TRIGGERnometry: w/ Jonathan Wilson on Football (Transcript)

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.

JONATHAN WILSON: Exactly.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Carry on.

JONATHAN WILSON: And this is a time 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 Turnen, which is a sort of militarized gymnastics.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That sounds very German.

JONATHAN WILSON: Yeah. And I think people accept that kicking the ball about is more fun than doing aerobics while a sergeant major shouts at you.

So, yeah, football gets taken around the world by British teachers, by the church, by railway workers, by engineers, by businessmen. 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 much easier to play football because you don’t need intricate pitch preparation.

And in terms of the local populations, they watch cricket and go, this is complicated, don’t understand this. Football? Oh, yeah, we could do that. That looks like something that we can—we can find something that looks like a ball and we could do that in our space.

And so you see in Argentina, first game is played in 1867. The US, 1869. It spreads incredibly quickly and is adopted by local populations. And then in 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 the 1890s.

Why Some Countries Resisted Football

FRANCIS FOSTER: And Jonathan, you say it was spread by the empire, then what—but then why was it that the United States and Canada, former colonies of ours, didn’t take it? And yet you look at South America, with the exceptions of a couple of countries which are Portuguese and Spanish empires, and yet they all love football.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s a good question, actually. Also think about South Africa, Australia, New Zealand. Also compared to how good they are at other sports, in football, massive underperformance.

JONATHAN WILSON: Right. And India 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 example, because they actually do set up, tried to set up a professional league in the 1880s, and it just doesn’t work. And I think there’s a couple of reasons for that.

One is, if you look at England, why does England get the league? The league is set up in 1888, and that has remained the league through to today, with minor sort of little 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 a Saturday night, they’ll be there on Sunday morning. It’s fairly simple. And that leads to competition, which leads to sensationalism. You know, 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 take 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, away 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 sort of lead the way. They very 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 for football to try and strike back against rugby. The Rugby Football Union, just founded 1871, which is an offshoot from football, has more clubs affiliated to it in the 1870s than football does.

In the US, Harvard, Yale very much prefer rugby. It seems to be that they see it as being more manly, 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 try to set up a soccer league, there’s another attempt to set up a professional league in the 1920s. And then you get the NASL from 1966 onwards. And they can’t help themselves, they just tinker with it. Oh, we don’t like draws. We’ll have penalty shootouts or we’ll have sudden death overtime. Or offside seems a bit complicated, so we’ll change that. Or 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. I don’t know why Americans do that. And Canada is obviously—it’s always North American sport rather than just US sport.

So I think those are sort of two of the reasons. I think there was a problem trying to start a professional league there because baseball already had sort of colonized the summer. And the winter in the northeast of 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, even if it has “American” in the title, people trying to prove their Americanness will play that rather than a game—you know, for instance, there’s a lot of Scottish immigrants. Kearny in New Jersey is sort of the real early hotbed because two Scottish textile companies set up factories there and the Scottish workers they bring in bring 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—the 1891 Encyclical Rerum Novarum, which tries to raise the 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 Rimet, probably the best president FIFA ever had, the man who set 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, first professional is hard to get 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 at a national league in the late 60s and 70s, they actually outlaw ethnic names for teams until the moment 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 the NASL in, I think, 1976.

From Pastime to National Obsession

FRANCIS FOSTER: So, 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?

The Rise of Working-Class Football and the Birth of Professional Sport

JONATHAN WILSON: So in the UK, I think you can say the FA Cup 1872, which is the first 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 very 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, in the mine or in the factory, pick up your pay packet, let’s go and 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 workers 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, successful early clubs are Sunderland, Aston Villa, Everton, Newcastle, Liverpool, the Sheffield clubs. They are working class clubs.

And you know, Sunderland’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 someone’s geographical proximity to Scotland to go and basically steal players from Scottish teams where the professional game is not as established, and then go, they offer them more money, bring them down to Sunderland and so Sunderland win the league in 1894, 1895.

They go and play Hearts, 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 Sunderland also had two players injured who would have played, who were also Scottish. The Sunderland team is entirely Scottish imports. So this idea of sort of importing players is there right from the start.

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, 20,000 for games.

