TRIGGERnometry - The Real History of Football - Jonathan Wilson

Episode Date: December 28, 2025

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How did it get as big as it's gone? I think it's a simplicity that has made it so popular as to why it's spread in the way it did that is probably a story of empire. Football gets taken around the world by British teachers, by the church, by businessmen. They're pretty much everywhere where you have a British community. The big early clubs, successful early clubs.

They are working class clubs and so people start to pay to watch the football and suddenly you get people thinking, hang on, we can make money here. I go to American football games in America. I go to NBA games. I've been to cricket, rugby. You never see anything like it.

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and take control of your privacy with IPVanish. Jonathan Wilson, welcome to Trigonumetry. Oh, thank you very much. Good to be here. It's great to have you on your new. are one of the world's leading experts on football. I don't know if you're formally a football historian, but you know your history of football extremely well in addition to the contemporary side. You look like you're about to interrupt, so you've got something to say against that.

I'm just intrigued by the notion of being a formal football historian. I mean, I don't know. Is it certificated? I've written books of football history. If that makes me a football historian, I am a football historian. I would think so. But you genuinely are someone who's incredibly knowledgeable and fascinating in the way you talk about it. So it's great to have you on. The question, actually to start with, by the way, football for American fans, soccer is what we're talking about. How did it get as big as it's got? Because it is the world's number one sport by far and away, right? Oh, yeah, I have a huge margin.

I think it's a number of things. I think it's very simple. That you basically can play it with, didn't even need a ball, really. You can use a stone or some rags, you're tied together. You don't really need any kind of pitch. You know, cricket, you have to prepare the pitch. Football, you can play it anywhere. So it's a very easy game to pick up and play.

I think it's a very easy game for people to watch. You know, it doesn't, personally, I find the tactics incredibly interesting and you can go down to huge rabbit holes with that. But fundamentally, you can watch it. If they kick the ball from there, into there, that's one point to them. Okay, we know what's going on. So I think it's a simplicity that has made it so popular. As to why it's spread in the way it did, that is probably a story of empire.

Oh, story of empire. So when does football start? So it depends what you mean by football. So there have been ball games where people kick it about played for thousands of years. As evidence, they've been played in China, Japan, 5,000 years ago. There was evidence when Columbus goes to the Caribbean. He finds people kicking around a rubber ball. But in terms of what we call football, it starts in 1863 in December.

and what has happened is all the public schools in England they play their variants of the game and it will be different according to which school do you go to and according to the conditions in which you play that will condition what sort of game it is

so if you have a big grassy pitch it'll be about running and about chasing and about sort of great bundles and everybody sort of falling on top of each other if you play in Cloisters if you play like that you're going to break limbs

nobody wants that so it becomes much more about passing a ball to each other much more technical, much less physical. So you have all these people from different schools, get to university, right, let's play football, oh, we all are football, that's a great idea. Oh, hang on, that isn't football. And someone rugby tackles someone to the floor.

And then you have to come up with unified laws. There's various attempts to do that. The first sort of serious attempt happens at Cambridge, 1841, so we just post some laws on Parker's Peace, the grassy area centre of Cambridge. But what we call football starts December 1863. There's a meeting at the Freemasons to Tavern near Covent Garden. And it's representatives of some people are from schools, some are from sort of trades or

or company set up by people who've been in public schools. And that is the formation of Football Association, which exists today. And they draw up the first 12 laws of the game, which form a basis of what we understand in football today. That is the accepted and official history. However, there is also the working class history of it, about which we know far less. You see clubs have been set up in the 1850s in Yorkshire, particularly around Sheffield. The Sheffield rules are quite significant. We can go into a huge amount of details how the Sheffield rules and the FA rules interact,

but by the 1870s you have a unified set of laws. The FA Cup, the oldest tournament in the world, begins 1872. And talk to me about the Empire and how that kind of spreads around the world. So very early, people who come through the public schools start to... Just to interrupt you very briefly, sorry. Public schools, again for our foreign viewers are the elite. schools in Britain, fee-paying schools that the elite of the country send their kids to. Exactly.

And this is a time of where muscular Christianity is the presiding doctrine. So there is a belief in the schools that playing sport is good because it imbues kids with manliness, which will make them equipped to run the empire to fight in wars. And you see an equivalent thing happening in Germany with what they call Tuenen, which is a sort of militarized gymnastics. I don't know if you come across that. Sounds very German. Yeah.

And I think people accept the King of the Ball that is more fun than, you know, doing aerobics while they're, you know, a sergeant made a shout-out-out-you. So, yeah, football gets taken around the world by British teachers, by the church, by railway workers, by engineers, by businessmen.

They're pretty much everywhere where you have a British community, they will set up sports clubs. Those sports clubs will play cricket and they will play football. But it's most of the world. pretty easy to play football because you don't need intricate pitch preparation. And in terms of the local populations, they watch cricket.

It's like, it's complicated, don't understand this. Football, oh, yeah, we can, we could do that. That looks like something that we can find something that looks like a ball, and we can do that in our space. And so you see, in Argentina, the first game is played in 867, the US thing is 1869. It spreads incredibly quickly and is adopted by local populations. and then sort of the first decade or two of the 20th century,

you start to see in Argentina, for instance, you have Argentinian champions of an Argentinian league that was founded by the British in 1890s. And Jonathan, you say it was spread by the empire, but then why was it that the United States and Canada, took former colonies of ours, didn't take it, and yet you look at South America with the exceptions of a couple of countries and which are Portuguese and Spanish Empire,

and yet they all love football. It's a good question. I actually also think about South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, also compared to how good they are other sports in football massive underperformance, right? And India, you would say as well. Yeah.

So, I mean, there are exceptions. I think there's different reasons for each of those. North America, I think, is a really interesting an example because they actually do set up, tried to set a professional league in the 1880s, and it just doesn't work. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. So one is, if you look at England,

why does England get the league, it gets, I mean, the league is set up in 88 and that has remained the league through to today with minor sort of tweaks. And actually, Britain or England is the right size. And so it's exactly the same as our newspaper industry.

Why do we have 13 competing national newspapers? It's because to get from London to Glasgow or to the Highlands or to Cornwall, you can put newspapers on the train, they'll be there in six hours. So you can print them at 10pm on the Saturday night, they'll be there on the Sunday morning.

It's very simple. And that leads to competition, which leads to sensationalism. It raises the level. 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. They take a train. Maybe it takes six hours, seven hours.

They can play the game. They can't be tired when they get there. You look at results in the 1890s, a way teams tend to do quite badly because they're knackered, but you can have a league. Whereas you try and do that in the US, and it's just too big. So what happens is you get games,

in the northeast and New York State, Philadelphia, New Jersey, football's quite big there, but they can't really spread it to the rest of the country. And you get little pockets springing up, but they're never integrated. And that means you can never get the sort of crowds you get in England, and therefore you never make money. And so you never get that, it's much harder to develop that professional game. Also you have an issue with the US universities that Harvard and Yale, you know, and Yale, you sort of lead the way, they growing much prefer rugby, which actually is not untrue in the UK

in the 1870s. So you look at when the FA Cup begins in 1872. One of the reasons for that is the football to try and strike back against rugby, which the rugby football union, which is an offshoot from football. It has more clubs affiliated to it in the 1870s than football does. The FA Cup helps to spread the game. In the US, uh, hard. David Yale very much prefer rugby. It seems to be that they see it as being more manly, more, more masculine, more sort of fitting to their ideal of what an athlete should be. And then what they do, and this is something that just happens in American sport throughout

time, they start to change it. And so they take the laws of rugby and they turn them into American football. And you see that when they, the various attempts to set up a soccer league, there's another attempt to set a professional league. in 1920s and then you get the NASL from 1966 onwards, and they can't help themselves. It'd just tinker with it. Oh, we don't like drawers.

We'll have panicky shootouts. Or we'll have sudden death overtime. Our offside seems a bit complicated, so we'll change that. Oh, you can't be offside from a free kick. And FIFA, the governing body of football, says you can't do that. The Americans do do that. FIFA take action against them. They go off and off.

