TRIGGERnometry - The Real History of Football

00:00:01.000 How did it get as big as it's gone?

00:00:03.440 I think it's the simplicity that has made it so popular.

00:00:06.400 As to why it's spread in the way it did, that is probably a story of Empire.

00:00:10.760 Football gets taken around the world by British teachers, by the church, by businessmen.

00:00:17.640 Pretty much everywhere where you have a British community, the big early clubs, the successful

00:00:20.880 early clubs, they are working class clubs, and so people start to pay to watch the football

00:00:26.200 and suddenly you get people thinking, hang on, we can make money here.

00:00:29.600 I go to American football games in America, I go to NBA games, I've been to cricket,

00:00:34.240 rugby, you never see anything like it.

00:00:37.360 Is there something particular about football that attracts this?

00:00:41.600 Yes, and the answer is complicated.

00:00:45.520 Today's episode is supported by Hillsdale College.

00:00:48.320 Explore history, politics, literature, and more, all for free at hillsdale.edu slash trigger.

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00:01:38.960 Jonathan Wilson, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:40.640 Oh, thank you very much.

00:01:41.440 Good to be here.

00:01:41.920 It's great to have you on.

00:01:42.880 You are one of the world's leading experts in football.

00:01:45.120 I don't know if you're formally a football historian, but you know your history of football

00:01:49.200 extremely well in addition to the contemporary side of the game.

00:01:52.000 You look like you're about to interrupt, so you've got something to say against that.

00:01:54.960 I'm just intrigued by the notion of being a formal football historian.

00:01:58.800 I don't know, is it certificated?

00:02:00.320 I've written books of football history.

00:02:01.360 If that makes me a football historian, I am a football historian.

00:02:03.040 I would think so.

00:02:03.760 I would think so.

00:02:05.280 But you genuinely are someone who's incredibly knowledgeable and fascinating in the way you

00:02:09.040 talk about it.

00:02:09.600 So it's great to have you on.

00:02:10.640 And the question, actually to start with, by the way, football for American fans, soccer

00:02:16.800 is what we're talking about.

00:02:18.240 How did it get as big as it's got?

00:02:20.240 Because it is the world's number one sport by far and away, right?

00:02:23.760 Oh yeah, by a huge margin.

00:02:26.720 I think it's a number of things.

00:02:28.000 I think it's very simple.

00:02:30.720 That you basically can play it with, you don't even need a ball really.

00:02:33.680 You can use a stone or some rags tied together.

00:02:38.080 You don't really need any kind of pitch.

00:02:41.440 Cricket, you have to prepare the pitch.

00:02:44.960 Football, you can play it anywhere.

00:02:46.400 So it's a very easy game to pick up and play.

00:02:48.720 I think it's a very easy game for people to watch.

00:02:54.880 Personally, I find the tactics incredibly interesting and you can go down huge rabbit

00:02:58.480 holes with that.

00:02:59.520 But fundamentally, you can watch it.

00:03:01.120 If they kick the ball from there into there, that's one point to them.

00:03:05.360 Okay, we know what's going on.

00:03:06.800 So I think it's a simplicity that has made it so popular.

00:03:10.720 As to why it's spread in the way it did, that is probably a story of empire.

00:03:14.640 Oh, a story of empire.

00:03:15.600 So when does football start?

00:03:18.000 So it depends what you mean by football.

00:03:21.040 So there have been ball games where people kick it about, played for thousands of years.

00:03:25.760 There's evidence that they've been played in China, Japan 5,000 years ago.

00:03:28.800 There's evidence when Columbus goes to the Caribbean, he finds people kicking around a rubber ball.

00:03:33.040 But in terms of what we call football, it starts in 1863, in December.

00:03:39.840 And what has happened is all the public schools in England, they play their variants of a game.

00:03:44.880 And it will be different according to which school you go to.

00:03:47.840 And according to the conditions in which you play, that will condition what sort of game it is.

00:03:52.160 So if you have a big grassy pitch, it'll be about running and about chasing and about sort of great bundles.

00:03:58.960 Everybody's sort of falling on top of each other.

00:04:00.960 If you play on cloisters, if you play like that, you're going to break limbs.

00:04:04.960 Nobody wants that.

00:04:06.000 So it becomes much more about passing the ball to each other, much more technical, much less physical.

00:04:11.840 So you have all these people from different schools, get to university.

00:04:14.800 Right, let's play football.

00:04:15.760 Oh, we all love football.

00:04:16.400 That's a great idea.

00:04:17.520 Oh, hang on, that isn't football.

00:04:18.960 Let someone run, retackle someone to the floor.

00:04:20.720 And then you have to come up with unified laws.

00:04:23.600 There's various attempts to do that.

00:04:25.440 The first sort of serious attempt happens at Cambridge 1841.

00:04:28.400 So we just post some laws on Parker's Peace, the grassy area centre of Cambridge.

00:04:32.720 But what we call football starts December 1863.

00:04:36.000 There's a meeting at the Freemasons Tavern near Covent Garden.

00:04:38.240 And it's representatives of some people from schools.

00:04:42.400 Some are from sort of trades or companies set up by people who've been in public schools.

00:04:47.600 And that is the formation of Football Association, which exists today.

00:04:51.440 And they draw up the first 12 laws of the game, which form the basis of what we understand in football today.

00:04:57.760 That is the accepted and official history.

00:05:00.720 However, there is also the working class history of it, about which we know far less.

00:05:05.920 You see clubs being set up in the 1850s in Yorkshire, particularly around Sheffield.

00:05:09.680 The Sheffield rules are quite significant.

00:05:12.320 We can go into huge amounts of detail as to how the Sheffield rules and the FA rules sort of interact.

00:05:17.840 But by the 1870s, you have a unified set of laws.

00:05:20.800 The FA Cup, the oldest tournament in the world, begins 1872.

00:05:24.880 And talk to me about the empire and how that kind of spreads around the world.

00:05:29.760 So very early, people who've come through the public schools started...

00:05:34.240 Just to interrupt you very briefly, sorry.

00:05:36.000 Public schools, again, for our foreign viewers, are the elite schools in Britain.

00:05:39.600 Fee-paying schools that the elite of the country send their kids to.

00:05:42.800 Exactly.

00:05:43.360 And this is a time where muscular Christianity is the presiding doctrine.

00:05:50.240 So there is a belief in the schools that playing sport is good because it imbues kids with manliness,

00:05:57.280 which will make them equipped to run the empire, to fight in wars.

00:06:01.440 And you see an equivalent thing happening in Germany with what they call trunnen,

00:06:04.880 which is a sort of militarized gymnastics.

00:06:07.200 I don't know if you've come across that.

00:06:08.160 Sounds very German.

00:06:09.280 Yeah, and I think people accept that kicking the ball is more fun than doing aerobics while a

00:06:14.720 Sergeant Major shouts at you.

00:06:17.200 So yeah, football gets taken around the world by British teachers, by the church, by railway workers,

00:06:25.040 by engineers, by businessmen.

00:06:30.240 Pretty much everywhere where you have a British community, they will set up sports clubs.

00:06:34.160 Those sports clubs will play cricket and they will play football.

00:06:37.760 But it's much easier to play football because you don't need intricate pitch preparation.

00:06:42.240 And in terms of the local populations, they watch cricket and it's like,

00:06:46.640 it's complicated, I don't understand this.

00:06:48.320 Football, oh yeah, we could do that.

00:06:50.160 That looks like something that we can, we can find something that looks like a ball.

00:06:53.040 And we could do that in our space.

00:06:55.120 And so you see in Argentina, the first game was played in 1867.

00:06:58.400 The US thing is 1869.

00:07:00.480 It spreads incredibly quickly and is adopted by local populations.

00:07:05.600 And then sort of the first decade or two of the 20th century, you start to see in Argentina,

00:07:12.240 for instance, you have Argentinian champions of an Argentinian league that was founded by the British in the 1890s.

00:07:18.880 And Jonathan, you say it was spread by the empire.

00:07:22.160 But then why was it that the United States and Canada took form of colonies of ours, didn't take it?

00:07:28.880 And yet you look at South America with the exceptions of a couple of countries,

00:07:33.200 which are Portuguese and Spanish empires, and yet they all love football.

00:07:37.600 That's a good question.

00:07:38.240 I actually also think about South Africa, Australia, New Zealand also compared to how good they are other sports in football, massive underperformance, right?

00:07:45.280 And India, you would say, as well.

00:07:46.560 Yeah.

00:07:47.280 So, I mean, there are exceptions.

00:07:48.960 I think there's different reasons for each of those.

00:07:51.360 North America, I think, is a really interesting example, because they actually do set up,

00:07:55.440 try to set up a professional league in the 1880s, and it just doesn't work.

00:07:59.440 And I think there's a couple of reasons for that.

00:08:00.800 So one is, if you look at England, why does England get the league?

00:08:04.000 It gets, I mean, the league is set up in 1888, and that has remained the league through to today with minor sort of little tweaks.

00:08:10.880 And actually, Britain or England is the right size.

00:08:16.960 And so it's exactly the same as our newspaper industry.

00:08:19.200 Why do we have 13 competing national newspapers?

00:08:22.560 It's because to get from London to Glasgow or to the Highlands or to Cornwall, you can put newspapers on the train.

00:08:29.200 They'll be there in six hours.

00:08:30.400 So you can print them at 10pm on a Saturday night.

00:08:32.560 They'll be there on a Sunday morning.

00:08:33.680 Yeah, it's very simple.

00:08:35.280 And that leads to competition, which leads to sensationalism.

00:08:38.400 And, you know, it raises the level.

00:08:41.200 In football, you can have a national league, and you can have a team from the far north playing a team from the far south.

00:08:45.520 They take a train.

00:08:46.640 Maybe it takes six hours, seven hours.

00:08:48.480 They can play the game.

00:08:49.520 They can't be tired when they get there.

00:08:51.040 You look at results in the 1890s, away teams tend to do quite badly, because they're knackered.

00:08:55.360 But you can have a league, whereas you try and do that in the US, and it's just too big.

00:09:00.880 So what happens is you get games in the northeast and New York State, Philadelphia, New Jersey.

00:09:11.280 Football's quite big there, but they can't really spread it to the rest of the country.

00:09:14.560 And you get little pockets springing up, but they're never integrated.

00:09:18.640 And that means you can never get the sort of crowds you get in England, and therefore you never make money.

00:09:23.360 And so it's much harder to develop that professional game.

00:09:28.400 Also, you have an issue with the US universities that Harvard and Yale sort of lead the way.

00:09:35.280 They very much prefer rugby, which actually is not untrue in the UK in the 1870s.

00:09:42.080 So you look at when the FA Cup begins in 1872.

00:09:45.040 One of the reasons for that is for football to try and strike back against rugby, which

00:09:49.520 the Rugby Football Union just found in 1871, which is an offshoot from football.