Football’s Global Spread and the Romance of the Potrero

And then it spreads pretty quickly, especially in Denmark. Denmark is sort of the first foreign adopters. Austria, Hungary, again, it’s spread by the oldest team in Vienna is called First Vienna, and it was founded by Scottish gardeners on the Rothschild 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 the rep selling tennis equipment in Vienna and he sort of becomes the bloke who really introduces football on a big scale to Vienna, then moves to 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 urbanizing rapidly. They’re all, well, industrializing rapidly, but they’re all urbanizing around one center, essentially Budapest, Vienna, Montevideo, 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 romanticized. In Central Europe, they’re called grunts. In South America, they’re called Potreros. And players from a grunt, player from the Potrero are the sort of celebrated players of both those cultures.

The Dark Side: Violence and Hooliganism in Football Culture

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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 a 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 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.

JONATHAN WILSON: Right?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah.

JONATHAN WILSON: In fact, there was a Russian student was stabbed somewhere, somewhere on the south coast because they thought he was German.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

JONATHAN WILSON: Why? Why did that happen? Is that a question?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, no, what I’m asking is the fact that by the 90s, the England Football scene in particular has a reputation for hooliganism, etc. Was that the case from the beginning or was that a more modern development?

JONATHAN WILSON: 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.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Men, especially with large.

JONATHAN WILSON: Yeah, men. So, yeah, yeah, it’s true. Yeah. So the 1905 Sunderland-Newcastle Derby, for instance, a police horse got stabbed amidst rioting.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Police horse.

JONATHAN WILSON: Yeah, was a police horse. Got punched by Newcastle fan. Why would you punch a horse? Well, he’s disappointed.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, he’s a Sunderland fan.

JONATHAN WILSON: The horse won.

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The Moral Panic of the 1960s and the Peak of the 1980s

JONATHAN WILSON: But in terms of the more organized sort of what we call hooliganism now, that’s sort of a phenomenon of the 60s. I mean it’s the sort of real moral panic around that begins actually very precisely. It happens in November 1964. There’s a game between Everton and Leeds.

Sandy Brown, an Everton defender, is sent off in the fourth minute of the game. By the 10th minute, the referee had to take both teams off to kind of cool everybody down. But the real trigger for the sort of postponement of the game, they came off like 20 minutes or something. There’s an Everton player goes down, the Leeds physio is helping him out and the Leeds physio is getting pelted with coins and missiles by Everton fans.

And so that’s when the referee is like, come on, let’s go off, let’s calm this down. And you see the papers over that weekend and following week in this huge moral panic about both on field and off field behavior.

I think it’s partly related to the youth culture of the 60s, partly related to people kicking against the establishment, partly like to youth culture. I mean you talk about 1996. 1996 is really the tail end of the worst of English violence. I mean there’s some flare ups in the World Cup in 1998. There’s been isolated things since, but really it’s the 80s. 1985 is when it reaches its head.

And I think partly it’s just to do with the reason it slowed down is people going to games are much older and you know all this 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 wildness that teenagers have.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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 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.

JONATHAN WILSON: Oh, they have, absolutely. And there’s a self conscious aping of, I know some of the clashes in 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, you know, delightedly. I think there’s a real suggestion this is very organized in a way that to be honest, English hooliganism was never that organized. It was always quite organic.

But there was also some just sort of complete sort of category errors. Russian fans beating up England fans to steal their flag. Well, that’s what you did in the 70s. Stealing the flag was in the same way that Roman Legion would try and steal the banner of another legion. When the people you’re stealing the flag from are just sort of 45 year old accountants in Norwich. They’d probably given it to you if you’d asked.

What Makes Football Different?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I guess what I’m getting at is, is there something particular about football? Because I’ll be honest with you, 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, 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 an 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. You never see anything like it. So I guess what I’m getting at, is there something particular about football that attracts this?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yes.

The Football Club as Identity

JONATHAN WILSON: And the answer is complicated. So I think, and this is almost a slightly romanticized answer, I’m slightly cautious about saying this, but there is an extent to which—well, in fact, no, this isn’t over. This is actually what I think. It’s where 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, you know, I’m from Sunderland. When do we see Sunderland on the national news? When there’s a riot. And the fascinating thing there, I mean this is another stage of mood. How many people doing the rioting wore football shirts? How many people doing the cleanup wore football shirts? And both trying to say no, this is actually the real sort of, you know, we are expressing our Sunderland-ness.

And we’re consciously adopting the uniform of Sunderland to say that I am somehow representative of Sunderland, 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 Sunderland, 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 Sunderland, Newcastle, Leeds play at Wembley, their fans will take over Trafalgar Square 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 vile 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 organized crime.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It does big in Russia.