And I don't know why Americans do that. And Canada is obviously, it's always North American sport, rather than just the US sport. So I think they're sort of two of the reasons. I think there was a problem trying to start professional league there because baseball already had sort of colonised the summer and the winter in the north-east for the US is much harsher than the winter in Britain.

So you can't really play games when you've got six feet of snow. A hostility to what's perceived as being an alien game that American football, I think even if it has American in science, People trying to prove their American-ness will play that rather than again, for instance, there's a lot of Scottish immigrants. Keeney in New Jersey is sort of the real early hotbed because two Scottish textile companies are factories there and the Scottish workers they bring in, playing football in St Louis, you get the Irish Church, which is bizarre because in Ireland they weren't playing football, they're playing Gaelic games. But the Irish Church, Catholic Church, introduces football to try and raise the, I mean, the Irish Church, I mean,

the Publiot, the 13th, 1890s encyclical de Leon Noirum, which tries to raise a level of the working classes. One of the things it says is we should get them playing sport, so they're in a physically better condition, which is a huge inspiration to Jules Rime, probably the best President Pfefe ever had, the man who sets up the World Cup in 1930, I think it's a similar motivation to introduce sport,

introduce football in St. Louis from the church, but it's seen as, oh, that's an Irish game. It's not an American game. And this is a problem in America all the way through, So the first professional league, well, the first professional league is, you know, is how it gets going. The second one in the 1920s collapses post-Wall Street crash 1933. And when it starts up again, what you notice is all the teams are ethnic teams. It's Philadelphia Ukrainians.

It's German-Americans. It's Irish-Americans. So they're sort of circumscribed to small immigrant groups. This is something the NASL, which is the attempt to have a national league in the late 60s and 70s. They actually outlaw ethnic names for teams until the moment to which the team from Toronto goes bankrupt and Toronto Croatia go, well, we'll buy them, but we're calling them Toronto Croatia. And they end up winning NSLE in, I think, 1976. Wow. I mean, that's so interesting because when you look at the global game, I think one of the things that we kind of forget as football fans is we look at football and we don't realize, you know, how it must have started as a very small game.

So when did it explode in popularity? When did it go from just being a pastime or a game that people played with their mates to actually becoming a national obsession in the UK? So in the UK, I think you can say the FA Cup 872, which is the first or knockout tournament that there is, that is a massive driver.

And then over the two decades that follow, it really takes off. And it takes off because of working class adoption of it. So there were working class clubs. They just weren't particularly organized on a national level. You'd have local tournaments. And to be honest, they're not very well documented.

It's quite hard to find out what happened in those games. But you get from the 1880s working class clubs from the North starting to enter the FA Cup and starting to win the FA Cup, playing in quite a different way. They're much more direct, they're much more aggressive, and much more physical. They're much more focused on winning rather than playing the right way, which is still part of that sort of university public school ideal.

And then because of the factories act, because from 1850 onwards in England, or in the UK, you have Saturday afternoon as well as Sunday off. What do you do on the Saturday afternoon? You finish work at the shipyard or in the mine or in the factory, pick up your pay packet. Well, it's going to have a couple of pints. Oh, let's go and watch the football.

And so people start to pay to watch the football, and suddenly you get people thinking, hang on, we can make money here. And then you get local business owners, particularly in the north, well, almost exclusively in the north, to an extent in the Midlands, saying, well, A, I can make money from this, but B, this is a great way to make my work as happy if they go to the club that I own, that I'm funding, and that club is winning things, that enhances my status.

And that's why you see the big early clubs, the successful early clubs, are Sondland, Aston Billa, Everton, Newcastle, Liverpool, the Sheffield clubs. They are working class clubs, and, you know, Sondland's a great example. It's owned by a mine owner and a shipyard owner, and they are going scouting in Scotland.

They're using the Sunland's geographical proximity to Scotland to go and basically steal players from Scottish teams where the professional game is not as established and then offer them more money, bring them down to Sunland. And so Sondland's win the league in 1894-5, they go and play hearts with the Scottish champions in the first sort of championship of the world and all 22 players on the pitch in that game are Scottish.

Really? And Sunnand also had two players injured, who would have played, who were also Scottish. But the Sunnard team is entirely Scottish imports. So this idea of sort of importing players is there right from the start. But you know, the league starts 1888. And the league really starts because it's a way of getting guaranteed fixtures, and guaranteed fixtures guarantee you the money from the crowds. So by the 1890s, you're getting regular crowds of 15,000, 20,000 for games.

And then it spreads pretty quickly, especially in Denmark. Denmark is sort of the first foreigner. Austria-Hungary. Again, it's spread by the oldest team in Vienna is called First Vienna, and it was founded by Scottish Gardners on the Rothschilder estate. There's a guy called Edward Shires, who was a clerk at a typewriter factory in Manchester, who aged 17, this is in the 1890s, he thinks, I'm going to go and seek my fortune in Europe. He goes to Paris, ends up, he becomes a rep selling, he's in tennis equipment in Vienna, and he sort of becomes the the bloke who really introduces football on a big scale to Vienna, then leaves the Budapest,

and it takes it with him there. What you see after the First World War, there's four countries where it really takes off, which are Austria, Hungary, Uruguay, Argentina. And what's interesting is all four are urbanising rapidly, they're all industrialising rapidly, but they're all urbanising around one centre, essentially to Budapest, Vienna, Mondevedo, Buenos Aires. And it turns out that provides the perfect conditions for the development of players. that the vacant lots of a growing city is if you want to give kids the best,

in those days, before you have proper coaching, the best chance of becoming good footballers, that's where you put them. And in Central Europe, these spaces become, well, in both, they become very romanticised. In Central Europe, they're called Grunt. In South America, they're called Potreras. And, you know, players from a grunt, player from a Patreiro are the sort of celebrated players of both those cultures. And what was the culture around?

football like in the early days because it was interesting for me that my first encounter with football in this country coming from a kind of Soviet Union background where football was kind of almost as much of religion as I think it is here in a way but there was a very different culture as I experienced because I think my first memory was England getting knocked out in the semi-final of the 1996 euros which you know sad your country gets knocked out but but then they were like people smashing German cars up in the streets of London, which to me I was just like, I don't understand why they would do that. But then as I learned more about the culture of football in this country, it was actually kind of on brand, right? Yeah, in fact, the Russian student was stamped somewhere in the South Coast because they thought he was German.

Right. So why did that happen? Is that that a question? Well, no, what I'm asking is the fact that by the 90s, the England football scene in particular has a reputation. for violence, hooliganism, etc. Was that the case from the beginning

or was that a more modern development? I mean, football violence was definitely there from the start. I think anywhere where you get a big mass of people who are all emotionally invested in something, there is the potential for violence.

Men especially, we largely are men, so yeah, yeah, it's true, yeah. So the 905 Sunni Castle Derby, for instance, a police horse got stabbed amid rioting. Police horse? Yeah.

Was a police horse got punched by Castle Farm. I just bunch of horses. Well, he's disappointed. He's a Sunderland fan, the horse. Capitalism is evil. You hear that all the time these days.

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And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. But in terms of the more organized sort of what we call hooligans and now, that's sort of a phenomenon of the 60s. I mean, the sort of real moral panic around that begins You can actually date very precisely It happens in November, 1964, there's a game between Evan and Leeds

Sandy Brown and Evan defender is sent off in the fourth minute of the game By the 10th minute the referees had to take both teams off to kind of to cool everybody down But the real trigger for the sort of postponement of the game They're sort of, I think about 20 minutes or something there's a Everton player goes down Concust The Leeds Physio is helping him out

And the Leeds Fisorze is getting pelted with coins And missiles by Everton fans And so that's when the rest says right Come on let's go off let's calm this down And you see the papers over that weekend And the following week In this huge model of panic About both on-field and off-field behaviour

I think it's partly related to the youth culture Of the 60s, partly related to People kicking against the establishment partly related to youth culture. I mean, you talk about 96. Ninety-six is really the tail end of the worst of English violence. I mean, there's some flow-ups in the World Cup in 98. There's been isolated things since.

