Over the course of the 20th-century, the game of football became a commonly-used tool in the process of nation building. Countries on every continent, with the exception of North America, embraced the beautiful game with a wide variety of styles and political motives, but all with a common end result: the forging of a sense of national identity. Whether it was in the Fascist inter-war Italy, the whip-cracking 1930s of Bolshevik Russia, or in the recently-decolonized Africa of the 1960s, the beautiful game took on an important meaning unique to the people of those regions and their respective struggles.
Football as a 20th-Century Nation Builder
In 1930s Italy, Fascist leader Benito Mussolini became the first leader to make sport an integral part of government. While the Italian national team’s success on the international stage was championed as a victory for the country’s governing system, it was Mussolini’s grandiose stadium building plan which truly cemented Italian football’s intertwining with his Fascist regime. The national team’s success would combine spectacularly with Mussolini’s stadium plan in 1934, as Italy both hosted and won that year’s FIFA World Cup in a flag-waving display of the Fascist system’s sporting superiority. The Italian national team dominated the tournament, defeating the Czechoslovak entry 2-1 in the final, which was symbolically played at the ‘Stadium of the National Fascist Party’.
By utilizing football as a mechanism to bolster national pride and gain the respect of other nations, Mussolini consolidated his own power through sport in a way that had never been done before. By bridging the gap between politics and sport, he also ensured that any Italian of a certain era would automatically think of the Fascist party and the stadiums it commissioned while reminiscing about the glory days of Italian football in the 1930s.
Around the same time in Eastern Europe, football was being divvied up by class in the Soviet Union. While the well-funded Dynamo team — originally founded by the Secret Police — thrived atop the league, it was the working-class Spartak team which won the hearts and admiration of Moscow’s citizens. Originally founded in the early-’20s as Krasnaia Presnia, Spartak became the team of working men, and a place where attitudes towards the Soviet system and its governing organs could appear relatively free of reprimand. The fact that Spartak’s two fiercest rivals were the Secret Police’s Dynamo and the military’s CSKA team speaks to the ideology of political resistance that surrounded Spartak. By remaining as independent of state force as possible, Spartak gave the working-class people of Moscow a small form of resistance against the often oppressive Soviet regime.
Soviet Russia was not the only place where the beautiful game gave people a chance to rebel against a regime of sorts. In Central Africa, the indigenous peoples of the French colony of Congo played the game their own way. Throughout French Africa, ‘educated’ indigenous people saw the idea of playing the colonists’ game with boot-encased feet as a symbol of their assimilation into French culture. It then came as no surprise that, with colonial tensions high in Congo, its native people used the beautiful game as a form of revolt. In the colony’s capital, Brazzaville, indigenous Congolese played without boots on as a political statement. While most aspects of society were dictated by the French colonists, the natives used football as a means of showing solidarity even while playing the white man’s game.
Beyond those three examples, the game functioned as a national unification device in many regions, under many systems, during the 20th-century. In South American countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, the game functioned at various points during the century as an extension of governmental power and an instrument with which to stir up the national pride.
In 1925, the Argentine people collectively hung on the performances of domestic club Boca Juniors as it toured through Europe’s largest stadiums. The event drummed up deep sentiments of national pride, and even created an ideological idea of superiority over the Europeans at their own game — something no country on the continent had experienced in the recent past. In 1960s and ’70s Brazil, a largely unpopular military junta tried to piggyback off the passion for the country’s national team, moulding both club and international football into a political tool.
Lastly in Chile, dictator Augusto Pinochet bribed FIFA into hosting a World Cup qualifier in the very same stadium in which his regime was imprisoning and torturing political prisoners. Despite the fact that Chile’s opponents boycotted the farcical event, Chile still had to score a goal against an invisible team, in a full stadium, with a rabidly patriotic crowd in attendance to book their place at the World Cup. Pinochet later admitted that he hoped the match, and Chile’s subsequently ensured passage to the World Cup Finals, would boost his military dictatorship’s popularity.
The most poignant example of football being used as a nation-building exercise is seen in post-colonial Africa, where the beautiful game represented a rare form of ‘national culture’ on the continent, and massive stadiums signified the coming of a modern African age. Newly-independent African nations staged matches as part of their independence celebrations, and signalled their arrival in the international community through their participation in FIFA. Most notable, however, were the dual purpose stadiums built by these new countries’ leaders: large, cathedral-like venues whose names reflected nationally important dates (i.e. Algiers’ 5th of July Stadium and Conakry’s 28th of September Stadium). The larger the stadium, the more useful it was as a rallying cry for both nationalists and football fans alike.
In conclusion, the beautiful game served as both a beacon of national pride and a means to a political end across a variety of regions under a wide range of systems and leaders throughout the 20th-century. From Benito Mussolini’s first attempt to heavily involve sport in his governance of 1930s Italy, to post-colonial Africa’s ambitious leaders attempting to build their nation’s through sport, football has played a role in nation building in many different countries and eras.
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