Organized Crime and Football Violence

JONATHAN WILSON: Right. So in South America, particularly in, you know, certainly in Argentina, the various barras as they call there, the ultra groups, the hooligan groups, they will be organized crime and they will—can be as simple as 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.

And you saw it in Yugoslavia, and again this is slightly over-romanticized, but equally if you want muscle on the street, who are the people who are used to taking over a street, used to fighting with police who are disciplined? It’s the ultra groups.

And so Arkan, the warlord, Zeljko Raznatovic puts him in charge of the Delije ultras, the Red Star ultras. 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, yeah, they use the English name, the Dinamo fans were a very organized force. If you go to the Maksimir Stadium in Zagreb, there’s a statue of them and the inscription underneath says something about “our fans marching off to war.” And there are people from both the Delije and the Bad Blue Boys who would see a riot at the Maksimir at a Dinamo Zagreb-Red Star game in 1990 as the first battle of the war. I mean, I think they’re massively over-romanticizing that. But equally it is true that those two sides did go off and they did fight.

Hooliganism, Politics, and Racism

FRANCIS FOSTER: 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—

JONATHAN WILSON: There were—

FRANCIS FOSTER: There were certain fans who had a notorious reputation. Millwall was one and particularly at Millwall and West Ham and Chelsea, to a certain extent you would get people handing out NF leaflets. And that’s the National Front, that’s a far-right organization 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.

JONATHAN WILSON: Yeah, I mean that was very much only an ’80s thing. I think it’s actually—then 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 a 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 downplayed significance, but I think it’s more ad hoc thing. I don’t think it’s like the National Front.

FRANCIS FOSTER: So—

JONATHAN WILSON: Yeah, I mean this, I guess another one, what you’re asking about the violence, certain clubs and certain fan groups at certain clubs attract a reputation 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 fighting. I mean that’s the thing that a lot of people don’t get about hooliganism. 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 if you feel a particular affinity to 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. But yeah, that would draw you to particular clubs and particular fan groups.

I mean the Northeast is the area I know much better. And you had a very bizarre situation that on New Year’s Day 1985, Sunderland played Newcastle in the Derby. Madness about New Year’s Day. Don’t know why they thought that was a good idea. Newcastle win 3-1 and Sunderland’s two black players both get sent off having been horrifically racially abused through the game.

And overnight Sunderland 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 are racist, therefore we’re anti-racist.” And suddenly then had a Gary Bennett who was a black captain who remains one of the club’s most popular players. And I’m sure it was because they’d seen two of their black players sent off and it was an anti-Newcastle gesture rather than a pro-tolerance, “all together” gesture.

Italian Ultras and Fascism

FRANCIS FOSTER: 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 have a—they’re kind of open about their fascism, really.

JONATHAN WILSON: 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 Livorno 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, that sort of culture permeates through. And football is now where it finds its expression.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And they are very powerful. I remember going to see Palermo play with Ines in Palermo and the moment the game was over, you could see the captain of Palermo immediately ran over to the ultras, specifically clapped along almost like he kind of had to and probably did.

JONATHAN WILSON: 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 Boca in the ’90s and the ultras invaded Boca’s training base after a series of bad results to sort of, I guess logic is, will intimidate the players into playing better. I’m not sure sports psychology would suggest—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s the best way to do it.

JONATHAN WILSON: But you have like Maradona literally having to talk down the ultras going, “Yeah, no, hang on, this is not helping. Kind of, you know, our 17-year-old left back, he’s terrified just to play a match in front of fans is not going to play better because he was threatened to cut his throat if we don’t win next Wednesday.”

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, because it’s that very famous clip of Gascoigne scoring. I think it may have been his—Paul Gascoigne, he was a legendary England footballer, 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 his own, “No, that was relief” because he would see 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.

JONATHAN WILSON: Yeah, I know it’s a very, very strange thing. I mean, and also, you know, especially in South America, the fan groups get involved in transfers. So there’s a story of Marcelo Bielsa, legendary coach, great Argentinian coach. People in England probably know him best from his time at Leeds, but when he was at Newell’s, one of the two big Rosario clubs with a particularly sort of hardcore support.

Finally the delegation went round sort of berating about some tactical decision he made in the game. And he had a live hand grenade by his door that as soon as—as soon as door to them, he picked up a hand grenade, put his teeth around the pin 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 mad at us, we’re bye. Sorry.”