00:09:54.640 It has more clubs affiliated to it in the 1870s than football does.

00:09:59.120 The FA Cup helps to spread the game.

00:10:01.760 In the US, Harvard, Yale very much prefer rugby.

00:10:06.080 It seems to be that they see it as being more manly, more masculine,

00:10:10.640 more sort of fitting to their ideal of what an athlete should be.

00:10:14.240 And then what they do, and this is something that just happens in American sport throughout time,

00:10:18.240 in him, they start to change it.

00:10:20.640 And so they take the laws of rugby and they turn them into American football.

00:10:26.000 And you see that when they, the various attempts to set up a soccer league in the,

00:10:31.520 there's another attempt to set up a professional league in the 1920s,

00:10:34.400 and then you get the NASL from 1966 onwards, and they can't help themselves.

00:10:38.400 They just tinker with it.

00:10:39.440 Oh, we don't like draws.

00:10:40.320 We'll have penalty shootouts.

00:10:41.520 Or we'll have sudden death overtime.

00:10:43.280 Our offside seems a bit complicated, so we'll change that.

00:10:46.320 Or you can't be offside from a free kick.

00:10:48.240 And they, FIFA, the governing body of football, says you can't do that.

00:10:52.720 The Americans do do that.

00:10:53.760 FIFA take action against them.

00:10:55.520 They go off on a huff.

00:10:57.040 And it, I don't know why Americans could do that.

00:11:00.240 And Canada is obviously, it's always North American sport rather than just US sport.

00:11:05.680 So I think they're, they're sort of two of the reasons.

00:11:09.360 I think there was a problem trying to start a professional league there,

00:11:11.840 because baseball already had sort of colonized the summer.

00:11:15.680 And the winter in northeast, the northeast of the US, is much harsher than the winter in Britain.

00:11:19.920 So you can't really play games when you've got six feet of snow.

00:11:25.680 A hostility to what's perceived as being an alien game.

00:11:29.520 That American football, I think even in fact has American title.

00:11:33.440 People trying to prove their Americanness will play that rather than a game, you know.

00:11:38.960 For instance, there's a lot of Scottish immigrants.

00:11:42.080 Kearney in New Jersey is sort of the real early hotbed,

00:11:45.520 because two Scottish textile companies set up factories there.

00:11:48.400 And the Scottish workers they bring in, bring football.

00:11:51.360 In St. Louis, you get the Irish church, which is bizarre,

00:11:54.080 because in Ireland they weren't playing football, they were playing Gaelic games.

00:11:57.520 But the Irish church, Catholic church, introduces football to try and raise the, I mean, the

00:12:04.480 public of the 13th, 1890s encyclical, De Raon Nooram,

00:12:08.240 which tries to raise the level of the working classes.

00:12:10.000 One of the things it says is we should get them playing sport,

00:12:13.040 so they're in a physically better condition, which is a huge inspiration to Jules Rime,

00:12:17.440 probably the best president FIFA ever had, the man who sets up the World Cup in 1930.

00:12:22.400 I think it's a similar motivation to introduce sport, introduce football in St. Louis from the church.

00:12:28.000 But it's seen as, oh, that's an Irish game. It's not an American game.

00:12:31.120 And this is a problem in America all the way through.

00:12:33.840 So the first professional league, well, the first professional league in the 1880s,

00:12:37.520 hardly gets going. The second one in the 1920s collapses post-Wall Street crash, 1933.

00:12:42.960 And when it starts up again, what you notice is all the teams are ethnic teams.

00:12:46.320 It's Philadelphia Ukrainians. It's German Americans. It's, you know, Irish Americans.

00:12:52.800 So they're sort of circumscribed to, you know, small immigrant groups.

00:12:58.000 This is something the NASL, which is the attempt to serve a national league in the late 60s and 70s,

00:13:03.360 they actually outlaw ethnic names for teams until the moment which the team from Toronto goes bankrupt.

00:13:09.360 And Toronto-Croatia go, well, we'll buy them, but we're calling them Toronto-Croatia.

00:13:13.280 And they end up winning the NASL in, I think, 1976.

00:13:16.400 Wow. So, I mean, that's so interesting because when you look at the global game,

00:13:21.040 I think one of the things that we kind of forget as football fans is we look at football

00:13:27.360 and we don't realise, you know, how it must have started as a very small game.

00:13:32.960 So when did it explode in popularity? When did it go from just being a pastime

00:13:37.360 or a game that people played with their mates to actually becoming a national obsession in the UK?

00:13:42.080 So in the UK, I think you can say the FA Cup 1872, which is the first knockout tournament that there is,

00:13:48.080 that is a massive driver.

00:13:50.000 And then over the two decades that follow, it really takes off.

00:13:52.640 And it takes off because of working class adoption of it.

00:13:55.920 So there were working class clubs.

00:13:57.120 They just weren't particularly organised on a national level.

00:14:00.320 You'd have local tournaments.

00:14:01.680 And to be honest, they're not very well documented.

00:14:03.280 It's quite hard to find out what happened in those games.

00:14:07.040 But you get from the 1880s, working class clubs from the north starting to enter the FA Cup

00:14:12.000 and starting to win the FA Cup, playing in quite a different way.

00:14:15.840 They're much more direct.

00:14:16.800 They're much more aggressive and much more physical.

00:14:18.720 They're much more focused on winning rather than playing the right way,

00:14:21.200 which is still part of that sort of university public school ideal.

00:14:24.800 And then because of the factories act, because from 1850 onwards in England or in the UK,

00:14:32.720 you have Saturday afternoon as well as Sunday off.

00:14:34.640 What do you do on a Saturday afternoon?

00:14:36.880 You finish work at the shipyard or in the mine or in the factory, pick up your pay packet.

00:14:40.720 Well, let's go and have a couple of pints.

00:14:42.160 Oh, let's go and watch the football.

00:14:44.000 And so people start to pay to watch the football.

00:14:46.560 And suddenly you get people thinking, hang on, we can make money here.

00:14:49.120 And then you get local business owners, particularly in the north, well, almost exclusively in the north,

00:14:55.200 to an extent in the Midlands, saying, well, A, I can make money from this.

00:14:58.800 But B, this is a great way to make my workers happy.

00:15:03.760 If they go to the club that I own, that I'm funding, and that club is winning things,

00:15:08.320 that enhances my status.

00:15:10.720 And that's why you see the big early clubs, the successful early clubs are Sunderland,

00:15:16.800 Aston Villa, Everton, Newcastle, Liverpool, the Sheffield clubs.

00:15:21.760 They are working class clubs.

00:15:23.440 And yeah, Sunderland's a great example.

00:15:26.240 It's owned by a mine owner and a shipyard owner.

00:15:29.680 And they are going scouting in Scotland.

00:15:32.720 They're using Sunderland's geographical proximity to Scotland to go and basically steal players

00:15:38.880 from Scottish teams where the professional game is not as established.

00:15:42.480 And then they offer them more money, bring them down to Sunderland,

00:15:46.400 and so Sunderland win the league in 1894-5.

00:15:50.960 They go and play Hearts, who are the Scottish champions, in the first sort of championship

00:15:54.560 of the world.

00:15:55.920 And all 22 players on the pitch in that game are Scottish.

00:15:58.560 Really?

00:15:59.360 And Sunderland also had two players injured, who would have played, who were also Scottish.

00:16:03.920 The Sunderland team is entirely Scottish imports.

00:16:06.160 So this idea of sort of importing players is there right from the start.

00:16:09.920 But yeah, the league starts 1888.

00:16:11.760 And the league really starts because it's a way of getting guaranteed fixtures.

00:16:15.360 And guaranteed fixtures guarantee you the money from the crowds.

00:16:18.720 So by the 1890s, you're getting regular crowds of 15,000, 20,000 for games.

00:16:22.960 And then it spreads pretty quickly, especially in Denmark.

00:16:27.280 Denmark is sort of the first foreign adopters.

00:16:29.440 Austria-Hungary.

00:16:30.160 Austria-Hungary.

00:16:31.600 Again, it's spread by...

00:16:33.920 The oldest team in Vienna is called First Vienna, and it was founded by Scottish gardeners

00:16:38.560 on the Rothschild estate.

00:16:39.680 There's a guy called Edward Shires, who was a clerk at a typewriter factory in Manchester,

00:16:44.480 who aged 17.

00:16:45.680 This is in the 1890s.

00:16:46.720 He thinks, I'm going to go and seek my fortune in Europe.

00:16:50.640 He goes to Paris, ends up, he becomes the rep selling tennis equipment in Vienna.

00:16:56.960 And he sort of becomes the bloke who really introduces football on a big scale to Vienna,

00:17:01.600 then leaves to Budapest, and it takes it with him there.

00:17:05.440 What you see after the First World War, there's four countries where it really takes off,

00:17:08.800 which are Austria, Hungary, Uruguay, Argentina.

00:17:12.640 And what's interesting is all four are urbanizing rapidly.

00:17:16.400 They're all industrializing rapidly, but they're all urbanizing around one center.

00:17:20.560 Essentially, it's Budapest, Vienna, Montevideo, Buenos Aires.

00:17:23.840 And it turns out that provides the perfect conditions for the development of players,

00:17:28.640 that the vacant lots of a growing city is if you want to give kids the best,

00:17:34.240 in those days, before you have proper coaching, the best chance of becoming good footballers,

00:17:39.040 that's where you put them.

00:17:40.800 And in Central Europe, these spaces become, well, in both, they become very romanticized.

00:17:46.480 In Central Europe, they're called grunts.

00:17:48.800 In South America, they're called potreros.

00:17:51.440 And players from a grunt, players from a potrero are the celebrated players of both those cultures.

00:17:57.200 And what was the culture around football like in the early days?

00:17:59.840 Because it was interesting for me that my first encounter with football in this country,

00:18:03.600 coming from a kind of Soviet Union background,

00:18:05.840 where football was kind of almost as much a religion as I think it is here, in a way.

00:18:11.120 But there was a very different culture, as I experienced,

00:18:13.280 because I think my first memory was England getting knocked out in the semi-final of the 1996.

00:18:19.760 Euros.

00:18:21.440 Which, you know, sad, your country gets knocked out.

00:18:23.600 But then there were like people smashing German cars up in the streets of London,

00:18:28.160 which to me, I was just like, I don't understand why they would do that.

00:18:31.600 But then as I learned more about the culture of football in this country, it was actually kind of on brand, right?

00:18:36.240 Yeah, in fact, there was a Russian student who was stabbed somewhere on the south coast,

00:18:43.360 because they thought he was German.

00:18:44.400 Right.

00:18:44.720 So why did that happen?

00:18:46.960 Is that a question?

00:18:47.840 Well, no, what I'm asking is the fact that by the 90s, the England football scene in particular

00:18:55.120 has a reputation for violence, hooliganism, etc.

