Controversial World Cup | The paper

We are at the end of one of the most controversial World Cups in history and, at the time of writing, we don’t know if it will be Messi’s Argentina or Mbappé’s France that will lift the most desired cup. In any case, the Italians, Argentines and French have a lot to do with the other most questionable editions in the history of the World Cup. The 1978 World Cup was held in Argentina, those of the bloodthirsty General Videla, while the 1934 and 1938 editions were held in Italy and France, those from the attempt to bend football to the laws of propaganda.

I choose two books that tell the facts and characters of those editions of almost nine decades ago. The first is an essay by Giovanni Mari, Mondiali inglorio (People, 2022). If the title clarifies, the subtitle (The victory of 1934, bought by Mussolini, and the very fascist one of 1938) and the first quote, released in 2013 by Jérôme Valcke, secretary general of FIFA, eliminate any doubt: “Sometimes, with less democracy, it is easier to organize a World Cup.” Mari asks a question: “Can we be proud of the successes of 1934 and 1938?”, and replies by recalling that the consensus machine that politics has never stopped building alongside football “exploits passion, pride, blindness, transport, frustration, poverty, loneliness and the meta-realities that competition triggers in every person. Here, in these interstices between the intellect and the enthusiasm of each of us, the most dangerous of propaganda techniques has proliferated”.

Mari dedicates a chapter to an intermediate step, that of the Berlin 1936 Olympic Games, not so much “wanted” by Adolf Hitler, assigned in 1931, when the Führer was still far from power, but then used for propaganda purposes by the dictator, also on stock of what happened in Italy in 1934. Nazi Germany missed the podium in only three team sports: soccer (again Italy won), basketball and polo. Mari’s conclusion is that, if there are no doubts about the marvelous victories of 1982 and 2006, a profound collective examination of conscience is needed for the successes of the 1930s: “If we confessed to ourselves and worked on our having been fascists, accomplices silent of a bloodthirsty, liberticidal, oppressive and murderous regime, we could even tenderly remember the exploits of Meazza and Piola. Feeling less shame, without forgetting it. And finally give us a consolation, passionate and aware, Forza Italia”.

So what about the greatest protagonist of those three sporting successes, Vittorio Pozzo? Dario Ronzulli and Vittorio Pozzo. The father of Italian football (Minerva, 2022) reminds us that for every great story, first of all, we need to build the narrative world. Pozzo will be author, director, screenwriter, protagonist of that narrative world. At the center there is a boundless love for football, but Pozzo knows that to achieve success you need to create an ecosystem, so the figure of coach Pozzo cannot ignore that of the journalist (an epic piece of his for “La Stampa” which tells the moment in which his blues triumphed in Paris in 1938), of the Alpino, of the psychologist who knows how to create very solid bonds between his players. A figure so strong and charismatic as to make the National one more “of Vittorio Pozzo” than “of fascism”. This book, which reads like a Homeric hero novel, opens and closes with tears. The unstoppable ones in the moment of recognition of the victims of the tragedy of the Grande Torino airplane (where he could, indeed should, have been there too) when Pozzo did not shirk the duty of recognizing the mangled bodies of his players and the tears of a competitor Pozzo at the TV quiz “Fiera dei Sogni” by Mike Bongiorno. Old man’s eyes, shiny because he doesn’t remember the names of two players of the national team defeated in Berlin in 1939. he He makes an effort, they don’t come to mind, he suffers. He doesn’t win the prize and cries for those millions lost. He cries, not for himself, but because they would have helped his former player in great difficulty, Bruno Chizzo, who was in great economic difficulty due to some wrong investments.