The Money Revolution in Football

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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 a normal person. Right?

JONATHAN WILSON: Well, 1963 was when the maximum wage ends. Maximum wage is £20 a week for—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: An English footballer right now, £20 was a bit more than it is now, but still it wasn’t. They were not getting paid low.

JONATHAN WILSON: No, it was sort of a normal working-class wage, maybe, maybe a slightly better than average working-class wage.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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?

JONATHAN WILSON: Well, I mean, that’s quite a complicated question as well. But maximum wage, when it was introduced in 1901, 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, you’re 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 of 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 a 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 were sort of thinking, “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 lifted in 1963.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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 are—

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah.

The Economics of Modern Football

JONATHAN WILSON: So there’s basically two big changes happen post that. So one is the coming of television. So in England you can say Match of the 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, I think 7.6 billion. The rights deal for the Premier League.

And that pertains up to 2003, when Roman Abramovich 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 Wolverhampton 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 38,000. Manchester United 70 odd, roughly. Arsenal’s capacity is half of Manchester United’s. So even if they’re getting roughly the same TV money, United have 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, a state or private equity. And that has radically changed the economics of football.

American Sports vs. Football: Different Models

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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 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 and it’s 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 who were 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, my grandfather used to piss 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 a 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?

JONATHAN WILSON: Well, there’s two different issues there. 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 then, you know, if it’s finishing 110, 108, then how do you get that excited about any one point? Whereas if it finishes one nil, that’s an incredibly exciting moment. And also, what if it finishes nil nil? Well, that can also be exciting.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m kidding.

JONATHAN WILSON: 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 to that, and that is one of the beauties of football, that it’s not just about the best team winning, it’s about strategizing. Give yourself the best chance of 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 United 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 caters 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 and keeps getting more members and keeps getting more money and maybe 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 support for people who want it. And you can pick your level, you can play at any level, from being the highest level professional to being the level club cricketer that I was that, you know, you can be hopeless out there. 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 the off. And if you look at the history of the NASL, franchises are changing all the time. Oh, hang on. The LA Aztecs have become the Miami Toros overnight and they’ve moved from, how do you support that team when suddenly they’re playing 3,000 miles away with entirely different cast members of players?

So, sure, if you want a closed system with no promotion, 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, then I would prefer the European model. So they’re just two different models.

The other problem with that closed model is you have no relegation. So if you have a bad start to the season, that’s it, it’s over. Whereas at least in European leagues or South American leagues, you’re fighting against relegation. It’s still something to play for.

The Draft System Problem

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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 it’s clear you’re not going anywhere because then you will probably get, you’ll get the best chance of having the best players from next year’s draft.

JONATHAN WILSON: And the draft has become a major problem for US soccer because their players finish their university education. Great. They 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.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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 anything.

JONATHAN WILSON: Exactly. I mean, it can only work. I mean, 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, early 70s anyway, that says you have to have equal opportunity in all things 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 for men’s sport. The women’s sport have this funding. They 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 are already four or five years behind their development by the time they hit professional level.

Fan Culture and Atmosphere

FRANCIS FOSTER: I also think as well, fan culture in European leagues, particularly in the English league, is just far superior to American. Like they’ve got no banter is what I’m saying.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But that’s a cultural thing. It’s nothing to do with football.

FRANCIS FOSTER: No, it’s terrible. You go, there you go. Let’s go Dodgers, 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. That fact, fan culture. It’s something very unique to English football and I think is what makes English football so special.

JONATHAN WILSON: Yeah, I would agree with that up to a point. I think—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: We just spent about 40 minutes talking about hooliganism, which is the flip side of this coin.

JONATHAN WILSON: Yeah, it’s, 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, yeah, you 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 that when you see it for 30 seconds, God, that’s amazing. And then—

FRANCIS FOSTER: Hang on.

JONATHAN WILSON: 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 humor of it, I think is a big thing that, okay, a lot of it’s quite formulaic, but within the formula, sometimes you get very good jokes that relate to things that happen in the game or things have happened in the past week.

And that spontaneity I think is something, it’s not that common, but when it happens, it’s a great thing and it’s that more organic feel to it that it’s, this is not pre scripted, it’s not everybody sets up for flares after 43 minutes or whatever. It’s, you allow the game, you know, there’s 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 Everton’s 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 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 I think, I mean, maybe it’s just what I’m used to, but I think that is a good thing.