But really, it's the 80s, the 85 is when it reaches its head. And I think partly is just to do with the age, the reason it's slowed down is people going at games are much older. And all the sort of talk about, oh, it's CCTV, it's better policing. Yeah, I'm sure they play their part. but actually it's just the tickets are really expensive so the people who go are old and they don't have that sort of wildness

the teenagers are. Is it really fair to say I mean you said the violence comes with large groups of people who really care about something? I was going to rugby games in the 1990s and it was a totally different atmosphere. What's interesting to me as well is you look at Russia today and other countries today actually that football violence

and who has become extremely common like the Russian ultras and the Italian ultras and all the others are pretty hardcore. It's almost like they've outdone the master. Oh, they have, absolutely. And there's a self-conscious aping of, I know, some of the clashes in year 2016 between Russian fans and England fans. Some of it, I think, probably was to an extent, state-sponsored. I mean, there's no proof of that, but the indication is that the Russian fan groups were incredibly well-organized,

and the fact they were taking videos of everything and posting them in, you know, delightedly, I think there's a real suggestion of this is very organized in a way that, to be honest, Englishism was never that organized. It was always quite organic. But there was also some just sort of complete sort of category errors. Russian fans, you know, beating up England fans to steal their flag. Well, that's what we did in the 70s. Stealing the flag was in the same way that, you know, Roman Legion would try and steal the

banner of another Legion. When the people you're stealing the flag from, they're just sort of, you're a 245-old accountants of Norwich. They'd probably given it to, if you asked. Right. guess what I'm getting at is, is there something particular about football? Because I'll be honestly, I remember even in the 2000s going to Chelsea games, I lived in London at the time. And there were times when I felt like I was not sounds like a really kind of Gen Z, a millennial thing to say.

But I was genuinely uncomfortable being there. The level of vitriol, particularly if the team was losing or, you know, I remember one game against Everton. I was in Everton supporter in the Chelsea stands and I was not going to let anybody know that I was happy about what was happening on the pitch remotely because it felt like that. I go to American football games in America. I go to NBA games. I've been to cricket, rugby, all sorts of things. You never see anything like it. So I guess what I'm getting at is there something particular about football that attracts this? Yes, and the answer is complicated. So I think, and this is almost a slightly romanticised answer that I'm slightly cautious about saying this. But there isn't a

extent to which... Well, in fact, no, this isn't over-remant. So this is actually what I think. It's the link to violence that I think is over-romanticized. So I think the football club provides an identity for people who otherwise lack one. And I would include myself in that.

I'm from Sondland. When do we see Sondland on the national news? When do we see... When there's a riot? When there's a riot? And the fascinating thing there, I mean, this is another stage removed. How many people doing the rioting war football shirts how many people doing the cleanup war football shirts

and both trying to say this is actually the real sort of you know we are expressing our Sondlandness and we're consciously adopting the uniform of Sondland to say that I am somehow representative of Sondland whether I'm rioting or whether I'm

cleaning up. Either way you come to the same conclusion that the football club is the way that the city projects itself and I think actually Sondland the football club is pretty conscious of that and pretty good at it. I think some clubs find it very awkward. I guess

it kind of depends what the people who are projecting the club as the identity, what they believe in, as to whether the club can sort of go along with that or not. But I think particularly, I mean this is very much a British answer, but from post-industrial northern British cities,

particularly the one club cities, the football club is the most representative element of that city. So you see when London and Newcastle, Leeds, play at Wembley, their fans will take over to Falgastro or Covent Garden. And that's a gesture of, we are still here, don't forget us. And so I think that sense of fighting for an identity, however misguided the violent aspect may be, I think that is very real and very true.

There's also, I think this is particularly true in South America, I think it's true in Italy. I honestly don't know the case in Russia. It's often co-opted by organised crime. That's big in Russia So in South America, particularly certainly in Argentina The various barris, as they call there, the ultra groups, the Hulican groups

They will be organized crime And they will Can be as simple as So charging the parking around the stadium It could be gambling on the game, it could be merchandise Or it can be much more sinister stuff To do with running drugs You saw it in Yugoslavia

And again, this is slightly over-romanticized But equally, if you were want muscle on the street, who were the people who are used to taking over the street, used to fighting with police, who are disciplined? It's the ultra-groups. And so Arkhan, the warlord, Söbram Loshavich, puts him in charge of the Zerner-Svester ultras, the Red Star Ultras, the De Lear. I mean, essentially to kind of calm them down and discipline them, but then they become a fighting force, and they are at least complicit and probably guilty of many of the atrocities during the Civil War.

Equally, the Bad Blue Boys, they used the English name, the Danamo Zagreb fans were a very organized force. If you go to the Maximir Stadium in Zagreb, there's a statue of them, what do you call it, the inscription underneath, says something about

our fans marching off to war. And there are people from both the Delia and the bad blue boys who would see a riot at the Maximeer, at a Ther-Zarreb, Zer's the game, in 1990 as the first battle of the war. I think they're massively over-remantitizing that, but

equally, it is true that those two sides did go off and they did fight. And Jonathan, I want to explore a little bit the relationship between hooliganism, politics, but also racism, because so I'm from South London and I grew up, I was born in 82.

And when I was a little boy, you know, if you, there were, there were certain fans who had a notorious reputation, Millwall was one. And, particularly at Millwall and West Ham and Chelsea to certain extent, you would get people handing out an NF leaflets, and that's the National Front. That's a far-right organisation in the UK at the time, which no longer exists.

But that was open, wasn't it? And then they were associated with hooligans as well. Yeah, I mean, that was very much, I think an 80s thing. I think it's actually, there have been odd elements of it, but it's actually, I think it's striking how little traction the racist far-right has made in football. So the Football Lads Alliance was the thing four or five years ago disappeared.

I don't know what's going on with it now. So I think there were attempts to harness that. You absolutely see racist abuse of players after games. But I think that's a... I mean, it's not a downplay significance, but I think it's more ad hoc thing. I don't think it's like the National Front. So, yeah, I mean, this, I guess,

is another one of what you're asking about the violence. Certain clubs and certain fan groups at certain clubs attract a representative. for violence or for racist beliefs. And so people rally to them who have no connection with the club, but they think, actually, I quite enjoy it. I mean, that's the thing that a lot of people don't get about colonialism. People just, a lot of people just enjoy it.

Why do they do it? Because for them, that's fun. They enjoy the rush of it. Or, you know, if you feel a particular affinity to a far-right politics and you think, yeah, actually I want to join this group that's going to take a more sort of direct action, as it were. that would draw you to particular clubs and particular particular fan groups.

I mean, the North East is the area I know much better. And you had a very bizarre situation that on New Year's Day, 985, Sondland played Newcastle in a derby, madness about New Year's Day. I don't know why they thought that was a good idea. Newcastle win 3-1, and Sondland's two black players are both sent off,

having been horrifically racially abused through the game. And overnight, Sondland became an anti-racist club. and that wasn't to do with people suddenly kind of thinking oh you know what we should be more tolerant oh yeah actually I was wrong what I thought yesterday it was hang on Newcastle a racist therefore we're anti-racist and suddenly then had a Gary Bennett

who was a black captain who remained when it comes from his popular players and I'm sure it was because they'd seen two of their black players sent off and it was an anti-Nakastal gesture rather than a pro sort of tolerant all those together, Jesse. Yeah, because you see within the Italian ultras,

which I find fascinating. Number one, the fact that a lot of footballers talk about this, if the team is going through a particularly rough patch, the head ultra then demands a meeting with the captain, and that's just seen as acceptable. So that number one is mind-boggling. And number two, particularly in Italy, you see the links between certain fascist groups and ultras,

and they kind of open about, they're fascism really. Yeah, absolutely. And it depends club by club. So, I mean, Lazio have a reputation of being very far right. Livorno have a reputation of being very far left. I'm not saying all Lazio fans are massively far right or all Lovano fans are massively far left. But their ultra groups identify in that way. And that's absolutely true.