00:18:58.240 Was that the case from the beginning, or was that a more modern development?

00:19:01.600 Um, I mean, football violence was definitely there from the start.

00:19:05.600 I think anywhere where you get a big mass of people who are all emotionally invested in

00:19:09.600 in something, there is the potential for violence.

00:19:11.680 Men especially, with large groups of men.

00:19:13.840 Yeah, men, so yeah, it's true, yeah.

00:19:16.240 So the 1905 Sunderland-Newcastle derby, for instance, a police horse got stabbed amid rioting.

00:19:21.920 Police horse?

00:19:22.720 Yeah.

00:19:24.160 It was a police horse who got punched by a Newcastle fan.

00:19:26.560 Why was he punched a horse?

00:19:27.600 Well, he's disappointed.

00:19:29.200 Yeah, he's a Sunderland fan, the horse was.

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00:20:48.080 Some say the bubbles in an arrow truffle piece can take 34 seconds to melt in your mouth.

00:20:52.800 Sometimes the very amount you're stuck at the same red light.

00:20:56.480 Rich, creamy, chocolatey arrow truffle. Feel the arrow bubbles melt. It's mind bubbling.

00:21:02.480 But in terms of the more organized sort of what we would call hooliganism now,

00:21:08.480 that's sort of a phenomenon of the sixties. I mean, it's the sort of real moral panic around

00:21:16.000 that begins, you can actually date very precisely. It happens in November 1964.

00:21:21.280 There's a game between Everton and Leeds. Sandy Brown, an Everton defender, is sent off

00:21:26.320 in the fourth minute of the game. By the 10th minute, the referees had to take both teams off

00:21:30.800 to kind of cool everybody down. But the real trigger for the sort of postponement of the game,

00:21:37.680 for the sort of, I think I'm off for like 20 minutes or something, there's an Everton player

00:21:41.600 goes down, concussed. The Leeds physio is helping him out, and the Leeds physio is getting pelted

00:21:47.280 with coins and missiles by Everton fans. And so that's when the ref says, right, come on,

00:21:52.320 let's go off, let's calm this down. And you see the papers over that weekend and the following week

00:21:58.320 in this huge moral panic about both on-field and off-field behavior. I think it's partly related to

00:22:04.880 the youth culture of the sixties, partly related to people kicking against the establishment,

00:22:10.400 partly related to youth culture. I mean, you talk about 96, 96 is really the tail end of the worst of

00:22:17.120 of English violence. I mean, there's some flare ups in the World Cup in 98. There's been isolated things

00:22:21.760 since. But really, it's the 80s, the 85 is when it reaches its head. And I think partly it's just

00:22:28.720 to do with the 80s. The reason it's slowed down is people going to games are much older. And, you know,

00:22:33.920 all the sort of talk about, oh, it's CCTV, it's better policing. Yeah, I'm sure they play their part.

00:22:39.120 But actually, it's just the tickets are really expensive. So the people who go are old,

00:22:43.120 and they don't know that's the wildness the teenagers have.

00:22:45.440 Is it really fair to say, I mean, you said the violence comes with large groups of people

00:22:49.200 who really care about something. I was going to rugby games in the 1990s,

00:22:53.600 and it was a totally different atmosphere. What's interesting to me as well is you look at Russia

00:22:59.120 today and other countries today. Actually, that football violence has become extremely common,

00:23:05.120 like the Russian ultras and the Italian ultras and all the others are pretty hardcore. It's

00:23:09.280 almost like they've outdone the master. Oh, they have, absolutely. And there's a

00:23:12.720 self-conscious aping of some of the clashes in 2016 between Russian fans and England fans.

00:23:22.560 Some of it, I think, probably was to an extent state-sponsored. I mean, there's no proof of that,

00:23:27.600 but the indication is that the Russian fan groups were incredibly well organized. And the fact they were

00:23:34.080 taking videos of everything and posting them, you know, delightedly, I think there's a real

00:23:38.800 suggestion that this is very organized in a way that, to be honest, Englishism was never that

00:23:44.000 organized. It was always quite organic. But there was also some just sort of complete sort of

00:23:48.640 category errors. Russian fans, you know, beating up England fans to steal their flag. Well, that's what

00:23:53.440 we did in the 70s. Stealing the flag was in the same way that, you know, a Roman legion would try and

00:23:57.760 steal the banner of another legion. When the people you're stealing the flag from are just sort of,

00:24:01.920 yeah, two 45-odd accounts from Norwich. They'd probably have given a T if you'd asked.

00:24:06.160 Right. I guess what I'm getting at is, is there something particular about football? Because

00:24:10.720 I'll be honest with you, I remember even in the 2000s going to Chelsea games, I lived in London at

00:24:16.240 the time. And there were times when I felt like, I was not, sounds like a really kind of

00:24:22.320 Gen Z or millennial thing to say, but I was genuinely uncomfortable being there. The level of vitriol,

00:24:27.680 particularly if the team was losing or the, you know, I remember one game against Everton,

00:24:31.760 I was an Everton supporter in the Chelsea stands. And I was not going to let anybody know that I was

00:24:37.840 happy about what was happening on the pitch remotely because it felt like that. I go to

00:24:42.080 American football games in America. I go to NBA games. I've been to cricket, rugby, all sorts of,

00:24:47.520 you never see anything like it. So I guess what I'm getting at, is there something particular about

00:24:52.640 football that attracts this? Uh, yes. And the answer is complicated. So I think, and this is

00:24:59.680 almost a slightly romanticized answer though, I'm slightly cautious about saying this, but there

00:25:03.760 is an extent to which, well, in fact, no, this isn't over-romantic, this is actually what I think.

00:25:08.240 It's where, it's the link to violence that I think is over-romanticized. So I think the football club

00:25:15.440 provides an identity for people who otherwise lack one. And I would include myself in that, you know,

00:25:21.360 I'm from Sondland. When do we see Sondland on the national news? When do we see Sondland?

00:25:25.920 When there's a riot.

00:25:26.640 When there's a riot. And the fascinating thing there, I mean, this is another stage removed.

00:25:33.200 How many people doing the rioting wore football shirts? How many people doing the cleanup wore

00:25:37.120 football shirts? And both trying to say, no, this is actually the real sort of, you know,

00:25:42.800 we are expressing our Sondland-ness and we're, you know, we're consciously adopting the,

00:25:48.480 the uniform of Sondland to say that I am somehow representative of Sondland, whether I'm

00:25:52.960 rioting, whether I'm cleaning up. But either way, you come to the same conclusion that the football club

00:25:59.440 is the way that the city projects itself. And I think actually Sondland, the football club,

00:26:04.640 is pretty conscious of that and pretty good at it. I think some clubs find it very awkward.

00:26:09.520 I guess it kind of depends what the people who are projecting the club as the identity,

00:26:13.920 what they believe in as to whether the club can sort of go along with that or not. But I think

00:26:20.480 particularly, I mean, this is very much a British answer, but from post-industrial northern British

00:26:25.360 cities, particularly the one club cities, the football club is the most representative element

00:26:31.360 of that city. So you see when Sondland, Newcastle, Leeds play at Wembley, their fans will take over

00:26:38.240 Trafalgar Square or Covent Garden. And that's a gesture of, we are still here, don't forget us.

00:26:43.520 And so I think that sense of fighting for an identity, however misguided the violent aspect may be,

00:26:49.680 I think that is very real and very true. There's also, I think this is particularly true in South

00:26:54.880 America. I think it's true in Italy. I honestly don't know the case in Russia.

00:26:58.320 It's often co-opted by organized crime. And it does big in Russia.

00:27:04.160 Right. So in South America, particularly, certainly in Argentina, the various barras,

00:27:10.000 as they call there, the ultra groups, the hooligan groups, they will be organized crime and they will,

00:27:15.920 can be as simple as sort of charging the parking around the stadium. It could be gambling on the game,

00:27:21.440 it could be merchandise, or it can be much more sinister stuff to do with running drugs.

00:27:26.800 You saw it in Yugoslavia. And again, this is slightly over-romanticized. But equally,

00:27:32.160 if you want muscle on the street, who are the people who are used to taking over the street,

00:27:36.240 used to fighting with police, who are disciplined? It's the ultra groups. And so Arkhan, the warlord,

00:27:42.480 Subodan Lošević puts him in charge of the Zvena Zvezda Ultras, the Red Star Ultras, the Delia.

00:27:49.040 I mean, essentially, it's to kind of calm them down and discipline them. But then they become a

00:27:52.480 fighting force. And they are at least complicit and probably guilty of many of the atrocities during

00:27:58.320 the Civil War. Equally, the Bad Blue Boys, they use the English name, the Danamo Zagreb fans were a very

00:28:06.480 organized force. If you go to the Maximilien Stadium in Zagreb, there's a statue of them,

00:28:12.880 what do you call it? The inscription underneath says something about our fans marching off to war.

00:28:18.880 And there are people from both the Delia and the Bad Blue Boys who would see a riot at the Maximilien

00:28:25.200 at a Zagreb Zvezda game in 1990 as the first battle of the war. I think they're massively over-romanticizing

00:28:32.480 that. But equally, it is true that those two sides did go off and they did fight.

00:28:38.480 And Jonathan, I want to explore a little bit the relationship between hooliganism, politics,

00:28:43.680 but also racism. So I'm from South London and I grew up, I was born in 82. And when I was a little

00:28:51.440 boy, there were certain fans who had a notorious reputation. Millwall was one. And particularly

00:28:58.240 Millwall and West Ham and Chelsea, to a certain extent, you would get people handing out an NF

00:29:03.760 leaflet. So then that's the National Front. That's a far-right organization in the UK at the time,

00:29:08.400 which no longer exists. But that was open, wasn't it? And then they were associated with hooligans as

00:29:13.280 well. Yeah, I mean, that was very much, I think, an 80s thing. I think it's actually,

00:29:18.320 there have been odd elements of it, but it's actually, I think it's striking how little traction

00:29:25.040 the racist far-right has made in football. So the Football Lads Alliance was a thing four or five

00:29:30.960 years ago. It disappeared. I don't know what's going on with it now. So I think there were attempts

00:29:34.560 to harness that. You absolutely see racist abuse of players after games. But I think that's a,

00:29:41.280 I mean, it's not a downplayed significance, but I think it's more ad hoc thing. I don't think it's

00:29:44.640 a, it's like the National Front. So yeah, I mean, this, I guess, is another one of what you're asking

00:29:49.360 about the violence. Certain clubs and certain fan groups at certain clubs attract a reputation for

00:29:55.520 violence or for racist beliefs. And so people rally to them who have no connection with the club,

00:30:02.080 but they think, actually, I quite, you know, I quite enjoy fighting. I mean, that's the thing that

00:30:06.880 a lot of people don't get about hedonism. People just, a lot of people just enjoy it. Why do they do

00:30:10.960 it? Because for them, that's fun. They enjoy the rush of it. Or, you know, if you feel a particular

00:30:16.320 affinity to a, you know, far-right politics and you think, yeah, I actually, I want to join this

00:30:20.720 group that's going to take a more sort of direct action, as it were. But yeah, that would draw you

00:30:26.000 to particular clubs and particular fan groups. I mean, the North East is the area I know much

00:30:31.920 better. And you had a very bizarre situation that on New Year's Day 1985, Sondland played Newcastle

00:30:40.240 in a derby. Madness about New Year's Day. Don't know why they thought that was a good idea.

