increased in number from 400 in 1920 to 1120 in 1923 and perfectly integrated into the mechanisms of expression of local rivalries by putting down roots in territories forged by centuries-long municipal tradition. They made the sources of antagonism and particularities of campanilismo play out while updating them. Campanilismo was a kind of parochial and chauvinistic attitude of which football teams became the representatives.
The Fascist regime could not ignore football’s rise in power even if it was far from being its favourite sport. From this point of view, Benito Mussolini’s sporting passions are illuminating in what they reveal of Fascism’s priorities in the field of sport (I) and the underlying reasons for the political powers’ wariness regarding this booming sport. In reality their aim was to tame it and control the ways in which it thrived. This helps explain why the sport was made professional and the creation of a unified national championship. These initiatives made it possible to instrumentalize football even to a modest extent particularly when the Squadra Azzurra was victorious in international competitions in the 1930s. Such successes were used to serve the regime’s foreign policy (II).
Mussolini—indifferent to football
In a regime which was so centred on the figure of its leader as fascism, propaganda staging the sporting figure of Mussolini obviously revealed the major outlines of the regime’s policy regarding sport. In this field, from the end of the 1920s onwards, Mussolini opted for equestrian portrayals of himself. Horse-riding actually was his favourite sport and indeed the only sport he regularly practiced. He is known to have greatly appreciated the 1936 portrait of himself, Duce a cavallo which no longer exists and was painted by the futurist Gerardo Dottori. The process described by Sergio Luzzatto which transformed Mussolini’s living body into the political body of Il Duce was completed and thus the publicity given to this passion for horses was politically motivated. Mussolini thus situated himself in a medieval tradition, that of the condottiere making the peace between enemy factions. Then in the second half of the 1930s the political use of his horse-riding portrayed him in a tradition from antiquity—that of the conquering Roman emperor celebrated, for example, during the Mostra Augustea della Romanità in 1937, a year after the successful conquest of Ethiopia. Other sporting portrayals of Mussolini abounded in the first years of the regime but these remained distant from the reality of Il Duce’s physical activity and instead helped construct an ‘imaginary Mussolini’, to use the expression coined by Luisa Passerini. These images illustrated Mussolini’s physical dexterity, portraying him as ‘familiar with the elementary gestures of each discipline’ and thus able to ‘create an illusion’ for the cameras of the Istituto Luce. The sports were chosen according to different logics. The first idea was to show him skiing, playing tennis and fencing which were the distinctive practices of Italian high society. This portrayed both his personal rise in society and gentrification which was also conveyed by images of him dressed in the three-piece suits and bowler or top hats suitable for the president of the Council. It also portrayed his desire for respectability in line with the orientations of a regime which had sought and obtained the support of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Skiing also enabled him to occupy the mountain space while distancing himself from royal mountaineering and adding a touch of modernity. Meanwhile, fencing evoked the violence employed in the conquest of power which was admitted and claimed as a quality by the former soldier in combat and leader of squadristi missions. However, henceforth the use of force was codified and framed in a well-established aristocratic tradition with the original brutality tamed and ultimately subdued. The second idea involved the rather fuller register of motor sports and aviation which made reference to both the futurist culture of early fascism which glorified speed and to the drive to modernize the country. Finally the emphasis on swimming and running reflected the voluntarist policy implemented in 1926 with the creation of the Opera nazionale dopolavoro aimed at the middle-and working classes. By 1935, the Dopolavoro (literally ‘after work’) with its 15,000 sporting sections was the world’s first-ranked leisure organization ahead of the USSR. At a time when the body of Il Duce was progressively becoming the body of Italy, Mussolini had to lead by example. Firstly he had to be the incarnation of the sporting dimension of the ‘new man’ advocated by fascism14 and also had to symbolize the systematization and intensification of the incorporation of the nation programme which the liberal regime had inaugurated. All these sports could be considered in one way or another as preparation for future military operations with the notable exception of tennis which only made a furtive appearance in the middle of the 1920s. However, the diversity of sporting disciplines portrayed tended to dwindle over the years as Mussolini’s figure became fuller. This is shown in Mimmo Franzinelli and Emanuele Valerio Marino’s studies of the stock of photographs which were banned for publication by the head of government himself and came from a daily selection taken by a forty-person specialized department at the Istituto Luce. The images which were rejected often seem to have perhaps been wrong because they would have given the public a view of a body which did not comply with the canons of sporting virility. In short, all the photographs which made it totally clear that Mussolini had become a ‘bombolone’ (a ‘dumpy fat man’ to put it politely) were rejected. However, we still need to look at why cycling and football were almost completely absent despite being the two booming sports which were among the most popular. While one or two photographs show Mussolini on a bicycle in the middle of the 1920s, there are no images of him kicking a football. Similarly, Il Duce never attended the start or finish of a stage of the Giro and there is no genuine evidence of his presence in the stands of stadium for a championship match. In fact, Mussolini’s sporting culture remained deeply influenced by conceptions inherited from the Risorgimento in which sport was above all one of the modalities for the construction of the modern nation-state. Consequently, Mussolini could only be wary of professional athletes whose activity was above all determined by the lure of money. This kind of attitude explains why relations between the world of football run by industrialists determined to promote the expansion of their chosen sport and the Fascist powers were initially complicated.