And I guess that has its roots probably in Mussolini and street violence and street gangs. That sort of culture permeates through in football is now where it finds its expression. And they are very powerful in it today. I remember going to see Palermo play with Dien. Inanez in Palermo. And the moment the game was over, you could see the captain of Palermo immediately ran over to the ultras specifically. I don't know. I'm like he kind of had to and probably did.

Yeah. And it's a, I think from the outside, it's a very odd phenomenon. And you have it in Argentina as well. I think Argentina has changed. In the 80s, it was very much about we want our team to win football matches. And now it's about making money from the drug sideline. But you have instances of when Maradona went back to Bocca in the 90s

and the Ultras invaded Bokka's training base after the series of bad results to sort of, I guess, logic is it will intimidate the players and the playing better which I'm not sure the sports psychology would suggest it's the best way they do. But you have like, Maradona literally having to talk down the Ultras going, no, hang on, this is not helping

kind of, you know, I was 17-year-left back who's terrified just to play a match in front of the fans is not going to play better because he'd threaten to cut his throat if we don't win next Wednesday. Yeah, because it's that very famous clip of Gascoigne scoring. I think it may have been his, Paul Gascoen, he was a legendary England football hero of mine, scoring in the Rome Derby for Lazio. It was 1-0 to Roma, he scored, and then he went absolutely mental when he scored,

and so did the players, and they went, that must have been Joy, Paul, and he said something along, no, that was relief. because he was, him and the rest of the players were genuinely worried that if they lost in the Rome Derby at home, that they were going to get lynched before they left the stadium. Yeah, I know it's a very, very strange thing. And also, you know, it's especially in South America, the fan groups get involved in transfers.

So there's a story of Marcel Bielsa, yeah, legendary coach. Great Argentinian coach. People in England probably known best from his time at Leeds. But when he was at Newells, one of the two big Rosario clubs, with a particularly sort of hardcore support, a fan group, a delegation went around to sort of berate him about some tactical decision made in the game.

And he had a live hand grenade by his door that as soon as he opened his door to them, he picked up a hand grenade, put his teeth around the pins, and sort of said, go away or else I'm pulling this out, and we'll all die. And they were like, okay, you're madder than us, we're bye, sorry. That's an incredible story. And you mentioned you keep referring to the money side of it, that's obviously changed dramatically.

Even within our lifetimes, but I mean, obviously before, you know, in the 60s, people weren't being paid really much more than normal person, right? Well, 963 was when the maximum wage ends. Maximum wage is 20 pounds a week for an English football. Right. Now, 20 pounds was a bit more than it is now, but still, they were not getting paid loads. No, it was sort of a normal working class wage. Maybe a slightly better than an average working class wage. Right. To the point now where the top players are making tens of millions a year,

they're making more in a week, many of them, than the ordinary person will make in a year. How does that happen? Well, I mean, that's quite a complicated question as well. But maximum wage, when it was introduced in 901, is actually, I think, it comes from exactly the right motives. So the Victorians are very smart about this. The Victorians realize, if you set up a league,

If a team wins, it will get more fans. If it gets more fans, it gets more money. If it gets more money, it buys better players. If it gets better players, it's going to win again. So you're creating a monopoly situation. And they think, this is terrible. The league, what we're selling, if you think this as a product, we're selling competition between teams.

So it's not like a normal business. And this is one of the mistakes people made, one of the mistakes I think pretty much every country has made in British law makes is treating sport as if it's a normal business. It's not. Because what you're selling is competition between two clubs. And once that becomes imbalanced, the product becomes less attractive. So you have to maintain that balance. So the idea of the maximum wage is, if we cap the amount players can make,

that means that me, the big club, can't go to you, the little club, and say, we'll take your centre forward because we're going to pay him what you're paying plus 50%. So I think it comes from the right motives. Very quickly, it becomes a tool of oppression for the players who are sort of saying, hang on, there's 50,000 people here, and I'm getting four quid a week. How does that work? And so that's why eventually after a series of court cases it's lifted in 1963. And I imagine television is a big part of it as well, because now it's not 50,000, it's a million people that I can't.

Yeah, and so there's basically two big changes happen post-that. So one is the coming of television. So in England, you can say match for a day starts 1964, so just after the maximum wage is lifted, which doesn't bring in very much money. But by the time you're getting regular live coverage by the 90s, broadcast rights are enormous. And then foreign rights on top of that. So I think there's a 7.6 billion, the rights deal for the Premier League. And that pertains up to 2003 when Ronald Bramich arrives at Chelsea. And suddenly you've got somebody who's taking over the club

who is not interested in profit and is not interested in just doing what's right for Blackburn Rovers or Wolframand and Wanderers or whatever his local team happens to be. But has motives that are, to be honest, pretty hard to discern. But money doesn't matter to him. He can pump in whatever money he wants, whether that's just because he likes football or whether there is some sort of soft power directive behind that. And, I mean, Arsenal, I think,

the great example of the club who get caught up in that, that Arsenal have been challenging Manchester United through the 90s. They're the big two teams in England. Arsenal Stadium, Highbury had a capacity that was 38,000. Yeah. Manchester United. So roughly, Arsett's capacity is half of Manchester United's. So even if they're getting roughly the same TV money,

United has a huge advantage in terms of gate receipts in terms of corporate possibilities. So Arsenal then blow the bank on building a new stadium. It's an amazing new stadium. Well, it's not new now, but an amazing stadium. It's exactly the right economic logic, except by the time it's built, suddenly those economics don't work anymore, and you have to have this billionaire owner, be he an oligarch, estate, or private equity,

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Get started today at IPVanish.com slash audio and take control of your privacy. privacy with IP vanish. Well, on that, actually, you bring up a question that I've been saving because I didn't want to offend you straight away. But I'm a big fan of American sports. And one of the things they do, as you know, incredibly well, is they have a draft system, which means that younger players, A, have to get an education, which is good because most players don't make it. And so you force them to get a degree and whatever.

But then what it also does is there's a salary cap, obviously. and if you overspend other teams get the fine that you pay on this distributed evenly, you basically do not get these decade-long periods of domination by one or two teams. And actually, it all gets rotated around. So the Chicago Bulls, it were great under Michael Jordan, haven't been great since. The Lakers, you know, they go through their periods, the Celtics. The big market teams still tend to come out on top, but it's not like anything like what you have in football. And then the other thing is I have to, my grandfather used to piss the hell out.

You pissed me off so much when I was a kid because I used to be a big football fan. And he would always say to me, Constantine, football is really not that good of sport. I mean, look at basketball, look at American football. They're so entertaining. And it's true, American football is all geared towards maximum performance in like bite-sized chunks. Whereas with football, you might be watching people just run around the pitch for about 70 minutes and nothing happens. Do you think football is a better sport? Do you think it merits its global dominance?

Well, there's two different issues here. So let's deal with the second one first. And I think that depends entirely what your personal preference is. I like the fact there aren't many goals in football. And I like it for two reasons. One is the explosion of emotion when you score is way greater than, you know, if it's finishing 110, 108, then how do you get that excited about any one point? Whereas if it finishes 1-0, that's an incredibly exciting moment.

And also... Can you finish this 0-0? That can also be exciting. I'm kidding. But you also have the opportunity in football for the weaker team to set out to stop the better team. And I would say maybe in 20% of the games, the weaker team is able to stop the stronger team.

There's obviously a limit. And that is one of the beauties of football, that it's not just about the best team winning. It's about strategising and give yourself a best chance to getting the best possible result. And you can be, well, the day we're recording this is the day after Grimsby beat Manchester United. I suppose you can make a case that Manchester Island

are no longer better than Grimsby, but still, a fourth-flight team, beating a top-flight team, I'm not sure any other sport in which that can happen. And that is a very good thing. The first point I think is more interesting. And I don't know what my answer would be if I hadn't grown up within a British model.