00:30:44.000 Newcastle win 3-1, and Sondland's two black players are both sent off, having been horrifically

00:30:48.960 racially abused through the game. And overnight, Sondland became an anti-racist club. And that

00:30:54.880 wasn't to do with people suddenly kind of thinking, oh, you know what, we should be more tolerant.

00:30:58.640 Oh yeah, actually, I was wrong what I thought yesterday. It was, hang on,

00:31:03.360 Newcastle are racist, therefore we're anti-racist. And Sondland then had Gary Bennett,

00:31:09.280 who was a black captain who remained one of the clubs' most popular players. And I'm sure

00:31:13.920 it was because they'd seen two of their black players sent off, and it was an anti-Newcastle

00:31:19.840 gesture rather than a pro sort of tolerance all races together gesture.

00:31:25.280 Yeah, because you see within the Italian ultras, which I find fascinating. Number one, the fact that

00:31:32.720 a lot of footballers talk about this. If the team is going through a particularly rough patch,

00:31:37.040 the head ultra then demands a meeting with the captain, and that's just seen as acceptable.

00:31:42.320 So that, number one, is mind-boggling. And number two, particularly in Italy,

00:31:46.720 you see the links between certain fascist groups and ultras, and they kind of open about their fascism,

00:31:54.640 really. Yeah, absolutely. And it depends, club by club. I mean, Lazio have a reputation of being

00:31:59.120 very far right. Livorno have a reputation of being very far left. I'm not saying all Lazio fans are

00:32:03.920 massively far right or all Livorno fans are massively far left, but their ultra groups identify in that

00:32:08.640 way. And that's absolutely true. And I guess that has its roots probably in Mussolini and street

00:32:14.480 violence and street gangs, that that sort of culture permeates through in football is now where

00:32:18.560 it finds its expression. And they are very powerful in Italy. I remember going to see Palermo play

00:32:23.600 Udinese in Palermo, and the moment the game was over, you could see the captain of Palermo immediately

00:32:29.760 ran over to the ultras specifically and like, clapped along. Almost like he kind of had to, and probably did.

00:32:35.440 Yeah. And it's a, I think from, from the outside, it's a very odd phenomenon. And you have it in

00:32:41.840 Argentina as well. I think Argentina has changed. I think in the eighties, it was very much about,

00:32:46.000 we want our team to win football matches. And now it's about making money from the drug sideline.

00:32:50.560 But you have instances of when, when Maradona went back to Boca in the nineties and the ultras

00:32:57.840 invaded Boca's training base of the series of bad results to sort of, I guess logic is we'll

00:33:02.000 intimidate the players into playing better. Which I'm not sure sports psychology would suggest

00:33:06.160 it's the best way to do. But you have like, no, I don't want to live for you having to talk down

00:33:09.520 the ultras going, you know, no, hang on, this is not helping. Kind of, you know, our 17 year

00:33:14.320 left back, he's terrified just to play a match in front of the fans, is not going to play better

00:33:18.560 because he threatened to cut his throat if we don't win next Wednesday, you know.

00:33:22.000 Yeah. Because there's that very famous clip of Gascoigne scoring. I think it may have been his,

00:33:27.360 is Paul Gascoigne. He was a legendary England football hero of mine scoring in the Rome Derby

00:33:33.440 for Lazio. It was one nil to Roma. He scored. And then he went absolutely in mental when he scored.

00:33:40.960 And so did the players. And they went, that must have been joy, Paul. And he said something,

00:33:45.200 and I was like, no, that was relief. Because he was, him and the rest of the players were genuinely

00:33:51.040 worried that if they lost in the Rome Derby at home, that they were going to get lynched before

00:33:56.960 they left the stadium. Yeah. And it's a, it's a very, very strange thing. I mean, and also,

00:34:02.720 you know, it's, especially in South America, the fan groups get involved in transfers. So there's

00:34:08.240 a story of Marcelo Bielsa. Yeah. Legendary coach. Great, great Argentinian coach. People in England

00:34:13.920 probably know him best from his time at Leeds. But when he was at Newell's, one of the two big Rosario

00:34:19.440 clubs with a particularly sort of hardcore support, a fan group, a delegation went around to sort of

00:34:24.720 berate him about some tactical decision he made in the game. And he had a live hand grenade by his door

00:34:31.280 that as soon as he opened his door to them, he picked up the hand grenade, put his teeth around

00:34:35.520 the pins and sort of said, go away or else I'm pulling this out and we'll all die. And they were

00:34:40.720 like, okay, you're madder than us. Bye. Sorry. That's an incredible story. And you mentioned,

00:34:46.400 you keep referring to the money side of it. That's obviously changed dramatically, even within

00:34:52.800 our lifetimes. But I mean, obviously before, you know, in the sixties, people weren't being paid

00:34:58.960 really much more than a normal person, right? Well, 1963 was when the maximum wage ends.

00:35:04.720 Yeah. Maximum wage is £20 a week for an English footballer. Right. Now, £20 was a bit more than it

00:35:09.680 is now, but still, they were not getting paid loads. No, it was sort of a normal working class wage,

00:35:14.400 maybe a slightly better than average working class wage. Right. To the point now where the top players

00:35:20.480 are making tens of millions a year. They're making more in a week, many of them, than the ordinary

00:35:26.800 person will make in a year. How does that happen? Well, I mean, that's quite a complicated question

00:35:31.760 as well. But the maximum wage, when it was introduced in 1901, is actually, I think, it comes from exactly

00:35:38.720 the right motives. So the Victorians are very smart about this. The Victorians realise, if you set up

00:35:43.760 a league, if a team wins, it will get more fans. If it gets more fans, it gets more money. If it gets

00:35:49.200 more money, it buys better players. If it gets better players, it's going to win again. So you're

00:35:53.120 creating a monopoly situation. And they think, this is terrible. The league, what we're selling,

00:35:57.840 if you think of this as a product, we're selling competition between teams. So it's not like a normal

00:36:02.640 business. And this is one of the mistakes people made. One of the mistakes, I think,

00:36:06.560 pretty much every country's main British lawmakers is treating sport as if it's a normal business.

00:36:10.640 It's not. Because what you're selling is competition between two clubs. And once that

00:36:15.600 becomes imbalanced, the product becomes less attractive. So you have to maintain that balance.

00:36:20.560 So the idea of the maximum wage is, if we cap the amount players can make, that means that me,

00:36:26.240 the big club, can't go to you, the little club, and say, we'll take your centre forward because we're

00:36:30.320 going to pay him what you're paying plus 50%. So I think it comes from the right motives.

00:36:35.120 Very quickly, it becomes a tool of oppression for the players who are sort of thinking, hang on,

00:36:40.720 there's 50,000 people here and I'm getting four quid a week. How does that work?

00:36:45.440 And so that's why eventually, after a series of court cases lifted in 1963.

00:36:50.560 And I imagine television is a big part of it as well, because now it's not 50,000,

00:36:54.160 it's a million people that are...

00:36:55.520 Yeah. And so there's basically two big changes happen post that. So one is the coming of

00:36:59.760 television. So in England, you can say match for day starts 1964. So just after the maximum wage is

00:37:04.880 lifted, which doesn't bring in very much money. But by the time you're getting, you know, regular

00:37:09.520 live coverage by the 90s, broadcast rights are enormous. And then foreign rights on top of that.

00:37:15.680 So I think it's 7.6 billion, the rights deal for the Premier League. And that pertains up to

00:37:22.160 2003, when Roman Brammerich arrives at Chelsea. And suddenly you've got somebody who's taking over

00:37:28.160 a club who is not interested in profit and is not interested in just doing what's right for Blackburn Rovers

00:37:35.280 or Wolverhamton Wanderers or whatever his local team happens to be, but has motives that are,

00:37:39.680 to be honest, pretty hard to discern. But money doesn't matter to him. He can pump in whatever money

00:37:44.720 he wants, whether that's just because he likes football or whether there is some sort of soft power

00:37:49.280 directive behind that. And, I mean, Arsenal, I think the great example of a club who get caught

00:37:55.360 up in that, that Arsenal have been challenging Manchester United through the 90s. They're the

00:37:59.200 big two teams in England. Arsenal's stadium, Highbury had a capacity of, like, was it 38,000?

00:38:04.480 Yeah.

00:38:04.880 Manchester United's 70-odd there. So roughly, Arsenal's capacity is half of Manchester United's.

00:38:09.280 So even if they're getting roughly the same TV money, United have a huge advantage in terms of

00:38:13.440 gate receipts, in terms of corporate possibilities. So Arsenal then blow the bank on building a new

00:38:19.040 stadium. It's an amazing new stadium. Well, it's not new now, but an amazing stadium. It's exactly the

00:38:23.680 right economic logic, except by the time it's built, suddenly those economics don't work anymore.

00:38:29.360 And you have to have this billionaire owner, be he an oligarch, estate or private equity.

00:38:37.440 And that has radically changed the economics of football.

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00:40:12.800 Well, on that, actually, you bring up a question that I've been saving because I didn't want to

00:40:16.400 offend you straight away. But I'm a big fan of American sports. And one of the things they do,

00:40:21.920 as you know incredibly well, is they have a draft system, which means that younger players,

00:40:25.840 A, have to get an education, which is good because most players don't make it. And so you force them to

00:40:30.320 get a degree and whatever. But then what it also does, there's a salary cap, obviously. And if you

00:40:36.800 overspend, other teams get the fine that you pay and it's distributed evenly. You basically do not

00:40:42.560 get these decade long periods of domination by one or two teams. And actually, it all gets rotated

00:40:48.720 around. So the Chicago Bulls, who were great under Michael Jordan, haven't been great since.

00:40:52.640 The Lakers, you know, they go through their periods. The Celtics, the big market teams still

00:40:57.840 tend to come out on top, but it's not like anything like what you have in football.

00:41:02.640 And then the other thing is, I have to, my grandfather used to piss the hell out. He

00:41:07.360 pissed me off so much when I was a kid because I used to be a big football fan. And he would always

00:41:12.560 say to me, Constantine, football is really not that good a sport. I mean, look at basketball,

00:41:16.960 look at American football. They're so entertaining. And it's true. American football is all geared

00:41:21.360 towards maximum performance and like bite-sized chunks. Whereas with football, you might be watching

00:41:26.720 people just run around the pitch for about 70 minutes and nothing happens.