Compromises and arrangements
In the period between the Wars, in Italy as in all other continental European and South American countries, the growing popularity of football made essential the questions of the game becoming professional and the necessity to create unified national championships as these were required to support the industrial growth of this new mass culture. Italy was thus one of the ‘laboratories’ for changes to be implemented all over the world because of the increasingly important role the country began to play in the international trade of players and coaches.
At the turn of the 1920s, two main export zones had emerged—the British Isles and Mitteleuropa—along with two main importing countries, France and Italy. While French clubs preferred players and coaches from across the Channel to those from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italian teams preferred the latter. From 1922 onwards, almost all the clubs in all divisions recruited Austrian and Hungarian players with their number rising from 20 in 1923 to 40 in 1924 and 80 in 1925. The heritage of cultural and footballing links created with Austria-Hungary, before the First World War partly explains this but the excellent level of football in these countries also explains the attraction of their players and coaches.
The emergence of a ‘Danubian’ or ‘Viennese’ School of football was an indirect consequence of the regulation of sport following the Great War. In 1920, the governments of the victorious countries (France, the United Kingdom and Belgium) demanded that their respective Olympic committees ban athletes from the former central European powers (Germany, Austria and Hungary) from taking part in the Antwerp Olympic Games. The rule of pure amateurism was strictly applied in the Olympic movement at the time. Given that the best footballers in Central Europe were deprived of the possibility of representing their countries in the only international competition of the era, there was nothing to stop them becoming professionals. And so at the start of the 1920s a real market was set up between Vienna, Budapest and Prague involving the circulation of players and coaches for whom football was a full-time activity. In 1924, Austria, quickly followed by Hungary and Czechoslovakia, made the game professional, thus becoming the first country in continental Europe to follow the example of England where a professional championship had been created in 1888. The implementation of professionalism of course meant that the players were paid to play but also that they represented a potential source of financial profit for their clubs. The endemic economic crisis which hit Austria and Hungary between the wars and weakened their domestic markets meant that clubs in Central Europe preferred to sell players abroad, mainly to French and Italian clubs, to bring in substantial revenues which otherwise would have been limited. Therefore, by the middle of the 1920s, the flow of Danubian players looking for the highest salaries possible towards Italy grew exponentially. However this stopped abruptly at the start of August 1926.
This was when the Italian Football Federation adopted at its conference in Viareggio a new set of rules which firstly regulated the implicit legalization of professionalism and secondly banned clubs from recruiting players from other countries. The so-called Viareggio Charter was the result of a compromise between the industrialist owners of the major Northern Italian clubs and the Fascist regime represented by the new president of the Italian Football Federation, Leandro Arpinati, vice-general secretary of the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF) and federal secretary of the Bologna section of the PNF (‘podestà’). There were so many migrants from Central Europe playing or coaching in the Italian championships that this was a far too visible contradiction of the policies of autarchy the new powers-that-be had implemented in other spheres. In return, to satisfy the richest clubs a status for players was created which was not actually professional—no-one wanted to offend the liberal aristocracy who were attached to amateurism and still dominated the CONI (the national Italian Olympic committee)—but instead ‘non-amateur’ with professionalism only being legally recognized in Italy in 1946. This pragmatic compromise explains how the Squadra Azzurra was able to take part in the 1936 Berlin Olympic tournament where it won the gold medal with de facto professional players, most of whom had won the World Cup, a competition open to non-amateurs, two years earlier. This was no longer possible in the period after the Second World War. In 1926, clubs who chose to employ ‘non-amateur’ players were given a year to get rid of sixty players from Central Europe which gives an idea of the scale of these migratory flows of qualified workers. On the other hand, coaches from other countries were not banned by the Viareggio Charter and Italian clubs continued to recruit ‘Danubian’ coaches who helped rationalize and professionalize the sport in Italy. For three decades, there was a market of ‘Gyrovague’ coaches from Central Europe attracted by salaries four or five times higher than those in their own countries and who were in demand at all the clubs in the country. It should however be noted that the Viareggio compromise was only accepted by the Italian clubs because they had just discovered an alternative to the ‘Danubian’ market which was more likely to satisfy the new regime, namely South America.
