Fútbol y fascismo

Soccer is a game, a passion, a form of social aggregation, a business; and, therefore, also an effective tool for controlling the masses. Thanks to its unrivaled ability to create myths, its intrinsic epic, this sport has been exploited since its dawn as a weapon of ideological propaganda and, more recently, also commercial. The first to realize its immense power of suggestion were perhaps the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, which, in their eagerness to cut across all strata of society, used this popular discipline as a rudimentary but powerful instrument of political marketing. These pages bring together the most significant episodes of this disturbing symbiosis between football and fascist dictatorships; anecdotes, feats -sometimes tragic and other bizarre- in which football has been used as a blindfold to cover the eyes of the people or as a vehicle of indoctrination in the framework of delirious propaganda designs conceived by despotic megalomaniacs from around the world. The book is divided into three parts: Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal, and the Latin American dictatorships.