But the British model is, you play sport at your local club and your local club cater to its local community and it can enter competitions and it can grow and if it keeps growing and if it keeps getting more popular

it keeps getting more members and keeps getting more money and maybe you can start to pay people to play for them it can enter the pyramid and it can go all the way up in theory can go all the way up to the top and so that club is very representative

of its local community and that is a tiny fraction of clubs who can do that but the clubs are all joined in this mass pyramid and you have social sport for people who want it and you can pick your level. You can play at any level from being the highest level of professional

to being the level of club cricketer that I was. You can be hopeless out, but if you want to do it, you can do it. In the US, professional sport is not based on that pyramid. It's not based on clubs that are very much rooted in their community. It's based on franchises and it's based on making money from me off. And if you look at the history of the NASL, franchises are changing all the time. Oh, hang on, the LA Gatos have become a Miami Taurus overnight and they move from... How do you support that team when suddenly they're playing 3,000 miles away with entirely different cast of players?

So, if you want a closed system with no promotion of relegation, then, yeah, you can put in place all these controls, all these caps. It's designed to make money for the owners, which maybe that's... Maybe you see sport purely as a product to be sold. If you see it as having a community value and as representing its community and of providing facilities at some level for the most hopeless players, but I would prefer the European model. So they're just two different models. The other problem about Clare's model is you have no relegation.

So if you have a bad start of the season, that's it, it's over. Whereas at least in European leagues or South American leagues, you're fighting into relegation. It's not something to play for it. Well, in fact, sorry, Francis, just to, in fact, in a closed system like the US one, you're actually heavily incentivized to perform badly once you've, it's clear you're not going anyway, because then you'll probably get, you'll get the best chance of having the best players from next year's draft.

And the draft has become a major problem for US soccer because if their players finish their university education, great, they've got a degree, brilliant, they're 21. If you're an English player in the same position, you've been playing since you're 16, 17, You've got four or five years of high-level experience. That's not going to work for football because there's a global market for football, whereas for the NBA and the NFL, that's not really an issue. Exactly. I mean, it can only work.

Maybe that's why the tweaks of the laws introduced to whatever games they took up in the 19th century made sense on a local level, but it makes it very hard to integrate. And I think you see with women's soccer, I think you're seeing the US approaching a crisis point because they were dominant for a long time. So you have legislation in 1971, I think. think, early 70s anyway, that says you have to have equal opportunity in all things in universities for men and women. In practice, what that means is because there are no women's American football teams and because they're incredibly costly, the American football team takes

almost all the funding from men's sport. The women's sport have this funding that can distribute much more freely. They invest in soccer. Their soccer programs become very good. And so by the mid-70s, they're producing high numbers of highly accomplished women's soccer players, and so America becomes the dominant power. Now that Europe is beginning to catch up, it's benefiting from the fact that you have an English league, a Spanish league, a Dutch league, an Italian league, a Swedish league, a Danish league, also competing with each other, you're getting best practice, and they are now catching the US, and the US has got this problem that they're not developing teenage players,

they're developing 21-year-old players who were already four or five years behind their development by the time they hit professional level. I also think as well fan culture in European leagues, particularly in the English League, is just far superior to American, right? They've gone no banter, is what I'm saying. But that's a cultural thing. It's not to do with football. No, it's terrible.

You go there, you go, let's go, let's go. I went to an LA Dodgers game, and I looked at my friend, because I went to the game with him, I went, is this the best you can do? In West Ham, we stand up, and we sing to the Liverpool fans, stand up if you've got a job. You know, it's, but there's a genuine thing there that I love about it, which is the humor element, the fan culture. It's something very unique to English football, and I think is what makes English football so special. Yeah, I would agree with that up to a point. I think again, I've just spent about 40 minutes talking about hooliganism, which is the flip side of this coin.

Yeah, but one other thing, and I'm very conscious, again, this is the environment I grew up in. When I go to, say, Germany or Italy, you see, see the ultras and it's great, they make noise, they keep going, and it's all pre-programmed. They're not reacting to the game at all. And when you see it for 30s, you say, you say, God, that's amazing. And then, you know, 10 minutes ago, hang on, but you haven't, there's a really bad foul there. You should have been booing that. The referee's never going to be intimidated unless, and English fans or British fans react

to the game. And I think the humour of it, I think, is a big thing that, okay, a lot of it's quite formulaic, but within the formulae, sometimes you get the, very good jokes, that relate to things that have happened in the game or things have happened in the past week. And that's spontaneity, I think, is something, it's not that common. But when it happens, it's a great thing. And, yeah, that's, yeah, it's that more organic feel to it, that it's, this is not prescripted. It's not everybody sets out for flares after 43 minutes or whatever.

It's, you allow the game, you have a sort of a symbiotic relationship between the game and the fans. even to the point where there was a it must be what 10, 11 years ago now when an evident surge against relegation begins with a bad challenge

by Phil Neville because suddenly everybody gets up because he's put in a huge challenge and that atmosphere changes to the nature of that game and they end up getting a point or getting a win that they weren't going to get and they then get points in the next half dozen games and they stay up and that I think

I mean maybe it's just because it's what I'm used to but I think that is a good thing yeah and would It's really interesting, particularly football across our lifetime. Look, you can say the first celebrity footballer was a Manchester United player, George Best, who was dubbed the Fifth Beetle, and, you know, he was cool, he had a rock style, good looks, and he was an incredible footballer, arguably one of the best of all time. But then you've just seen footballers just ascend to the point where they now arguably

some of the most famous people in the world. Like, I would say Lionel Messi is, what, top 10 famous people or Cristiana Ronaldo? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Or, I mean, even scale it down a bit, go out in the street, pick a random person, say, name 20 Brazilians, and you're getting 19 footballers, minimum. I mean, all due respecter, nobody's saying, Clavisoros Respecter. And why is that? Why has suddenly football become footballers, certain footballers transcended the sport and become celebrities? I don't even think it's certain footballers.

I think all footballers. I think all footballers are famous. So, I mean, I'll give you a concrete example of this. In 2015, I was in Ethiopia. I was in Lala Bella, where the rock churches are. And it was when Marino was falling apart at Chelsea. Chelsea were playing Liverpool that day, in the lunchtime kickoff. I went for lunch, and the owner of the restaurant I went to,

she was a Scottish woman, she was a Motherwell fan, she distributed Motherwell kits to local kids, which actually was a little bit weird, seeing local kids walking around in Motherwell shirts. And I got talking to her, and I said, where can I watch this, you know, the Chelsea Liverpool game today? Oh, look, the restaurant manager will be going. So just wait for him when he's finished his shift.

He'll take you to this cafe where they've got a screen. Okay, great. So we go at this cafe, paid the 10 beer or whatever to get in. And there's 200 people in this room watching this TV, massively engaged, know what they're talking about, very educated audience, they clearly watch a lot of football. And then the rest of the one just says, do you want to come watch Swansea Arsenal later this afternoon?

I'm, yeah, okay. We'll go to a proper local's place. And it's sort of a muddy bank. They've hammered benches into the bank. There's screens at the front. There's a tarpaulin over top. It's five periods. It's half the price of a cafe.

And everybody is watching, there's 500 people there, watching this game. And he said, oh, you know, there's five places like this, plus a couple more cafes. And I worked out. There's something like 40% of the adult male population of that village in rural Ethiopia are watching the Premier League on any given Saturday. I don't know if you come across David Goldblatt, great football historian. So he wrote a book called The Age of Football. And he tells the story of a village in Uganda, remote village.

where nobody really bothered with time. You know, they get up when the sun comes up, we go to bed when the sun goes down, they move a cattle about according to the seasons, that's it, that's their lifestyle. And then suddenly everybody starts getting watches, and the reason is, they know the football kicks off at 4pm or whatever,

and so they need to know when it's 4pm, so then go back to watch it. It's the cultural phenomenon of the Premier League. I mean, you know, the very ball question of why does football matter? It matters now, because it is the most popular cultural phenomenon there has ever been.