The Premier League as Global Phenomenon

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah. And what’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 Beatle. And you know, he was cool, he had a rock star 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 Cristiano Ronaldo.

JONATHAN WILSON: 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. I mean, all due respect, nobody’s saying Gladys Spector.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And why is that? Why has suddenly football become footballers? Certain footballers transcended the sport and become celebrities.

JONATHAN WILSON: I don’t 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 Lalibela, where the rock churches are. And it was when Mourinho 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’s 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? The Chelsea Liverpool game today? And she went, 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 to 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 mine just says, do you want to come watch Swansea Arsenal later this afternoon? Yeah. Okay, well, we’ll go to a proper locals place.

And it’s sort of like a muddy bank. They’ve hammered benches into the bank. There’s screens at the front, there’s a tarpaulin over top. It’s 5pm, it’s half the price of the cafe and everybody is watching. There’s 500 people there watching this game. And he said, oh, yeah, there’s five places like this plus a couple more cafes. And I worked it out. It was 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. They get up when the sun comes up, they go to bed when the sun goes down, they move their 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 a cultural phenomenon of the Premier League. I mean, you know, the very bold question of why does football matter? It matters now because it is the most popular cultural phenomenon there has ever been, that the number of people who watch the Premier League is extraordinary.

FRANCIS FOSTER: 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, Getafe versus Sevilla or Livorno versus Udine.

JONATHAN WILSON: 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 marketed exceptionally well, exceptionally cleverly. I think you’ve got to give Richard Scudamore, the first CEO of 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 Goldblatt’s most recent book, “Injury Time,” he makes the point that football is now, or the Premier League is now the world soap opera. And he points out that in 2001, it was Liverpool, Barcelona game. It was the day that EastEnders, BBC soap opera revealed who had shot Phil Mitchell, one of the biggest characters. And they persuaded UEFA to delay kickoff in this game by 10 minutes so they could have a 10 minutes extended EastEnders so we could find out who’d shot Phil Mitchell. And UEFA agreed.

And yet, I think it was 2019, there was EastEnders was cancelled entirely to show an FA Cup fifth round game. Because football has now become bigger than the soap operas. In the old days, soap stars were on the front page of the tabloids all the time. Now it’s footballers, football. The Premier League is the world soap opera.

The World Cup and National Identity

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And Francis mentioned the World Cup. You’ve obviously got a great book out about it, remind everybody of the title so they can go and grab a copy.

JONATHAN WILSON: It’s called “The Power and the Glory.”

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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.

JONATHAN WILSON: Yeah, absolutely. And you see that right from the start, right from 1930 when it begins. That is true. Jules Rimet, who is the FIFA president who set up the World Cup, he thinks football will encourage fraternity among nations. I would say by 1934, 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 England, Argentina relationship in football.

Even before the Falklands, there’s a sort of Oedipal relationship there that, okay, Argentina was never part of the empire. It 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 66, when they play in a very violent World Cup quarter final, a hugely controversial game that’s full on sort of we have to beat the quasi colonial power. Or look at when Senegal played France in the opening game, the 2002 World Cup. How can you see that as anything other than the colonised against the colonizer?

FRANCIS FOSTER: 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.

JONATHAN WILSON: Is that their performative? I don’t know, maybe.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, switch it the other way. I mean, the Argentine, so Francis, his mother’s from Venezuela, so he knows Latin America pretty well. He always says the Argentinians of the, the English of, of South America, i.e. universally hated. And one of the things through. I don’t know if this is a stereotype, but they do have a reputation for being kind of, you know, dirty and dirty as players, dirty as a team. Is that a fair assessment?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yes.

The Gaucho Spirit and Argentine Football Identity

JONATHAN WILSON: Yeah. Yeah, probably even. That’s, you know, that’s a fascinating question and you know, I could, I could talk for an hour on this if you give me two minutes. Yes. So the British retreat from 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 of how you do things.

And it’s suddenly faced with this question once the British get out of, hang on, who are we? What is Argentina, what is it to be Argentinian? And so there’s a series of lectures in 1912 in the Odeon Theater, attended by the President and all his cabinet and all the great and good of Argentina. And Leopoldo Lugones, the great poet of the age, he gives these lectures on what is Argentinian identity. And he concludes that the spirit of Argentina is to be found in the gaucho, in the Lone Horseman of the Pampas, that combination of virtuosity but also self reliance that is characteristically Argentinian, it’s romanticized image. But yeah, fair enough. The great Argentinian epic poem “Martin Fierro” is about a gaucho.