The quality of South American footballers had burst into the spotlight in 1924 with Uruguay’s victory in the final of the tournament at the Paris Olympics and was subsequently confirmed by the finals of the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics and the first World Cup in 1930 which both opposed La Celeste and Argentina. This was the context then that led to the first important South American player to be transferred to Europe being an Argentine, Julio Libonatti, who was bought by Torino in 1925. He was born into a poor family originating from Genoa, had played for Rosario Central and for the Albiceleste, scoring the only goal in the final of the Copa America in 1921. The president of Torino, Enrico Maroni, the director of Cinzano, decided to buy him when on a business trip to Argentina. Libonatti immediately obtained an Italian passport and quickly became the main attraction of his new team who won their first scudetto with him. Umberto Agnelli, president of FIAT and Juventus, imitated him and recruited two other Argentine internationals, Raimundo Orsi in 1928 then Renato Cesarini in 1929. This set off a trend—between 1929, when the Series A and B were set up and 1943, 118 South American players from Argentina (60), Uruguay (32) and Brazil (26) joined Italian professional clubs including those in the south of Italy. In the exporting countries, many were willing to leave because of the economic crisis (very attractive salaries were on offer in Italy), the troubled political context in the 1930s, particularly in Argentina, and the ban on professionalism until 1933. Italian clubs found the situation to their advantage as well because they could recruit the best players of the era for reasonable transfer fees compared to those paid within the Italian market. Moreover, these South American players were not considered to be foreign but rimpatriati. They did not need to become Italian because the jus sanguinis implemented by the Fascist regime meant they legally had double nationality. The regime’s press vilified the pre-Fascist governments which had forced these players’ parents to emigrate in the first place and this new trend enabled them to reintegrate the nation of citizens ‘with Italian names and Latin blood’. Consequently, some of these rimpatriati were selected for the Squadra Azzurra and helped the team achieve international success in the first half of the 1930s with victories in the Central European International Cup and World Cup.
As for the creation of a unified national championship, the Serie A for the 1929-1930 season, the Fascist regime did not oppose the owners of the major Northern clubs who had been in rivalry with the smaller clubs in the Centre and the South since the start of the 1920s. However, it made sure that local Fascist hierarchs created clubs in the major central and southern cities which were able to compete with the powerful northern clubs. For example, this was the case in Naples and in Florence in 1926—the federal head of the National Fascist Party, the marquis Luigi Ridolfi created Fiorentina by merging the Florence’s two existing clubs—and in Rome in 1927 where Guido Pallotta nonetheless had to accept Lazio’s refusal to join the three other clubs which formed A.S. Roma.
To sum up, the Fascist regime was somewhat reticent regarding the step-by-step dynamic leading to the industrialization of Italian football but did not attempt to block it. At best the regime contented itself with believing that it had managed to model the dynamic according to its own general ideological orientations. In reality, the football world was able to make the political powers accept all its plans and while it may have seemed to have to put up with the conditions imposed by the Fascist regime, in fact football always found an advantage in them.
Fascist Italy and international soccer
The same mode of functioning can be seen in Italy’s participation in international competitions. The political powers had a limited interest or even certain disinterest in the world of football and the clubs were all-powerful. In 1930, the national team’s non-participation in the first World Cup in Uruguay can in part be explained by Italy’s diplomatic efforts aimed at ruining the Cup and instead promoting the International Cup which would have served its interests in Central Europe. However, Italy’s big clubs’ reluctance to let their best players go for a long period also seems to have had a great deal of influence. Similarly, in 1934, Mussolini only decided to provide financial backing for the organization committee for the World Cup in Italy when the Squadra Azzurra qualified. This competition had only begun in 1930 and certainly did not offer the aristocratic prestige of the Olympic Games but it could still act as an instrument for the regime’s foreign policy, albeit a modest one. Also, within Italy, this World Cup suffered from the competition of the Giro which Italians were much more interested in than the Squadra Azzurra’s matches. The day after the final which Italy had won, La Gazzetta dello Sport preferred to make the winner of the last stage of the Giro’s its headline story. Furthermore the final of the competition was the only match Mussolini attended and the regime used its propaganda to stage.