The number of people who watch the Premier League is extraordinary. I push back on that. I don't think it's football. I think the World Cup and we're going to talk about the World Cup because you wrote a great book about it.

But I think it's the Premier League. I don't see people doing the same for, I don't know, Gathe v. Sevilla or Livorno versus Udine. Yeah, that's true. The Premier League is definitely the world. I mean, I think in South America or Spanish-speaking South America,

maybe La Liga does still dominate. But yeah, the Premier League has been marked exceptionally well, exceptionally cleverly. I think you've got to give Richard Scudimore, the first CEO, the Premier League, huge credit that initially he effectively gave away the foreign rights because he wanted it to be. If you go into a bar or a cafe, whether you're in China or Nigeria or Canada, it'll be on. And then people start watching it, people become engaged in it. And David Goldbott's most recent book, Injury Time, he says, he makes the point that football is now, the Premier League is now the world soap opera.

And he points out that in 2001, it was a Liverpool-Bassalona game, it was the day that EastEnders, BBC soap opera, revealed who had shot Phil Mitchell, one of the biggest characters. And they persuaded Eufa to delay kickoff in this game by 10 minutes, so we could have a 10-minute extended East Enders

so we could find out who'd shot Phil Mitchell. And EOFA agreed. And yet, in, I think it was 2019, there was, East Enders was cancelled entirely to show an ethical fifth round game because football has now become bigger than the soap operas. In the old days

soap stars are on the front page of the tabloids all the time. Now it's footballers. Football of the Premier League is the world soap opera. And Francis mentioned the World Cup. You've obviously got a great book out about it. I remind everybody the title so they can go and grab a copy. It's called The Power and the Glory. And one of the things that

many, many people I think will say very often is, I'm not really a football fan, but I watch it when the World Cup is on. And if sport is ritualized combat, which I've always thought it is, especially team sport, then the World Cup really is the epitome of that, isn't it? Teams from countries coming together and fighting it out for who's top dog. Yeah, absolutely. And you see that right from the start, right from 1930 when it begins, that is true.

Julesa Rimo, who is the FIFA president who sets up the World Cup, he thinks football will encourage fraternity among nations. I would say by 1934, and Mussolini's got his hands on it, it's already true. That's not going to happen. But, yeah, if you look at, say, the Indian-Argentina relationship in football, it's a, even before the Falklands, there's a sort of Oedipal relationship there, that, okay, Argentina was never part of the empire, but was part of the informal empire, but Britain essentially ran the economy there from 1870 through to 1910,

for sake of easy numbers. There's a sense, when they first started playing friendlies in the 1950s, of being people against Master. By 86, when they're playing a very violent World Cup quarterfinal, a hugely controversial game, that's full on sort of, we have to beat the Quasar Colonial Power. Or look at when Senegal played France

in the opening game in the 2002 World Cup. How can you see that as anything other than the colonised against the coloniser? Yeah, and that's what I love about the World Cup, is that you watch the teams, and the teams actually, sort of embody the stereotypes that you give their countries. You know, you look at the Japanese fans,

who I would argue are the most beautiful fans in terms of behavior. They literally clean up after themselves. And they show Japanese players after they leave the dressing room. The dressing room looks immaculate. Yeah, is that bit performative? I don't know.

Maybe. Well, switch the other way. I mean, the Argentines, who Frances, his mother's from Venezuela, so he knows Latin America pretty well. He always says the Argentinians are the English of South America, I universally hated.

And one of the things, I don't know if this is a stereotype, but they do have a reputation for being kind of, you know, dirty as players, dirty as a team. Is that a fair assessment? Yes. Yeah, probably. But even that's quite, you know,

that's a fascinating question. And I could talk for an hour on this. You give me two minutes. Yes. So the British retreat tonight. Argentina. And there's a big question in Argentina, this immigrant nation, you know, the indigenous people have essentially been driven off or killed. And so you have this country that's a mix of Spanish, Italians, Arabs, Jews, British, Germans, Irish, French. And they all come

from very different places, very different ideas how you do things. And they suddenly face of this question, once the British get out of, hang on, who are we? What, KSat in Denedinidad? What is it to be Argentinian? And so there's a series of lectures in 1912 in the audio and theatre attended by the president and all this cabinet and, you know, all the great and good of Argentina. And Leopold de Lagunas, the great poet of the age, he gives these lectures on K.S. Agendindindana and he concludes that the spirit of Argentina is to be found in the gauchel, you know, in the sort of lone horseman of the panthers, that that combination of virtuosity but also self-reliance, that is characteristically Argentinian.

It's a romanticised image, but fair enough, the great Argentinian epic poem, Martin Hiro, is about a gaucho. But you then have this issue, Buenos Aires is growing rapidly. Argentina has become a much more urban society. And so by the 1920s, people are starting to say, well, it's all very well to have these big assados and everything becomes dressed as gauchos,

but you are in a city and you do kind of look ridiculous. So Borges is very funny on this. In El Graphical, the great sports magazine, selling over 100,000 copies a week at its peak, based in Buenos Aires. They start to say, well, how do you explain? this gaucho spirit in the city.

And they say, well, the true spirit is actually the Peebe, the urchin, the kid from the street. He's playing on the potreiros, on the vacant lots. And he also has some virtuosity, because he's playing in his games of 15, 20, 25 a side in a small space on a hard and even pitch. He's got to have great ball control, great technique. But he's also got to have self-reliance.

He's got to be street-wise. He's got to be able to look after himself. He's got to be able to use his elbows. And they realise this is in complete contradiction to the British you've taught them a game because they're playing on big grassy pitches in schools. So their game's all about stamina and running. They've got a teacher with a whistle if things get out of hand. There's no teachers with a whistle on the Potreras.

You've got to be able to handle yourself. And so Boricotto, he's actually Uruguayan, but he's a sort of honorary Argentinian. He's the editor of Elgrapher. On 1928, he writes this incredible piece where he says, right, if we were to erect a statue to the spirit of Argentinian football, he would depict a Peabay,

with a shock of dark hair, with his teeth worn down by eating yesterday's bread, and he goes on about how he's got holes in his shirt, he's playing with a ragball, he's not rich enough to have a proper ball, and he's all about the dribble. And the Argentinian word for dribble is gambetar, which is the, it's a gaucho' a gaucher word, meaning the running motion of an ostrich. And the thing is, if he took that description and gave it to somebody without context, said, who is that?

100% of people would say is Maradonna. So 49 years before Maradona makes his international debut, his coming as foretold. And that's why when Maradonna gets there, when he turns up, when they're seeing him in youth competitions, is that this is him. This is Helpebedo, the gold merchant, the Argentinian hero who's coming as has been prophesied. And then, why does the goucho culture come to an end? Comes to an end because the British introduced Barbaya. Once you have Barbemois, you don't need a cowboy. You just put a fence up around your cows. If you look at Argentine newspapers in the 1870s, one of the biggest celebrities is a bull, British bull, called Tarquin.

And the reason Tarquin is surprised is if your cows mate with Tarquin, then they're going to give good meat yield because you can do selective breeding if you've got a fence. If you've just got a cow way, you can't stop the bulls, going with whichever cows they want.

So even if you want to do things the traditional way, if you're a farmer, if you're in Estanciao, and you're trying to do it with the gauchas, you're going to make less money than your neighbour who's put at Barb Waya. So the British have killed the gauchel

And that's why, when Maradona scores his two goals against England in his greatest single performance, 986 World Cup quarterfinal, four years after the Falklands, that's why that is the Gaucho's revenge on England. And look at his two goals. The first one, the cunning of the street kid, the second one, the virtuosity of a street kid. It's the perfect game for Maradonna. And it is this sense of the Gaucho finally getting his own back on the British. I just read a report that Americans are outliving their retirement savings, leaving them in a doomed financial position. That's because their retirement has been set up the same as before, using the old default strategies that haven't changed since the 1970s.