But you then have this issue of Buenos Aires is growing rapidly. Argentina’s 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 asados and everybody comes 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 Grafico,” 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 express this gaucho spirit in the city? And they say, well, the true spirit is actually the pibe, the urchin, the kid from the street. He’s playing on the Potreros, on the vacant lots. And he also has that virtuosity because he’s playing in these 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 a 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 realize this is in complete contradistinction to the British who’ve taught them the 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 Potreros. You’ve got to be able to handle yourself.

And so Borocotó, who’s actually Uruguayan, but he’s a sort of honorary Argentinian, he’s the editor of “El Grafico” in 1928, he writes this incredible piece where he says, if we were to erect a statue to the spirit of Argentinian football, it would depict a pibe 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 rag ball, he’s not rich enough to have a proper ball, and he’s all about the dribble.

And the Argentine word for dribble is gambetta, which is the, it’s a gaucho word meaning the running motion of an ostrich. And the thing is, if you took that description and gave it to somebody without context, said, who is that? 100% of people would say it’s Maradona. So 49 years before Maradona makes his international debut, his coming is foretold.

And that’s why when Maradona gets there, when he turns up, when they’re seeing him in youth competitions, it’s like, this is him, this is El Pibe de Oro, the golden boy, the Argentinian hero who’s coming, has been prophesied.

And then why does the gaucho culture come to an end? It comes to an end because the British introduced barbed wire. Once you have barbed wire, you don’t need a cowboy. You just put a fence up around your cows. If you look at Argentine newspapers from the 1870s, one of the biggest celebrities is a bull, British bull called Tarquin. And the reason Tarquin is so priced 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 just got a cowboy, 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 even estanciero, and you’re trying to do it with the gauchos, you’re going to make less money than your neighbour who’s put up barbed wire. So the British have killed the gaucho.

And that’s why when Maradona scores his two goals against England in his greatest single performance, 1986 World Cup quarter final, 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 the street kid. It’s the perfect game for Maradona. And it is this sense of the gaucho finally getting his own back on the British.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why do you think? I know 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?

The Street Football Advantage

JONATHAN WILSON: 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 question, so I’ll come back to it, that there is something of a street footballer which is anarchic, it’s individualistic, it’s hard to predict. I think players who’ve grown up in academies can become quite predictable.

I think you’ve seen, for instance, Germany in the last sort of 15, 20 years since they overhauled our academy system. They produce loads of great midfielders. They don’t produce centre forwards anymore. So I think that learning your 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 Astroturf pitches where 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 mean, I remember speaking to Philippe Troussier, a French coach who coached a lot in Africa. He was Japan coach, must have been 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 and the edge that he’d found in African players. So your question about why there’s a…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There’s a saying in the NBA, I think I can’t remember which coach used to say, but you never recruit a player from a two car garage at home with a two car garage.

JONATHAN WILSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So why, why, why Argentinians?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Tell me, Jonathan.

The Argentine Football Identity

JONATHAN WILSON: So partly it’s that self reliance, but what you see is this technical skill is really privileged and Argentinian football turns professional in 1931. The Argentine league in the 30s is incredibly, it’s incredibly well followed. Huge crowds. The football’s very beautiful, very individualistic. There’s all kinds of myths and stories about it.

La Máquina, the great River Plate side of the 40s, massively celebrated. Their famous five man forward line. You look at it, they hardly win anything. They win I think two of the five championships when they played 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 fall out with the Brazilians in 1950 and they don’t go. And they try to say it’s because of Perón’s isolation, they just fell out with the Brazilians. Brazil hosted in 1950, 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 Argentinian culture.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t think that’s remotely what I suggested, but well done.

JONATHAN WILSON: In 1957 they win the South American championship with this great forward line, the Carasucias, “Dirty Faces” forward line. So again the dirty faces are this urchin ideal. Problem is three of those players are sold to Italy before the World Cup and they won’t pick them when they play in Italy.

But they get there, they brought in Adolfo Pedernera, he’s been this great player, 39, so he’s old, he’s overweight, but they still thought, oh he’s so skillful, that’ll be enough. And they get beaten 6-1 by Czechoslovakia and immediately they think hang on. This technical, beautiful… well 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 criolleza, 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. Let’s be really cynical. And you can even say the history of coups is like that. Oh, you know, Perón, this great work as you… ah, it’s gone wrong.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Off you go.

