Sports governing bodies
October 2020
Football and Fascism
by Cristóbal Villalobos Salas
Football is a game, a passion, a form of social gathering, a business; and, therefore, also an effective tool for controlling the masses. Thanks to its unrivaled ability to create myths and to the intrinsic epic of the game, this sport has been exploited since its dawn as mean of ideological propaganda as well as, more recently, for commercial uses. The first ones to realize its immense power of suggestion were perhaps the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, who, in their eagerness to cut across all strata of society, used this popular discipline as a rudimentary but also powerful instrument of political marketing. These pages bring together the most meaningful episodes of this disturbing symbiosis between football and fascist dictatorships; anecdotes, feats —some tragic and others downright bizarre— in which football has been used as a blindfold to cover the eyes of the masses. It worked perfectly as a vehicle for indoctrination, fitting into the delirious propaganda designs conceived by the tyrants of those times. The book is divided into three parts: Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal, as well as some Latin American dictatorships.