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If you have over $50,000 in your retirement accounts, you need to contact our friends at Augusta Precious Metals. Visit Triggergold.com or text Trigger to 35052 today. Your future self will thank you. Why do you think, and this is quite a leading question, but I firmly believe it to be true. Why is it the majority of the best players are South American? Well, I think it probably is that culture of playing on the streets. I think certainly in terms of forwards, I think that's really valuable to have that.

I realize I didn't fully answer your questions, I'll come back to me, that there is something of a street football which is anarchic, it's individualistic, it's hard to predict. I think players who've grown up on academies can become quite predictable. I think you've seen, for instance, Germany and last sort of 15, 20 years since they overhaul their academy system. They produce loads of great midfielders. They don't produce centre forwards anymore. So I think that learning our own way of playing, I think, is quite important.

And Arsenal, for instance, now, although they've got incredible facilities, they have at least one session a week where they just let the kids play. They don't coach them. I mean, they're doing it on beautiful, astrotters with balls have been properly blown up. So maybe they're not going to develop in the same way. But I think that is why. I think there's also a sense of if you grew up in poverty and football is your way out,

then possibly you are more committed, more ruthless. I remember speaking to Philippeutusier, a French coach who coached a lot in Africa. He was Japan coach between 2000 when I spoke to him, and him saying that he found Japanese football incredibly frustrating because it's technically very good. The players are very disciplined, very obedient. They look after themselves, you know, they're very fit,

but they don't have the hunger in the age that he'd found in African players. So your question about why... There is a saying in the NBA. I can't remember which coach used to say, but you never recruit a player from a two-car garage, from a home with a two-car garage. Yeah, yeah.

So why... Why Argentinian's dirty, Jonathan? So partly it's that self-reliance. But what you see is, this technical skill is really privileged. And Argentine football tennis professional 1931, the Argentine League in the 30s is incredibly well-followed,

huge career. The football's very beautiful, very individualistic. There's all kinds of myths and stories about it. La Machina, the Great River Plate side of the 40s, and massively celebrated. Their famous five-man forward line. You look at it, they hardly win anything. I think I win two of the five championships

when they play together. But they play this beautiful football, and that's what's privileged. Argentina go to the First World Cup in 1930. They lose in the final. In 34, they send the amateur team and lose to Sweden in the first game. They don't go in 38.

They've fallen out with the Brazilians in 1950, and they don't go and they try to say it's because of perinous isolation. They just fell out with the Brazilians, Brazil or host of 1990. They can't afford to send a team to Switzerland in 54. They finally go to the World Cup again in 58. So the first time they send a proper professional team for 28 years. And their football has been incredibly beautiful through this 25, 28 year period.

And they think they're the best in the world. As you suggested, there is a self-confidence about Argentine culture. I don't think that's remotely what I suggested, but well done. 957 they win the South American Championship with this great forward line the Carusukius for Dirty Faces Forward Line so again the Dirty Face side is urchin ideal

Problem is three of those players are sold to Italy before the World Cup and they won't pick them when they're playing in Italy But they get there they brought in Adolfo Pedanero who's been this great play, he's steady nine So he's old, he's overweight But they still say oh he's so skillful That'll be enough

And they get beaten 6'1 by Chekazovacia And immediately they think hang on, this technical beautiful world this doesn't work, we've got to be physical. And this, I think, is something you see repeatedly in Argentinian culture, not just in football, but in everything. Because it's this tabloaza, because it attracts these sort of dreamers,

you get this utopianism, but the flip side of that is cynicism. So you try to build utopia, oh, it's gone wrong, and that's be really cynical. And you can even say the history of coups is like that. Oh, you know, piran, this great work as utah, oh, it's gone wrong, off you go. And that cycle keeps going.

And I think you see it in the football. You get this very sort of bifurcated vision of either the incredible attacking beauty or the incredible cynicism. And those are manifested in two great coaches in Cesar Luis Monotti, who wins to work up with them in 78. He plays the beautiful football. A former communist who wins it under the Hunter, which is very complicated. And Carlos Bilardo, who is this cynical coach. who has Maldonov's team when they win it in 86.

It's even the sort of intellectual culture of Argentina, it loves a theory, so it loves to say, everybody falls on one of these two theories. And of course it's not true. I don't even think Monotti is Minotista. I think he's much more mixed than, but it suits them to come up with these ideals. So it's a whole mixture of where their football culture comes from,

the fact that it's created in contradiction to the British, the intellectual culture of the time, the defeat to Cheggers of Akia in Helsingborg in 1958, violence is legitimized there in a way that it wouldn't be elsewhere. That's really interesting. And speaking of cynicism, one of the things I would argue we've seen particularly in recent decades is a lot of countries that have a desire to impact their image on the world stage have cottoned onto the fact that actually the World Cup is probably the biggest thing that you can possibly

do to affect your image. And so you see Russia and Qatar. I mean, I don't know the details, but I wonder whether those two countries got the World Cup through entirely, you know, above-border methods. Yeah, I think you're not the only one who wonders that. Yeah, I really do wonder that. And it wouldn't surprise me if it was the case. Well, I mean, look at the Exco who voted on the 24-person Excoe and...

Executive Committee. Executive Committee in those days voted on who got the World Cup. And I think it's 15 of the 24, have been convicted of corruption. Others have died before in a trial. They are not a... They're not the most upstanding group of people. No, no, clearly not. And so I guess what I was going to ask is, it inevitably, anything with power, it's like the ring of power, it corrupts and it becomes used by corrupt people and politicians and countries.

What do you make of the inevitable infusion of politics and geopolitics into the World Cup? Well, I think it's always been there. So why do you, I want to host in 1930? In part, it's because they've won the Olympics in 24 and 28. They know they're really good at it. And they think this is, you know, they recognize that suddenly people recognize Uruguay as a country in its own right, not just a province of Argentina. Uruguay winning the Olympic football in 24 and 28 is a big thing for Uruguay self-projection into the world. So how do you magnify that?

You host the First World Cup. It happens to be 100 years, you know, happens to be the centenary of Uruguay's Declaration Independence in 1830, which is why the big stadium, where the finals played is a centenario. There's a centenary stadium. Juan Cambyssegee, the president of Uruguay, he's Batclista. Batali Adonias has been, in 1991 he comes to power. And I think pretty enlightened. He reinvests the profits from the meat industry in education, in health, he promotes physical education in school. He sees that as really important.

It's one of the reasons why Uruguay are so good at football. And this is supposed to be a celebration of batelismal. And when Julime, the president of FIFA gets there, and he's, you know, who is Zhugemi? He's just a French bureaucrat. He's not important. On his first day there, he's going to a barbecue with the president. So straight away, politics is trying to co-opt football. By 1934, Mussolini is much more overt than, I mean, Campesigie didn't do any good.

He was toppled in the queue the following year because of the Wall Street crash and the lack of money. But, yeah, Mussolini in 34, he takes hold of a World Cup in a way that, even Qatar and Russia haven't, that he introduces his own trophy, which is three times bigger than the official World Cup trophy. But he's obviously quite smart about it. So he subsidises travel for fans,

which try and get into it. Because part of the point is not just we want Italy to win the World Cup and prove with this muscular athletic, modern nation. And if you think of Mussolini, he's constantly projecting himself as a sportsman. He's riding horses, I guess a bit like Putin,

riding horses bearback. He's always been pictured skiing when Engelbert Dolphus, the Austrian chance that goes to see him at Ritjone in 33, I think. And instead of emergency talks, will Mussolini provide the troops just in case Hitler decides to go in? And Mussolini makes sure that when Dolphus arrives,

he's out in the sea swimming. And so Dolphus is there, he's an Austrian diplomat. He's dressed in this ridiculous three-piece seat. It's 30 degrees or whatever. Dolphus is tiny. He's 4'11, Dolphus, the millimetonnik, as they call. And so you then get these pictures, because Dolphus saying, oh, now, better go and get a skiff and row out to him. Obviously, he's terrible at rowing. He's his little 4-4-11 diplomat. Why would he be able to row? You get these pictures of him walking up the beach. And Musclean, he's, what was Muscle, 5, 7? He's not tall, but he's much taller than Dolphus. He's wearing these trunks. He's sort of big, muscular bloke. And there's Dolphus's little man in a three-piece suit with his, you know, he's taking his jacket off, but he's obviously hot and sweating. And the iconography of that, there's powerful, muscle. and modern Italy, an old, fussy, impotent Austria, it's incredibly powerful.