Menotti vs. Bilardo: Two Philosophies

JONATHAN WILSON: And, and you know, 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 César Luis Menotti, who wins the World Cup with them in 78. He plays the beautiful football, a former communist who wins under the junta, which is very complicated. And Carlos Bilardo, who is this cynical coach who has Maradona in this 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 in one of these two theories. And of course it’s not true. I don’t even think Menotti is Menottista. I think he’s much more mixed. But you know, it suits them to come up with these ideals.

So it’s a whole mixture of where the football culture comes from. The fact it’s created in contradiction to the British, the intellectual culture of the time, the defeat to Czechoslovakia in Helsingborg in 1958, the violence is legitimized there in a way that wouldn’t be elsewhere.

Politics and Corruption in the World Cup

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s really interesting. And speaking of cynicism, one of the things that 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 board methods.

JONATHAN WILSON: Yeah, I think you’re not the only one who wonders that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, I really do wonder that. And it wouldn’t surprise me if it was the case.

JONATHAN WILSON: Well, I mean, look at the EXCO who voted on it. The 24 personnel EXCO, the Executive Committee in those days vote on who got the World Cup. Yeah, and I think it’s 15 of the 24 have been convicted of corruption. Others have died before into each trial. They are not a… they’re not the most upstanding group of people.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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?

The Political Power of Football: From Uruguay 1930 to Modern FIFA

JONATHAN WILSON: Well, I think it’s always been there. So why do Uruguay 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—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’s self-projection into the world.

So how do you magnify that? You host the first World Cup. It happens to be 100 years—the centenary of Uruguay’s declaration of independence in 1830. Which is why the big stadium where the final’s played is the Centenario. This bit of a centenary stadium.

Juan Hanbistegui, the president of Uruguay, he’s Batlista. Batli Donas has been in 1901, 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, is one of the reasons why Ukraine are so good at football. And this is supposed to be a celebration of Batlismo.

And so when Shirouma, the president of FIFA gets there and he’s, you know, who is—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.

Mussolini’s Masterclass in Sports Propaganda

By 1934, Mussolini is much more overt than—I mean Kabiski didn’t do him any good. He was toppled in the coup the following year because of the Wall Street crash and lack of money. But yeah, Mussolini in ’34, he takes hold of the World Cup in a way that even Qatar and Russia haven’t. He introduces his own trophy, a Coppa del Duce, which is three times bigger than the official World Cup trophy. But he’s also quite smart about it.

He subsidizes travel for fans which try and get into—because part of the point is not just we want Italy to win the World Cup and prove we’re this muscular, athletic, modern nation. And you know, if you think of Mussolini, he’s constantly projecting himself as a sportsman. You know, he’s riding horses—I guess a bit like Putin riding horses bareback. He’s always been pictured skiing.

When Engelbert Dollfuss, the Austrian Chancellor, goes to see him at Riccione in—was that ’33, I think—and his sort of emergency talks. Will Mussolini provide the troops just in case Hitler decides to go in? And Mussolini makes sure that when Dollfuss arrives, he’s out in the sea swimming.

And so Dollfuss is there. He’s an Austrian diplomat. He’s dressed in this ridiculous three-piece suit. It’s 30 degrees or whatever. Dollfuss is tiny, he’s 4 foot 11. Dollfuss, the Millie Metternich as they called him. And so you then get these pictures because Dollfuss saying, “Oh now I better go and get a skiff and row out to him.” Obviously he’s terrible at rowing. He’s his little 4 foot 11 diplomat. Why would he be able to row?

Get these pictures of him walking up the beach. And Mussolini’s—what was Mussolini? Five-seven. He’s not tall, but he’s much taller than Dollfuss. He’s wearing these trunks. He’s a big muscular bloke. And there’s Dollfuss, this little man in the three-piece suit with his—if he’s taking his jacket off, being obviously hot and sweating. And the iconography of that. There’s powerful, muscular, modern Italy, an old fussy, impotent Austria. It’s incredibly powerful.

So Mussolini—he’s trying to put that into a local 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.

The Birth of Sports Merchandising

So Mussolini is one of the first people to think of sports merchandising. He has all this quite cheap but well-produced merchandise, all with the Fasces, with the fascist logo on the matchstick, T-shirts printed on lovely cardboard. They’re very well designed so people will keep them as souvenirs, again with fascist detailing.