00:41:30.960 Do you think football is a better sport? Do you think it merits its global dominance?

00:41:35.600 Well, there's two different issues there. So let's deal with the second one first.

00:41:39.120 And I think that depends entirely what your personal preference is. I like the fact there aren't

00:41:43.600 many goals in football. And I like it for two reasons. One is the explosion of emotion when you

00:41:48.480 score is way greater than, you know, if it's finishing 110, 108, then how do you get that

00:41:55.840 excited about any one point? Whereas if it finishes 1-0, that's an incredibly exciting moment.

00:42:02.640 And also... What if it finishes 0-0?

00:42:04.960 Well, that can also be exciting. I'm kidding.

00:42:08.880 But you also have the opportunity in football for the weaker team to set out to stop the better team.

00:42:14.560 And I would say maybe in 20% of the games, the weaker team is able to stop the stronger team.

00:42:19.200 There's obviously a limit. And that is one of the beauties of football, that it's not just about

00:42:23.760 the best team winning. It's about strategizing, give yourself the best chance of getting the best

00:42:27.120 possible result. And you can be... Well, the day we're recording this is the day after Grimsby beat

00:42:33.760 Manchester United. I suppose you can make a case that Manchester United are no longer better than

00:42:37.440 Grimsby. But still, a fourth flight team beating a top flight team. I'm not sure any other sport in

00:42:44.960 which that can happen. And that is a very good thing. The first point I think is more interesting.

00:42:51.840 And I don't know what my answer would be if I hadn't grown up within a British model.

00:42:55.280 But the British model is you play sport at your local club and your local club

00:43:00.800 caters to its local community. And it can enter competitions. And it can grow. And if it keeps

00:43:06.720 growing, and if it keeps getting more popular, and keeps getting more members, and keeps getting

00:43:09.760 more money, and maybe you can start to pay people to play for them, it can enter the pyramid. And it

00:43:14.480 can go all the way up, in theory, it can go all the way up to the top. And so that club is very

00:43:19.440 representative of its local community. And that is a tiny fraction of clubs who can do that. But

00:43:26.080 the clubs are all joined in this mass pyramid. And you have social sport for people who want it,

00:43:30.960 and you can pick your level. You can play at any level from being the highest level professional

00:43:35.200 to being the level club cricketer that I was. You can be hopeless at it, but if you want to do it,

00:43:41.520 you can do it. In the US, professional sport is not based on that pyramid. It's not based on

00:43:47.600 clubs that are very much rooted in their community. It's based on franchises, and it's based on making

00:43:52.560 money from me off. And if you look at the history of the NASL, franchises are changing all the time.

00:43:59.920 Oh, hang on, the LA Gatos have become a Miami Toros overnight, and they've moved from... How do you

00:44:06.160 support that team when suddenly they're playing 3,000 miles away with entirely different cast of players?

00:44:11.280 So sure, if you want a closed system with no promotion and relegation, then yeah, you can put in

00:44:18.000 place all these controls, all these caps. It's designed to make money for the owners, which maybe

00:44:23.360 that's... Maybe you see sport purely as a product to be sold. If you see it as having a community value

00:44:29.600 and as representing its community and providing facilities at some level for the most hopeless

00:44:35.440 players, then I would prefer the European model. So they're just two different models. Now, the other

00:44:40.800 problem with that closed model is you have no relegation. So if you have a bad start to the season,

00:44:45.200 what's it? It's over. Whereas at least in European leagues or South American leagues,

00:44:51.680 you're fighting into relegation. It's not something to play for.

00:44:53.840 Well, in fact... Sorry, Francis, just to... In fact, in a closed system like the US one,

00:44:59.040 you're actually heavily incentivized to perform badly once you've... It's clear you're not going

00:45:03.120 anywhere, because then you'll probably get... You'll get the best chance of having the best players

00:45:06.960 from next year's draft. And the draft has become a major problem for US soccer, because if their players

00:45:14.240 finished their university education, great, they've got a degree, brilliant. They're 21.

00:45:19.280 If you're an English player in the same position you've been playing since you're 16, 17, you've

00:45:22.400 got four or five years of high-level experience... That's not going to work for football because

00:45:26.240 there's a global market for football, whereas for the NBA and the NFL, that's not really an issue.

00:45:30.400 Exactly. I mean, it can only work. And maybe that's why the tweaks of the laws introduced to whatever

00:45:35.760 games they took up in the 19th century made sense on a local level, but it makes it very hard to

00:45:39.840 integrate. And I think you see with women's soccer, I think you're seeing the US approaching a crisis

00:45:46.080 point, because they were dominant for a long time. So you have legislation in 1971, I think,

00:45:52.400 early 70s anyway, that says you have to have equal opportunity in all things in universities for men

00:45:58.800 and women. In practice, what that means is, because there are no women's American football teams,

00:46:04.480 and because they're incredibly costly, the American football team takes almost all the funding for

00:46:08.720 men's sport. The women's sport have this funding that can distribute much more freely. They invest

00:46:13.360 in soccer. Their soccer programs become very good. And so by the mid-70s, they're producing high

00:46:19.840 numbers of highly accomplished women's soccer players. And so America becomes the dominant power.

00:46:25.280 Now that Europe is beginning to catch up, it's benefiting from the fact that you have an English

00:46:30.960 league, a Spanish league, a Dutch league, an Italian league, a Swedish league, a Danish league,

00:46:34.000 also competing with each other, you're getting best practice, and they are now catching the US.

00:46:38.800 And the US has got this problem that they're not developing teenage players, they're developing

00:46:42.240 21-year-old players who are already four or five years behind their development by the time they

00:46:46.240 hit professional level. I also think as well, fan culture in European, uh, in European leagues,

00:46:51.120 particularly in the English league, is just far superior to American, right? They've gone on banter,

00:46:57.200 is what I'm saying. But that's a cultural thing, it's nothing to do with football.

00:47:00.320 Oh, it's terrible. You go there, you go, uh, let's go Dodgers, let's go. I went to an

00:47:06.160 LA Dodgers game, and I looked at my friend, you know, because I went to the game with him,

00:47:10.080 I went, is this the best you can do? In West Ham, we stand up, and we sing to the Liverpool fans,

00:47:15.680 stand up if you've got a job. You know, it's, but there's a genuine thing there that I love about

00:47:21.280 it, which is the humour element, the fan culture. It's something very unique to English football,

00:47:26.640 and I think is what makes English football so special.

00:47:29.120 Uh, yeah, I would agree with that, up to a point. I didn't get it.

00:47:32.080 I haven't just spent about 40 minutes talking about hooliganism, which is the flip side of this coin.

00:47:38.080 Yeah, it's, but one other thing, and I'm very conscious again, this is the environment I grew

00:47:43.280 up in. When I go to, say, Germany or Italy, you see the ultras, and it's great, they make noise,

00:47:48.880 they keep going, and it's all pre-programmed. They're not reacting to the game at all. And that,

00:47:54.080 you know, when you, when you see it for 30 seconds, you say, God, that's amazing. And

00:47:57.040 then, you know, 10 minutes later, you say, hang on. But you, you haven't, there's a really bad foul

00:48:02.000 there. You should have been booing that. The referee's never going to be intimidated unless,

00:48:05.040 and English fans or British fans react to the game. And I think the humour of it, I think,

00:48:11.040 is a, is a big thing that, okay, a lot of it's quite formulaic, but within the formulae,

00:48:15.680 sometimes you get very good jokes, um, that relate to things that have happened in the game

00:48:20.640 or things that have happened in the past week. And that spontaneity, I think, is something,

00:48:24.640 look, it's, it's not, it's not that common, but when it happens, it's a great thing. And yeah,

00:48:29.600 that's, yeah, it's, it's that more organic feel to it that it's, uh, this is not pre-scripted.

00:48:35.600 It's not everybody sets up for flares after 43 minutes or whatever. It's, you allow the game,

00:48:40.400 you know, there's a sort of a symbiotic relationship between the game and the fans,

00:48:44.560 even to the point where, um, there was a, it must be what, 10, 11 years ago now,

00:48:51.840 when an Everton surge against relegation begins with a bad challenge by Phil Neville,

00:48:56.960 because suddenly everybody gets up because he's put in a huge challenge and that atmosphere

00:49:01.200 changes the nature of that game. And they end up getting a point or getting a win that they

00:49:04.800 weren't going to get. And they then get points in the next half dozen games and they stay up.

00:49:09.360 And that, I think, I mean, maybe it's just because that's what I'm used to,

00:49:11.680 but I think that is a good thing. Yeah. And what's really interesting,

00:49:14.640 particularly football across our lifetimes, look, you can say the first celebrity footballer

00:49:18.640 was a Manchester United player, George Best, who was dubbed the fifth Beatle. And, you know,

00:49:23.120 he was cool. He had a rock star, good looks, and he was an incredible footballer, probably,

00:49:27.040 arguably one of the best of all time. But then you've just seen footballers just ascend to the

00:49:32.560 point where they now arguably some of the most famous people in the world. Like,

00:49:37.280 I would say Lionel Messi is, what, top 10 famous people or Cristiano Ronaldo?

00:49:41.600 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Or, I mean, even scale it down a bit. Go out in the street,

00:49:46.560 pick a random person, say, name 20 Brazilians, and you're getting 19 footballers.

00:49:50.480 Right. I mean, all due respect to nobody saying Klaus Le Spectre.

00:49:55.040 And why is that? Why has suddenly football become footballers, certain footballers,

00:50:00.080 transcended the sport and become celebrities?

00:50:02.240 I don't even think it's certain footballers. I think all footballers, I think all footballers

00:50:07.120 are famous. So, I mean, I'll give you a concrete example of this. In 2015, I was in Ethiopia. I was

00:50:12.960 in Lalabella, where the rock churches are. And it was when Mourinho was falling apart at Chelsea.

00:50:18.000 Chelsea were playing Liverpool that day in the lunchtime kickoff. I went for lunch,

00:50:22.000 and the owner of the restaurant I went to, she was a Scottish woman, she was a Motherwell fan,

00:50:25.040 she distributed Motherwell kits to local kids, which actually was a little bit weird seeing

00:50:28.880 local kids walking around in Motherwell shirts. And I got talking to her and I said,

00:50:32.640 where can I watch this, you know, the Chelsea-Liverpool game today? And she went,

00:50:35.200 oh, look, the restaurant manager will be going. So just wait for him when he's finished his shift.