Ultimately, Mussolini and the Fascist regime tolerated the industrialists’ desire to make football professional and rationalize the organization of competitions more than actually trying to involve themselves in an area, football, of which they were wary and which basically did not particularly interest them. In this way, the success of the Serie A championship created in 1929 strongly displeased the leader who claimed to unify the nation because it incited the expression of urban rivalries by integrating itself into traditional parochial or campanilista mechanisms. However, Il Duce contented himself with never becoming a tifoso (fan groups) of any team, preferring a posture of superb indifference above any of the parties involved. This disdain for football explains how the game was hardly assimilated into the Fascist regime at all. The account given by Lucio Lombardo Radice, a mathematician and member of the Italian Communist Party’s central committee after the Second World War is highly enlightening on this subject. In 1982 he recounted the best match he ever saw, the 1934 World Cup final and pointed out that ‘no-one ever became Fascist because they supported Vittorio Pozzo’s [coach of the Italian national team in the 1930s] Italy.’ Lombardo Radice went on to draw a parallel with the fervour surrounding the Palio in Siena:
Oh you, very dear and unforgettable communist comrade, Sienese member of the Resistance from the Little Owl [the name of one of the Siena’s contrade or districts], you who one autumn evening in 1945 nearly forced me to go to the headquarters of your contrade to admire the ‘Palio of the 1936 Empire’, the greatest trophy of a totem which did not often win. Instrumentum regni, opium for the masses, corruption of consciences and souls? Please, let us stop talking nonsense.
Conclusion: football and politics in Italy
The remarkable tightness between the football and political spheres, underlined by the posteriori testimony of this communist tifoso then 18 years, explains without any doubt why the stadiums never became places of contest of the power. One of the first reasons is the composition of the fans’ public who, as we have seen, were in the inter-war period from the urban middle classes, a social group which for a long time remained one of the pillars of the Fascist regime, and of which it had nothing or little to fear. Paul Dietschy showed that if the power intervened in the space of the stadium, it did it mainly in the first half of the 1920s, during the consolidation phase of the regime and before the final changeover in the dictatorship. It was then a question of restoring order, in the stadiums as in the rest of the country, and to prevent any overflowing of the supporters. But the acts of violence of the tifosi then never assumed a political character and were always linked to the facts of the game, often a tendentious arbitration, and most of the time resulted in scuffles with little consequence at the end of the match. The reciprocal indifference between the world of football and political power also explains the fact that the guidelines on the fascisation of sport have been applied loosely, if at all. Thus, while since 1928 the Fascist salute was mandatory before the games, during the presentation of the players, the president of CONI, Achille Starace, had to split a circular in 1934 recalling that ‘the salute to use on the grounds and in the competitions, and also in the relations between athletes, is only the Roman salute and that the handshake is abolished.’ Also in 1928, the name of one of the two teams of Milan, the Internazionale, was changed to Ambrosiana, named after the patron saint of the city, St. Ambrose, to avoid any unfortunate allusion to the Third International. There was no need to worry: the name of the club did not originate in any socialist inclination but in the circumstances of its founding, when, in 1908, part of the management of Milan AC split, in disagreement with the sports policy. While the Milan was preparing to exclude foreign players from the formation—it was the time of the nationalization of the game of foot-ball mentioned above—the leaders of the new team of Internazionale thus showed their attachment to the cosmopolitanism in their policy of recruiting players. Thus in 1934 in Turin, during a match at the top between Juventus and Ambrosiana, the Milanese tifosi sing naturally ‘Forza Inter’ in the stadium Mussolini, without this causes particular reactions from the authorities. Moreover, Paul Dietschy indicates that the Fascist authorities, although very attentive to the political symbolism, never demanded that the garnet jersey of the Torino be changed, the podestà and the prefect having not been, it seems, disturbed that the club’s red flag was waved under their noses. It must be said that, on the merits, the colour red was not a problem for fascism, the red shirts of Garibaldi having for example been recovered without difficulty by the regime.
This thus probably explains why there were no purges in the football world after the fall of Fascism. Out of the 169 commissions set up for this purpose by 9 November 1945 decree, two dealt with journalists and sporting directors respectively. In Milan, for example, the former commission did not find anyone to sentence which earned it this ironic commentary from the organ of the Socialist Party, Avanti !: ‘It is said […] that the commission which purged the sports press, after attentive study, purged all the journalists who did not belong to the National Fascist Party.’ There is another revealing example of this. In Florence, in 1946, the return of Luigi Ridolfi, former leader of the Tuscan capital’s Fascist federation but also the founder of the city’s football club Fiorentina in 1926, was facilitated by Angelo Salvatori, the secretary of the communist federation. The latter made it known that he would personally ensure Ridolfi’s safety if by chance some ‘imbecile’ wanted to attempt to kill him. He justified his position in these terms: ‘After the Medicis, if anyone has done anything for Florence, it really is Luigi Ridolfi.’