And so from Mussolini’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.” You know, 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 there’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. It’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, 2022, is that Russia and Qatar—the benefit for them was to host the tournament. They didn’t think they had any chance of winning it, but hosting the 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-nil. And you have those images in the VIP box where you have Putin, Gianni Infantino, 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 bloke in the middle doing? Why is Gianni 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.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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.

JONATHAN WILSON: 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 Infantino’s face as Trump was talking about moving the draw from Las Vegas to the Kennedy Center in Washington. You can see Gianni’s face. “Hang on, I’m a—have I agreed to that?” But obviously he can’t do anything. So, yeah, he’s become a facilitator for the soft power ambitions of MBS, of Trump, or Putin.

Corruption on the Field: How Safe Are Match Results?

FRANCIS FOSTER: So, Jonathan, we’ve been talking about corruption off the field and FIFA notoriously 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?

JONATHAN WILSON: I think at the highest level, I think we can be almost 100% confident. And the reason I say that is gambling. So I’ll give you the Premier League as 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—Oxford, the Arsenal FA Cup game, the last season or season before—when there was an unusual number of bets 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. So next to nothing. And that was enough to trigger an investigation.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That could be four blokes in a pub, one of them spreads a rumor and they go and put a bet on.

JONATHAN WILSON: Basically it could be that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But even at that level, your point is, even at that level they’re going to—

JONATHAN WILSON: So it’s in nobody’s interest 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 them money. But 999 out of a thousand times they’re making money.

Look at the profit of gambling companies on football. They’re enormous. They have absolutely no incentive to allow the game not to be fair. Also, look at how much players are paid. How much money would you have to offer a player for them to risk their career?

The Wilson Raj Perumal Case Study

So we got an example of this. There was a Singaporean match fixer called Wilson Raj Perumal, 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 you bung someone $100, they’ll fix it for you.

So he thinks, “Right, I can do this in England and the returns will be much greater because there’s much greater interest.” So he goes to Birmingham 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 in 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. Just make sure you do.” And Bennett said, “No.” “What are you going to offer me?” He went, “Oh, 20 grand?” “No, no, I get more than that a week. Why would I take that? To risk being banned for life.”

That was 30 years ago. Now they’re getting paid way, way more than that. So 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 do bookmakers offer odds on—you’ve seen football where three people are watching. It makes no sense. Why do they offer odds on really easy, manipulable markets like the first throw-in?

So there was a stage in the ’90s where you could put spread bets on when the first throw-in’s going to be. So obviously players think, “Well, hang on, if I take the kickoff 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 could you see people crack down on that? It doesn’t happen anymore.

So the modern game, the highest level, I think you’d be pretty safe. I think the World Cup, there’s a couple of games recently—I think there were question marks over. Really? Really? Which games? I can’t say that, but there’s a last 16 game in 2006 I think looks pretty suspicious.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh, I remember this. Which World—it’s a World Cup.

JONATHAN WILSON: Yes.

FRANCIS FOSTER: World Cup 2006.

JONATHAN WILSON: I won the Italy one in—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Where is it? Korea? Japan? Is that—

JONATHAN WILSON: 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 in a game they’re expected to lose.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, that makes sense.

JONATHAN WILSON: And they sort of think, “Well, I’m—”

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Going to lose either 3 or 4-nil. Might as well be 4 for an extra X amount.

JONATHAN WILSON: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: See, I’m very good at thinking like a corrupt—

JONATHAN WILSON: 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 bitterness, I think, that also may sort of help break down the moral boundaries.

The Curious Case of Middlebrow Detective Drama

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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 triggerpod.co.uk, where everyone can follow that conversation. What’s the one thing we’re not talking about that we should be?

JONATHAN WILSON: Middlebrow detective drama. So middlebrow detective drama on TV is phenomenally popular, not just on the mainstream channels. You’ve got—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Define it first, because I don’t know.

JONATHAN WILSON: Okay, so Inspector Morse, that type? Yeah, Morse and its followers. Morse is probably the first of that real sort of hour and a half plus ads, or two hours in total. And so you now got things like Vera, or you’ve got the Chelsea Detective, or you’ve got Midsomer Murders, all the Marple and Poirot 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 there so much middlebrow detective drama? Do other countries do it? And why can the Americans not do it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, there we go, lots of questions for you. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk, where we ask Jonathan your questions.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Please inform me who is winning the upcoming World Cup, so I can bet my life savings.

JONATHAN WILSON: Thanks in advance.

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