00:50:39.280 He'll take you to this cafe where they've got a screen. Okay, great. So we go to this cafe,

00:50:44.880 paid the 10 beer or whatever to get in. And there's 200 people in this room watching this TV,

00:50:52.320 massively engaged, know what they're talking about, very educated audience. They clearly watch a lot

00:50:56.320 of football. And then the rest of the world just says, do you want to come watch Swansea Arsenal

00:50:59.760 later this afternoon? I said, yeah, okay. Well, we'll go to a proper locals place.

00:51:03.760 And it's this sort of, it's like a muddy bank. They've hammered benches into the bank.

00:51:08.560 There's screens at the front. There's a tarpaulin over the top. It's five beer. It's half the price

00:51:13.360 of a cafe. And everybody is watching, there's 500 people there watching this game. And he said,

00:51:20.320 oh yeah, there's five places like this, plus a couple more cafes. And I worked it out.

00:51:24.640 There's something like 40% of the adult male population of that village in rural Ethiopia

00:51:29.360 are watching the Premier League on any given Saturday. I don't know if you've come across

00:51:32.960 David Goldblatt, a great football historian. So he wrote a book called The Age of Football.

00:51:39.040 And he tells the story of a village in Uganda, a remote village where nobody really bothered

00:51:44.320 with time. You know, they get up when the sun comes up, they go to bed when the sun goes down,

00:51:48.240 they move their cattle about according to the seasons. That's it. That's their lifestyle.

00:51:51.760 And then suddenly everybody starts getting watchers. And the reason is, they know the

00:51:56.480 football kicks off at 4pm or whatever. And so they need to know when it's 4pm so they

00:52:00.080 can go back to watch it. It's the cultural phenomenon of the Premier League. I mean,

00:52:04.640 you know, the very bold question of why does football matter? It matters now because it is

00:52:10.320 the most popular cultural phenomenon there has ever been. The number of people who watch the Premier League

00:52:15.840 is extraordinary. I push back on that. I don't think it's football. I think the World Cup,

00:52:20.320 and we're going to talk about the World Cup because you wrote a great book about it,

00:52:23.040 but I think it's the Premier League. I don't see people doing the same for, I don't know,

00:52:27.840 Getafe versus Sevilla or Livorno versus Udine. Yeah, that's true. The Premier League is definitely

00:52:34.480 the world. I mean, I think in South America or Spanish-speaking South America, maybe La Liga does

00:52:40.880 still dominate. But yeah, the Premier League has been marketed exceptionally well, exceptionally

00:52:44.880 cleverly. I think you've got to give Richard Scudamore, the first CEO of the Premier League,

00:52:48.320 huge credit that initially he effectively gave away the foreign rights because he wanted it to be.

00:52:53.360 If you go into a bar or a cafe, whether you're in China or Nigeria or Canada, it'll be on. And then

00:52:59.840 people start watching it. People become engaged in it. And David Goldbach's most recent book,

00:53:05.200 Injury Time. He says, he makes the point that football is now, or the Premier League is now the

00:53:12.400 world's soap opera. And he points out that in 2001, it was the Liverpool-Barcelona game,

00:53:17.680 it was the day that EastEnders, BBC soap opera, revealed who had shot Phil Mitchell,

00:53:23.920 one of the biggest characters. And they persuaded UEFA to delay kickoff in this game by 10 minutes,

00:53:29.200 so we could have a 10-minute extended EastEnders, so we could find out who'd shot Phil Mitchell. And

00:53:33.600 UEFA agreed. And yet, since 2019, EastEnders was cancelled entirely to show an ethical fifth-round

00:53:42.400 game because football has now become bigger than the soap operas. In the old days, soap stars were

00:53:48.160 on the front page of the tabloids all the time. Now it's footballers. Football of the Premier League

00:53:52.560 is the world's soap opera. And Francis mentioned the World Cup. You've obviously got a great book

00:53:56.400 out about it. Remind everybody of the title so they can go and grab a copy. It's called The Power and

00:54:00.320 the Glory. And one of the things that many, many people, I think, will say very often is,

00:54:06.160 I'm not really a football fan, but I watch it when the World Cup is on. And if sport is ritualised

00:54:11.840 combat, which I've always thought it is, especially team sport, then the World Cup really is the

00:54:17.040 epitome of that, isn't it? Teams from countries coming together and fighting it out for who's top dog.

00:54:22.000 Yeah, absolutely. And you see that right from the start, right from 1930 when it begins.

00:54:27.680 That is true. Gilles de Rimeau, who is the FIFA president who sets up the World Cup,

00:54:34.720 he thinks football will encourage fraternity among nations.

00:54:39.680 I would say by 1934, when Mussolini's got his hands on it, it's already true that's not going to happen.

00:54:44.000 But yeah, if you look at, say, the England-Argentina relationship in football, it's even before the

00:54:51.040 Falklands, there's a sort of Oedipal relationship there that, okay, Argentina was never part of the

00:54:55.840 empire, but it was part of the informal empire that Britain essentially ran the economy there

00:54:59.760 from 1870 through to 1910, for the sake of easy numbers. There's a sense, when they first started

00:55:06.800 playing friendlies in the 1950s, of being people against master. By 66, when they play in a very violent,

00:55:13.920 World Cup quarter-final, a hugely controversial game, that's full-on, sort of, we have to beat

00:55:18.720 the quasi-colonial power. Or look at when Senegal played France in the opening game of 2002 World Cup.

00:55:25.360 How can you see that as anything other than the coloniser against the coloniser?

00:55:30.240 Yeah, and that's what I love about the World Cup, is that you watch the teams and the teams actually

00:55:38.480 sort of embody the stereotypes that you give their countries.

00:55:42.560 You know, you look at the Japanese fans, who I would argue are the most beautiful fans in terms

00:55:48.080 of behaviour, they literally clean up after themselves. And they show Japanese players

00:55:53.040 after they leave the dressing room, the dressing room looks immaculate.

00:55:56.240 Yeah, is that a bit performative? I don't know.

00:55:58.320 Maybe.

00:55:59.440 Well, switch it either way. I mean, the Argentines, who Francis, his mother's from Venezuela, so he

00:56:04.800 knows Latin America pretty well. He always says the Argentinians are the English of South America,

00:56:10.960 i.e. universally hated. And one of the things, I don't know if this is a stereotype, but they do

00:56:17.200 have a reputation for being kind of, you know, dirty, and dirty as players, dirty as a team.

00:56:22.400 Is that a fair assessment?

00:56:23.920 Um, yes.

00:56:25.120 Yeah.

00:56:25.920 Yeah, probably.

00:56:29.680 That's a fascinating question, and I could talk for an hour on this.

00:56:33.760 Can you give me two minutes?

00:56:34.720 Yeah.

00:56:35.040 Yes. So, the British retreat from Argentina, and there's a big question in Argentina,

00:56:40.560 this immigrant nation, you know, the indigenous people have essentially been driven off or killed.

00:56:46.000 And so you have this country that's a mix of Spanish, Italians, Arabs, Jews, British,

00:56:50.720 Germans, Irish, French. And they all come from very different places, very different ideas of how

00:56:55.840 you do things. And it suddenly fakes to this question once the British get out of, hang on,

00:57:01.360 who are we? What is it to be Argentinian? And so there's a series of lectures in 1912,

00:57:06.640 in the Odeon Theatre, attended by the president and all this cabinet, and all the great and good

00:57:12.000 of Argentina. And Leopoldo Lugones, the great poet of the age, he gives these lectures on chaos

00:57:17.120 and dinerad. And he concludes that the spirit of Argentina is to be found in the gaucho, in the

00:57:23.200 lone horsemen of the Panthers. That combination of virtuosity, but also self-reliance, that is

00:57:30.000 characteristically Argentinian. It's a romanticized image, but yeah, fair enough. The great Argentinian

00:57:34.160 epic poem, Martin Hierro, is about a gaucho. But you then have this issue, well, Buenos Aires is

00:57:42.240 growing rapidly. Argentina has become a much more urban society. And so by the 1920s, people are

00:57:46.800 starting to say, well, it's all very well to have these big asados and everybody becomes dressed as

00:57:50.800 gauchos, but you are in a city and you do kind of look ridiculous. So Borges is very funny on this.

00:57:56.480 In El Graphical, the great sports magazine, selling over 100,000 copies a week at its peak,

00:58:01.920 based in Buenos Aires. They start to say, well, how do you express this gaucho spirit in the city?

00:58:07.920 And they say, well, the true spirit is actually the pibe, the urchin, the kid from the street,

00:58:12.000 who's playing on the potreros, on the vacant lots. And he also has some virtuosity,

00:58:16.880 because he's playing in these games of 15, 20, 25 a side in a small space,

00:58:20.720 on a hard, uneven pitch. He's got to have great ball control, great technique. But he's also got

00:58:26.320 to have that self-reliance. He's got to be streetwise. He's got to be able to look after

00:58:28.720 himself. He's got to be able to use his elbows. And they realise this is in complete contradistinction

00:58:33.200 to the British who've taught them the game, because they're playing on big, grassy pitches in schools.

00:58:38.080 So their game's all about stamina and running. They've got a teacher with a whistle if things get out of

00:58:41.840 hand. There's no teachers with a whistle on the potreros. You've got to be able to handle yourself.

00:58:46.480 And so Boricotto, who's actually Uruguayan, but he's a sort of honorary Argentinian,

00:58:49.920 he's the editor of El Graphico. In 1928, he writes this incredible piece where he says, right,

00:58:54.160 if we were to erect a statue to the spirit of Argentinian football, it would depict a pibe

00:59:00.320 with a shock of dark hair, with his teeth worn down by eating yesterday's bread. And he goes on about

00:59:06.320 how he's got holes in his shirt. He's playing with a rag ball because he's not rich enough to have a

00:59:09.440 proper ball. And he's all about the dribble. And the Argentinian word for dribble is gambetar,

00:59:14.400 which is the, it's a gaucho word, meaning the running motion of an ostrich.

00:59:17.760 And the thing is, if he took that description and gave it to somebody without context, said,

00:59:21.360 who is that? 100% of people would say it's Maradona. So 49 years before Maradona makes

00:59:26.320 his international debut, his coming is foretold. And that's why when Maradona gets there, when he

00:59:31.840 turns up, when they're seeing him in youth competitions, he's like, this is him. This is

00:59:36.320 El Pibedoro, the gold merchant, the Argentinian hero whose coming has been prophesied.

00:59:42.000 And then why does the gaucho culture come to an end? It comes to an end because the British

00:59:47.520 introduced barbed wire. And once you have barbed wire, you don't need a cowboy. You just

00:59:51.680 put a fence up around your cows. If you look at Argentinian newspapers in the 1870s,

00:59:56.720 one of the biggest celebrities is a bull, British bull, called Tarquin.