So, Mussolini is trying to put that into a World Cup context, but it's also about showing Italy is not the disorganized ramshackle country of myth. It's a modern country that can host this big tournament. The trains run on time. So Mussolini is one of the first people to sort of think of sports merchandising. He has all this quite cheap but well-produced merchandise, always. with the Fasquez, with the fascist logo on. The match ticket has printed on lovely cardboard.

They're very well designed, so people will keep them as souvenirs. Again, with fascist detailing. And so from Bustler's point of view, the World Cup's a great success because Italy win it, and Italy hosts it really, really well. And every foreign journalist who goes

sort of has to write, yeah, this was actually a really great tournament that the stadiums are great. There's been this kind of great wave of stadium building in the late 20s, early 30s. A lot of it with loans from the government or local municipalities. There's been a, from 1926, it's been a conscious movement to make Italy better at football.

They've banned foreign players. They've, in a lot of cities, they would amalgamate smaller clubs to make one big club per city to make it a proper National League. There's a lot of very sort of forward-thinking, sort of clever planning comes together in 34. So whatever's happened recently, Mussolini got there first. But, yeah, I think the difference

in 2018 and 2022 is that Russia and Guitar, the benefit for them was to host the tournament. We didn't think they had any chance of winning it. But hosting a tournament, putting on a good show, showing they're part of this sort of international community. And you have that, the opening game in 2018, when Russia beat Saudi Arabia 5-0, and you have those images in the VIP box where you have Putin, Janiant Fantino, and Mohammed bin Salman sitting next to each other, engaging what looks like the most awful stilted banter but the three of them are pictured there together and the weird thing is

what's that ball bloke in the middle doing? Why is Jenny Infantino this Swiss diplomat? Why is he there? What's he got to do with this? But somehow the president of FIFA operates on a level where he's dealing with the most important people in the world. Look, he has the power, right? So actually, objectively, he's entirely merited in being in that box because he has the power that these other two people want.

Yeah, he has something that he can give them. How often has he been in the Oval Office? He's always there. He's always giving Trump something. I think for the first time, actually, last week, you saw a flicker of doubt on Infantina's face as Trump was talking about moving the draw from Las Vegas to the Kennedy Center in Washington.

You can see Johnny's face. Hang on, I'm sure I agree to that. But obviously he can't do anything. So, yeah, he's become a facilitator for the soft power ambitions at NBS of Trump and Putin. So Jonathan, we've been talking about corruption off the field and FIFA notoriety have had numerous scandals. What about corruption on the field? How much can we trust that the results on the field are actually organic and fair and haven't been manipulated by the players or referees? I think at the highest level, I think we can be almost

100% confident. And the reason I say that is gambling. So, again, it's, it's. It's, I'm a you the Premier League is the example because it's the one I know best. But the betting companies are very strictly regulated that if they get the slightest hint of unusual betting patterns, they raise a red flag. And so you had an instance, it's an Oxford, the Arsenal FC Cup game the last season or the season before,

when there was an unusual number of bets that had been placed on a particular player to get booked. And it turned out, I think the player was actually acquitted. But the amount they were talking about was four bets worth a total of £1,200. It's a next to nothing, and that was enough to trigger an investigation. That could be like four blocs in a pub, one of them spreads a rumor, they go and put a bet on, basically.

It could be there. But even at that level, your point is even at that level, they're going to. So it's in nobody's interests for it to be fixed at the top level, because the betting companies make huge amounts of money because they have margins. The margins operate if a game is fair, because they have their very complex, very sophisticated algorithms that work out the odds. and okay maybe

one in a thousand times there's a very strange result that costs the money but nine and 99 out of a thousand times they're making money look at the profits of gambling companies on football they're enormous they have absolutely no incentive

to allow the game not to be fair also look how much players are paid how much money would you have to offer a player to for them to risk their career So we got an example of this.

There was a Singaporean match fixer called Wilson Raj Paramel who in 1995, mid-90s anyway, he doesn't really know what he's doing. He flies to the UK, Birmingham playing Liverpool in a league cup game. He's been fixing games in Singapore because it's pretty easy because nobody's got any money

so he bonged me $100, they'll fix it for it. So he thinks, right, I can do this in England and the returns to be much greater because it's much greater interest. So he goes to Birmingham City and he says, oh, yeah, I'm a journalist from Singapore. And they're like, oh, okay, well, welcome. And it's not like now where you'd have to show a press card and you have to book three weeks in advance or whatever to get an interview.

And he goes into the car park and he goes over to the Birmingham goalkeeper, Ian Bennett, and he says, I want you to fix the game against Liverpool. You're probably going to lose anyway, but just make sure you do. And Ian Benesville, no. What did you go off me? He went, oh, 20 grand. No.

No, I get more than that a week. Like, why would I take that to risk being banned for life? So, and that was 30 years ago. Like, now they're getting paid way, way more than that. So at the top level, I think you can be pretty confident. I think lower down, there's much bigger problems, because players earn less, the scrutiny is less. I think you've got to ask why the bookmakers offer on

on, you've seen football where three people are watching. You know, it makes no sense. why do they offer odds on really easy manipulable markets like the first throw-in? So there was a spake in the 90s where you could put spread bets on when there's the first throwing going to be. So obviously players think, well, hang on, if I take the kick off and kick it out of play, and I've sold on the spread, I'm going to make a profit. So they start doing that. And that's sort of an open secret.

But pretty soon people crack down on that. It doesn't happen anymore. So the modern game in the highest level, I think you can be pretty safe. I think the World Cup, there's a couple of games recently,ishly. I think there were question marks over. Really? Really? Well, which games?

I can't say that. But there's a last 16 game in 2006, I think looks pretty suspicious. Well, I remember this. Which World Cup? It's a World Cup 2006. The Italy won. In where? Is it Korea, Japan?

Is that one? No, no. It was in Germany. In Germany? But it's, the games that are vulnerable are when you have a team of players with less money. Right. In a game they're expected to lose. Yeah, that makes sense.

And they feel think, well. I'm going to lose either three or four nil. Might as well be four for an extra X amount. Yeah. See, I'm very good at thinking like a corruptible. And also, I think in countries where maybe they can't guarantee they get the bonus they've been promised. And so there's an element of different. us. I think that also may

sort of help break down the moral boundaries. Jonathan, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. We're going to ask you a bunch of questions from our supporters in a second. Before we head on over to Trigopod.orgot.orgot.orgh. Where everyone can follow that conversation, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be? Middlebrough detective drama.

So, Middlebrow detective drama on TV is phenomenally popular. Not just on the mainstream channels. Define at first, because I don't know what you're talking about. Inspector Morse, that type of... Yeah, Morse and its followers. Morse is probably the first of that real sort of hour and a half plus ads, so two hours in total.

And so you've now got things like Karen Piri, or you've got the Chelsea Detective, or you've got Mid-Summer Murders, all the Marple and Prior adaptations. Why is that so popular? Why is this one of Britain's biggest cultural exports? Why is it proliferating? Why do I watch so much of it?

Why is that the way... Why is murder? the way that I relax. And I understand sort of, you know, the logic of the golden age of detective fiction in the 1930s, and you know, Martin Edwards has written a very good book on it, and it's sort of supposed to be

in the turbulence of the interwar years, this is sort of a... yes, violence happens, but then order prevails. But why are we obsessed by it now? Why is this so much Middlebrow detective drama? Do other countries do it? And why can the Americans not do it well? There we go, lots of questions for you.

Head on over to Triggerpot. code.uk. Where we ask Jonathan your questions. Please inform me who is winning the upcoming World Cup so I can bet my life savings. Thanks in advance. This episode sponsored by IP Vanish. IP Vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart TV. If it connects to the internet, it should be protected.

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