Introduction: football, fascism and popular culture

In the Portuguese collective imagination, the relationship between football and the New State (Estado Novo), the authoritarian regime that ruled the country for 48 years, between 1926 and 1974, is often subsumed under the formula “Fado, Fátima and Futebol”. Football, together with Fátima (the most important manifestation of popular religiosity) and Fado (the urban musical genre that became known as the national song), contributed, as one of the great Portuguese intellectuals of the twentieth century put it, “to that persistent feature of the New State that was to distract the people”.1 After the fall of the regime, this formula, “the three efes”, acquired the firmness and stability of common-sense beliefs, and football came to be seen as one of the regime's instruments of power. The supposedly alienating power of football, with a depoliticizing effect on Portuguese society, is still used as one of the explanations for the longevity of the regime.

The argument for the political instrumentalization of football during this period is grounded on the international success of Portuguese teams in the 1960s and the major transformations observed in the game's organization and popularity since the late 1920s. Over this period of around 35 years, Portuguese football ceased to occupy a peripheral position in the European context and assumed a prominent role, albeit temporary, on the international stage. That success reflected a transformation of infrastructures and actors. After the inauguration of the national stadium in 1944, a prototype of fascist architecture, during the 1950s the most important Portuguese clubs built modern stadiums for large publics in Lisbon, Porto and other major cities. As black players from the colonies joined the ever more successful clubs in the metropole, the ways of imagining the nation changed significantly. At a time when the New State was fighting African independence movements in the Portuguese colonies, in a war with multiple fronts that lasted from 1961 to 1974, many of these black players – Eusébio, first and foremost – were used for the political legitimation of the Portuguese empire.2 Black players' prominence in the public sphere helped proclaim lusotropical ideas, that is to say the belief on the exceptional nature of Portuguese colonialism, grounded on a multiracial and multicultural Portuguese national identity.

This book aims to examine in detail the role played by football – a crucial element of an autonomous sports field fully institutionalized by the end of the 1930s – in the materialization of the political project of the New State – and explore, specifically, the relationship between football, urban popular culture and authoritarian power. Analysing the place sports occupied in the Salazarist3 regime can shed new light on how the ideologies and organisations of corporatism came into conflict with the values, practices and institutions of one of the most important spheres of Portuguese civil society. Consequently, the present study aims to contribute to the large body of research on the meaning of spectator sports and leisure in everyday life during fascism.

The importance of sports in fascist and authoritarian states in the interwar period is hard to dispute: those were the first European political regimes to set in motion large-scale projects in the modern field of sport.4 The monumental architecture of fascist stadiums, the control of clubs and federations, the massification of physical education and the political instrumentalization of major international competitions are expressive examples of those authoritarian public interventions.5 Despite their relevance in the fascist imaginary, not only from the point of view of the multitudinous spectacle, as “instruments of depoliticization”, but also as tools for the construction of a “new man”, sports policies and practices have been surprisingly marginalised in major works focused on the culture of authoritarian regimes.6

However, contrary to what happened in Germany or in Italy, the Portuguese state, in the early 1930s still lacked the capacity to massify physical education and to turn mass sports events into instrumental means of propaganda. More than a consequence of state investment, the growth of sports and the inscription of football in Portuguese popular culture stemmed from processes of urbanisation and from an unequal structure of power distribution based on multiple social cleavages. The extensive associative network and the influential specialised press had transformed football into a terrain of social integration for urban populations. Its effectiveness in stabilising social structures did not result from an affiliation to a specific ideology or political regime. In Portugal, the functional dynamics of sports consumption derived from a specific social history of club affiliation, largely independent from other types of political, religious or even class bounds and boundaries, and was directly associated with the transformation of the role played by leisure in contemporary societies.7

Until the early 1960s, just before the first international successes of Portuguese teams – the national team was third in the 1966 World Cup, Sport Lisboa e Benfica won two European Champion Clubs' Cups, reaching other four finals, and Sporting Clube de Portugal won the Cup Winners' Cup in 1964 – football was perceived by the corporatist institutional and ideological space as an element of degeneration, deleterious to the health of the population, a problem of public order and an arena of “moral perversion” that should be controlled. From the 1920s onwards, when the game became a mass spectacle in many European countries following in some ways the English example, discourses about its educational value disappeared almost entirely.8 As with other phenomena linked to popular culture, the intervention of public authorities in the field of sport represented an attempt to discipline, at different levels, an area of social life whose values, codes and behaviours were far removed from the dominant ideological frameworks. Throughout this period, gymnastics, the privileged expression of the modern physical education movement, represented the ideal model of athletic activity with moralising and regenerating properties. As claimed by the Portuguese state authorities, the virtues of gymnastics were in every way opposed to the damaging effects of playing football and attending sports spectacles.

Focusing on the period spanning from the late 19th century to the early 1960s, this book analyses the social significance of the development of football and its gradual differentiation from other recreational and cultural practices. The transformation of a distinctive activity associated with the ruling classes in the 1900s into a mass spectacle in the 1930s was not a peaceful process. With the full sportivisation and spectatorisation of the game9 – as a competitive practice directed to the public rather than associated with the sportmen's leisure – the major clashes in the field revolved around the status of players and their professionalisation. The antagonism between those advocating for amateurism and those fighting for the recognition of sport as legitimate work became the structuring axis of Portuguese football and a crucial indicator of its place in the international sporting scene.

For almost thirty years, a significant part of the agents and institutions of the New State took sides in this conflict, using the ban on professionalism as a privileged instrument to intervene in the field of football, to delay the development of competition and sports spectacle. This active blockage, anchored in a class reading of the role of sports and its place in contemporary Portuguese society, cannot but call into question the above mentioned “instrumentalization” thesis: the conviction that the New State used football in order to “narcotize” people, leading to political passivity.

This book does not aim to explore football and politics from a cultural studies perspective, nor to propose a strictly political reading, framing sports history as another conflictive terrain between authoritarian control and political opposition. The contribution of the present volume to a reappraisal of the place of football in the New State derives exactly from an analysis of the daily practices of sports organisations, from an enquiry on the multiple meanings of the game for different social actors and from a detailed examination of the specific struggles held inside this social sphere.

Exploring the process that led to the professionalisation of football players shows that football in the New State cannot be simply understood as a vehicle for the dissemination of ideological discourses – nationalism or banal lusotropicalism –, as a source of legitimization for some political actors, as an instrument of depoliticization of the masses or, in the opposite sense, as a terrain of political contestation and resistance. Although those are major dimensions of sports history in Portugal, as they provide valuable insights into broader social processes, this book presents a different hypothesis: the struggles waged to affirm the autonomy of the sports field expressed lines of social and cultural cleavage with important political implications, but not necessarily involving politics. Thus, looking at the conflicts that emerged around football,...