01:00:02.320 And the reason Tarquin is so prized is, if your cows mate with Tarquin,

01:00:08.000 then they're going to give good meat yield. Because you can do selective breeding if you've

01:00:12.560 got a fence. If you've just got a cowboy, you can't stop the bulls going with whichever cows they

01:00:17.520 want. So even if you want to do things the traditional way, if you're a farmer, if you're

01:00:22.400 an estanciero and you're trying to do it with the gauchos, you're going to make less money than

01:00:27.040 your neighbour who's put up barbed wire. So the British have killed the gaucho. And that's why when

01:00:32.080 Maradona scores his two goals against England in his greatest single performance, 1986 World

01:00:36.320 Cup quarterfinal, four years after the Falklands, that's why that is the gauchos' revenge on

01:00:41.840 England. And look at his two goals. The first one, the cunning of the street kid. The second one,

01:00:48.240 the virtuosity of the street kid. It's the perfect game for Maradona. And it is this sense of the gaucho

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01:02:26.000 Why do you think, and this is quite a leading question, but I firmly believe it to be true, why is it

01:02:31.200 the majority of the best players are South American? Well, I think it probably is that culture of playing

01:02:36.800 on the streets. I think, certainly in terms of forwards, I think that's really valuable to have

01:02:41.680 that. I realise I didn't fully answer your question, so I'll come back to that. There is something of

01:02:47.760 a street footballer which is anarchic, it's individualistic, it's hard to predict. I think

01:02:52.480 players who've grown up in academies can become quite predictable. I think you've seen, for instance,

01:02:57.600 Germany in the last sort of 15, 20 years since they overhauled our academy system, they produce loads of

01:03:01.920 great midfielders, they don't produce centre forwards anymore. So I think that learning our

01:03:08.160 own way of playing, I think, is quite important. And at Arsenal, for instance, now, although they've

01:03:12.240 got incredible facilities, they have at least one session a week where they just let the kids play.

01:03:16.960 They don't coach them. I mean, they're doing it on beautiful astroft pitches with balls that have

01:03:21.200 been properly blown up. So maybe they're not going to develop in the same way. But I think that is why.

01:03:25.680 I think there's also a sense of, if you grew up in poverty and football is your way out,

01:03:31.280 then possibly you are more committed, more ruthless. I mean, I remember speaking to

01:03:35.120 Philippe Trussier, a French coach who coached a lot in Africa. He was a Japan coach in 2000 when

01:03:40.640 I spoke to him. And him saying that he found Japanese football incredibly frustrating because

01:03:45.360 it's technically very good. The players are very disciplined, very obedient. They look after

01:03:48.640 themselves, you know, they're very fit, but they don't have the hunger and the age that he'd found

01:03:52.960 in African players. So your question about why... There is a saying in the NBA, I think,

01:03:57.920 I can't remember which coach used to say, but you never recruit a player from a two-car garage,

01:04:03.360 from a home with a two-car garage. Yeah, yeah. So why... Why Argentinians dirty, Jonathan?

01:04:11.280 So partly it's that self-reliance. But what you see is this technical skill is really privileged.

01:04:16.640 And Argentinian football turns professional in 1981. The Argentinian league in the 30s is incredibly...

01:04:21.040 It's incredibly well followed, huge crowds. The football's very beautiful, very individualistic.

01:04:28.160 There's all kinds of myths and stories about it. La Machina, the great River Plate side of the 40s,

01:04:32.480 and massively celebrated their famous five-man forward line. You look at it, they hardly win

01:04:37.600 anything. I mean, I think they win two of the five championships when they played together.

01:04:41.280 But they play this beautiful football, and that's what's privileged. Argentina go to the

01:04:45.840 first World Cup in 1930. They lose in the final. In 34, they send the amateur team and lose to Sweden in the

01:04:50.480 first game. They don't go in 38. They've fallen out with the Brazilians in 1950, and they don't go

01:04:54.240 and they try to say it's because of Peronist isolation. They just fell out with the Brazilians.

01:04:57.520 Brazil hosted in 1950. They can't afford to send a team to Switzerland in 54. They finally go to the

01:05:02.240 World Cup again in 58. It's the first time they send a proper professional team for 28 years.

01:05:06.160 And their football has been incredibly beautiful through this 25, 28-year period. And they think

01:05:11.120 they're the best in the world. As you suggested, there is a self-confidence about Argentinian culture.

01:05:16.720 I don't think that's remotely what I suggested, but well done.

01:05:20.960 In 1957, they win the South American Championship with this great forward line. The Karasukius for

01:05:27.120 Dirty Face's forward line. So again, the Dirty Face side is urgent ideal. Problem is, three of those

01:05:32.960 players are sold to Italy before the World Cup, and they won't pick them when they're playing in Italy.

01:05:36.640 But they get there. They brought in Adolfo Pednero, who's been this great player. He's 39. So he's old.

01:05:41.200 He's overweight. But they still say, oh, he's so skillful. That'll be enough. And they get beaten

01:05:45.600 6-1 by Czechoslovakia. And immediately they think, hang on, this technical beautiful world,

01:05:52.240 this doesn't work. We've got to be physical. And this, I think, is something you see repeatedly

01:05:56.000 in Argentinian culture, not just in football, but in everything. Because it's this tabula rasa,

01:06:00.560 because it attracts these sort of dreamers, you get this utopianism. But the flip side of that is

01:06:06.560 cynicism. So you try to build utopia. Oh, it's gone wrong. Let's be really cynical.

01:06:10.640 And you can even say the history of coups is like that. Oh, Perron, it's great. Work as utopia.

01:06:16.880 Oh, it's gone wrong. Off you go. And that cycle keeps going. And I think you see it in the football.

01:06:23.520 You get this very sort of bifurcated vision of either the incredible attacking beauty or the incredible

01:06:30.880 cynicism. And those are manifested in two great coaches. In Cesar Luis Minotti, who wins the World

01:06:37.520 Cup with them in 78, who plays the beautiful football. A former communist who wins it under

01:06:42.400 the Hunter, which is very complicated. And Carlos Bilado, who is this cynical coach who has

01:06:48.480 Maradona's team when they win it in 86. It's even the sort of intellectual culture of Argentina,

01:06:53.360 it loves a theory. So it loves to say, everybody falls on one of these two theories. And of course,

01:06:58.000 it's not true. I don't even think Minotti is Minotista. I think he's much more mixed,

01:07:03.600 but it suits them to come up with these ideals. So it's a whole mixture of where the football

01:07:09.760 culture comes from, the fact it's created a contradiction to the British, the intellectual

01:07:14.000 culture of the time, the defeat to Czechoslovakia in Helsingborg in 1958. The violence is legitimized

01:07:20.480 there in a way that it wouldn't be elsewhere. That's really interesting. And speaking of cynicism,

01:07:24.400 one of the things that I would argue we've seen, particularly in recent decades, is a lot of

01:07:28.720 countries that have a desire to impact their image on the world stage have cottoned onto the fact that

01:07:35.040 actually the World Cup is probably the biggest thing that you can possibly do to affect your

01:07:38.240 image. And so you see Russia and Qatar. I mean, I don't know the details, but I wonder whether those

01:07:44.720 two countries got the World Cup through entirely above board methods.

01:07:49.040 Yeah, I think you're not the only one who wonders that.

01:07:50.720 Yeah, I really do wonder that. And it wouldn't surprise me if it was the case.

01:07:54.800 Well, I mean, look at the ex-co who voted on the 24 person ex-co and...

01:07:59.280 Executive committee.

01:08:01.200 Exactly. The people of executive committee in those days voted on who got the World Cup.

01:08:04.400 Yeah.

01:08:04.880 And I think it's 15 of the 24 have been convicted of corruption.

01:08:09.040 Others have died before it reached trial. They are not the most upstanding group of people.

01:08:14.400 No, no, clearly not. And so I guess what I was going to ask is,

01:08:17.360 inevitably, anything with power, it's like the ring of power, it corrupts and it becomes

01:08:25.360 used by corrupt people and politicians and countries. What do you make of the

01:08:31.200 inevitable infusion of politics and geopolitics into the World Cup?

01:08:35.360 Well, I think it's always been there. So why do Uruguay want to host in 1930? In part,

01:08:41.040 it's because they've won the Olympics in 24 and 28. They know they're really good at it.

01:08:44.080 And they think this is... They recognize that suddenly people

01:08:48.080 recognize Uruguay as a country in its own right, not just a province of Argentina.

01:08:53.520 Uruguay winning the Olympic football in 24 and 28 is a big thing for Uruguay's self-projection

01:08:58.720 into the world. So how do you magnify that? You host the first World Cup.

01:09:02.000 It happens to be 100 years... It happens to be the centenary of Uruguay's declaration of independence in

01:09:06.080 1830, which is why the big stadium where the finals played is the centenario. We have a centenary stadium.

01:09:11.520 Juan Campistegui, the president of Uruguay, he's batlista. Batli Donas has been... In 1901,

01:09:18.560 he comes to power and I think pretty enlightened. He reinvests the profits from the meat industry

01:09:26.080 in education, in health, in... He promotes physical education in school. He sees that as really

01:09:33.040 important. It's one of the reasons why Uruguay are so good at football. And this is supposed to be

01:09:39.040 a celebration of batlismo. And so when Gilles Rime, the president of FIFA, gets there, and he's,

01:09:46.080 you know, who is Gilles Rime? He's just a French bureaucrat. He's not important. On his first day there,

01:09:51.040 he's going to a barbecue with the president. So straight away, politics is trying to co-opt

01:09:55.600 football. By 1934, Mussolini is much more overt than... I mean, Campistegui didn't do any good.

01:10:00.720 He was toppled in the queue the following year because of the Wall Street crash and lack of money.

01:10:04.800 But yeah, Mussolini in 1934, he takes hold of the World Cup in a way that even Qatar and Russia

01:10:12.000 haven't. He introduces his own trophy, a Copa del Dice, which is three times bigger than the

01:10:16.640 official World Cup trophy. But he's also quite smart about it. So he subsidizes travel for fans.

01:10:21.840 Because part of the point is not just, we want Italy to win the World Cup and prove we're this

01:10:26.960 muscular, athletic, modern nation. And you know, if you think of Mussolini,

01:10:30.800 he's constantly projecting himself as a sportsman. He's riding horses, I guess a bit like Putin,

01:10:35.840 riding horses bareback. He's always been pictured skiing. When Engelberdolphus,

01:10:41.200 the Austrian chancellor, goes to see him at Riccione in, was that 33, I think? And it's sort of

01:10:46.960 emergency talks. Will Mussolini provide the troops just in case Hitler decides to go in?

01:10:53.040 And Mussolini makes sure that when Dolphus arrives, he's out in the sea swimming. And so Dolphus is

01:10:59.680 there. He's an Austrian diplomat. He's dressed in this ridiculous three-piece seat. It's 30 degrees

01:11:03.600 or whatever. Dolphus is tiny. He's 4'11", Dolphus, the millimeternik, as they called him.

01:11:09.520 And so you then get these pictures, because Dolphus is saying, oh no, better go and get a

01:11:13.760 skiff and row out to him. Obviously, he's terrible at rowing. He's his little 4'11 diplomat. Why would

01:11:18.320 he be able to row? You have these pictures of him walking up the beach. And Mussolini's,

01:11:22.000 what was Mussolini, 5'7"? He's not tall, but he's much taller than Dolphus. He's wearing these

01:11:26.960 trunks. He's a big, muscular bloke. And there's Dolphus, this little man in a three-piece suit with his,

01:11:32.000 you know, he's taking his jacket off, but he's obviously hot and sweating.

01:11:34.720 And the iconography of that, there's powerful, muscular, modern Italy, an old, fussy, impotent

01:11:42.320 Austria. It's incredibly powerful. So Mussolini's trying to put that into a welcome context,

01:11:47.680 but it's also about showing Italy is not the disorganized, ramshackle country of myth.

01:11:54.240 It's a modern country that can host this big tournament. The trains run on time.

01:11:59.040 So Mussolini's one of the first people to sort of think of sports merchandising. He has all this,

01:12:05.040 quite cheap, but well-produced merchandise, all with the Fasquez, with, you know, the fascist logo

01:12:11.120 on. The match tickets he has printed on lovely cardboard. They're very well designed,

01:12:14.720 so people will keep them as souvenirs. Again, with fascist detailing. And so from Mussolini's

01:12:21.200 point of view, the World Cup's a great success because Italy win it and Italy hosts it really,

01:12:27.040 really well. And all, every foreign journalist who goes sort of has to write, yeah, this was actually a

01:12:32.000 really great tournament. The stadiums are great. There's been this sort of great wave of stadium

01:12:36.720 building in the late 20s, early 30s. A lot of it with loans from the government or local

01:12:42.240 municipalities. There's been a, from 1926, there's been a conscious movement to make Italy

01:12:47.520 better at football. They've banned foreign players. They've, in a lot of cities, they would

01:12:52.400 amalgamate smaller clubs to make one big club per city to make it a proper national league.

01:12:56.080 It's a lot of very sort of forward thinking, sort of clever planning comes together in 34.

01:13:03.120 So whatever's happened recently, Mussolini got there first. But yeah, I think the difference in

01:13:09.520 2018, 2022 is that Russian guitar, the benefit for them was to host the tournament. They didn't,

01:13:16.320 didn't think they had any chance of winning it, but hosting the tournament, putting on a good show,

01:13:20.720 showing they're part of this sort of international community. And you have that, the opening game in

01:13:24.800 2018, when Russia beat Saudi Arabia 5-0. And you have, you have those images in the VIP box,

01:13:31.280 where you have Putin, Gianni Infantino, and Mohammed bin Salman sitting next to each other,

01:13:37.600 engaging what looks like the most awful stilted banter. But the three of them are pictured there

01:13:42.800 together. And the weird thing is, what's that ball bloke in the middle doing? Why is Gianni Infantino,

01:13:47.760 this Swiss diplomat, why is he there? What's he got to do with this? But somehow the president of FIFA

01:13:53.520 operates on a level where he's dealing with the most important people in the world.

01:13:56.000 Look, he has the power, right? So actually, objectively, he's entirely merited in being in

01:14:02.800 that box, because he has the power that these other two people want.

01:14:06.000 Yeah, he has something that he can give them. How often has he been in the Oval Office? He's always

01:14:12.160 there, he's always giving Trump something. I think for the first time, actually, last week, you saw a

01:14:17.840 flicker of doubt on Infantino's face, as Trump was talking about moving the draw from Las Vegas to

01:14:25.280 the Kennedy Center in Washington. You can see Gianni's face. Hang on, I'm sure I agree to that.

01:14:31.200 But obviously, he can't do anything. So yeah, he's become a facilitator for the soft power ambitions

01:14:36.400 of the MBS of Trump and Putin.

01:14:38.560 So Jonathan, we've been talking about corruption off the field and FIFA notoriously have had numerous

01:14:44.320 scandals. What about corruption on the field? How much can we trust that the results on the field

01:14:50.000 are actually organic and fair and haven't been manipulated by the players or referees?

01:14:56.480 I think at the highest level, I think we can be almost 100% confident. And the reason I say that is

01:15:01.920 gambling. So I'll give you the Premier League as the example, because it's the one I know best.

01:15:08.720 But the betting companies are very strictly regulated, that if they get the slightest hint

01:15:14.000 of unusual betting patterns, they raise a red flag. And so you had an instance, it was an Oxford

01:15:19.680 D-Arsen FA Cup game the last season of the season before, when there was an unusual number of bets

01:15:25.040 being placed on a particular player to get booked. And it turned out, I think the player was actually

01:15:31.360 acquitted. But the amount they were talking about was four bets worth a total of £1,200. So next to

01:15:36.480 nothing. And that was enough to trigger an investigation.

01:15:39.200 That could be like four blokes in a pub, one of them spreads a rumour and they go and put a bet on,

01:15:43.680 basically. It could be that. But even at that level, your point is, even at that level, they're going...

01:15:48.240 So it's in nobody's interest for it to be fixed at the top level, because the betting companies make

01:15:54.880 huge amounts of money because they have margins. The margins operate if a game is fair, because they have

01:15:59.600 their very complex, very sophisticated algorithms that work out the odds. And okay, maybe one in

01:16:07.040 a thousand times, there's a very strange result that costs them money, but nine in 99 out of a thousand

01:16:11.440 times, they're making money. Look at the profits of gambling companies on football. They're enormous.

01:16:16.320 They have absolutely no incentive to allow the game not to be fair. Also, look at how much players are

01:16:26.160 paid. How much money would you have to offer a player for them to risk their career? So we've got

01:16:34.800 an example of this. There was a Singaporean match fixer called Wilson Raj Peramal, who in 1995, mid-90s

01:16:44.160 anyway. He doesn't really know what he's doing. He flies to the UK, Birmingham playing Liverpool in

01:16:51.360 a League Cup game. He's been fixing games in Singapore, because it's pretty easy, because

01:16:55.120 nobody's got any money, so he bongs me $100, they'll fix it for you. So he thinks, right, I can do this

01:17:02.320 in England, and the returns will be much greater, because it's much greater interest. So he goes to

01:17:07.200 Birmingham City, and he says, oh yeah, I'm a journalist from Singapore. And they're like, oh, okay, well, welcome.

01:17:13.040 And it's not like now, where you'd have to show a press card, and you have to book three weeks in

01:17:16.560 advance or whatever to get an interview. And he goes into the car park, and he goes over to the

01:17:20.800 Birmingham goalkeeper, Ian Bennett, and he says, I want you to fix the game against Liverpool.

01:17:25.360 You're probably going to lose anyway, but just make sure you do. And Ian Bennett's like, no.

01:17:29.600 What are you going to offer me? He went, oh, 20 grand. He went, no. No, I get more than that a week.

01:17:34.240 Why would I take that to risk being banned for life? And that was 30 years ago. Now they're getting

01:17:41.840 paid way, way more than that. So at the top level, I think you can be pretty confident. I think lower

01:17:48.560 down, there's much bigger problems, because players earn less, the scrutiny is less. I think you've got

01:17:53.520 to ask why the bookmakers offer odds on youth-themed football where three people are watching. It makes

01:18:00.880 no sense. Why do they offer odds on really easy, manipulable markets like the first throw-in?

01:18:08.080 So there was a spate in the 90s where you could put spread bets on when there's the first throw-in

01:18:13.840 going to be. So obviously players think, well, hang on. If I take the kickoff and kick it out of play,

01:18:18.480 and I've sold on the spread, I'm going to make a profit. So they start doing that,

01:18:23.280 and that's sort of an open secret. But pretty soon, people crack down on that. It doesn't

01:18:28.320 happen anymore. So the modern game at the highest level, I think you can be pretty safe. I think

01:18:34.480 the World Cup, there's a couple of games recently. I think there were question marks over.

01:18:40.960 Really? Really? Well, which games?

01:18:43.040 I can't say that. But there's a Last 16 game in 2006. I think it looks pretty suspicious.

01:18:50.960 Oh, I remember this. It's the World Cup? Yeah, it's the World Cup 2006. The one that Italy won.

01:18:56.800 In where? Is it Korea-Japan? Is that one? No, it was in Germany.

01:19:00.320 In Germany? But the games that are vulnerable are when you have a team of players with less

01:19:08.000 money in a game they're expected to lose. Yeah, that makes sense. And they sort of think,

01:19:12.480 well... Well, I'm going to lose either three or four nil. Might as well be four for an extra X amount.

01:19:16.560 Yeah. See, I'm very good at thinking like a corrupted boy. And also, I think in countries where

01:19:24.240 maybe they can't guarantee they get the bonus they've been promised, and so there's an element

01:19:28.080 of bitterness. I think that also may sort of help break down the moral boundaries. Jonathan,

01:19:32.480 it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. We're going to ask you a bunch of questions

01:19:35.360 from our supporters in a second. Before we head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where everyone can

01:19:41.200 follow that conversation, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?

01:19:45.360 Middle-brow detective drama. So middle-brow detective drama on TV is phenomenally popular.

01:19:54.240 Not just on the mainstream channels you've got... Define it first, because I don't know what you're

01:19:58.720 talking about. Okay, so Inspector Morse, that type of thing. Yeah, Morse and its followers. Morse is probably the

01:20:02.960 first of that real sort of hour and a half plus ads, so two hours in total. And so you've now got

01:20:09.600 things like Karen Pirie, or you've got the Chelsea Detective, or you've got Midsommar Murders,

01:20:17.520 all the Marple and Poirot adaptations. Why is that so popular? Why is this one of Britain's biggest

01:20:23.120 cultural exports? Why is it proliferating? Why do I watch so much of it? Why is that the way...

01:20:28.800 Why is murder the way that I relax? And I understand sort of, you know, the logic of

01:20:34.080 the golden age of detective fiction in the 1930s. And you know, Martin Edwards has written a very

01:20:38.480 good book on it. And it's sort of supposed to be in the turbulence of the interwar years.

01:20:44.560 This is sort of a... Yes, violence happens, but then order prevails. But why are we obsessed by it now?

01:20:51.200 Why is there so much middle-brow detective drama? Do other countries do it? And why can the Americans

01:20:55.920 not do it well? There we go. Lots of questions for you. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where

01:21:00.480 we ask Jonathan your questions. Please inform me who is winning the upcoming World Cup so I can bet

01:21:07.200 my life savings. Thanks in advance.

01:21:16.480 We'll see you next time.

01:21:25.760 We'll see you next time.

01:21:39.760 Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

01:21:45.440 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you

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TRIGGERnometry - December 28, 2025

The Real History of Football - Jonathan Wilson

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