Here's Baxa again.

Soccer or football, it becomes an ideal metaphor for the kind of unified mass fascist state that, uh, Mussolini wanted to create.

It was kind of an ideal sport because it's a game where the, the sum is greater than the parts, where individuals are asked to sacrifice themselves for, for the team.

And the beautiful game is, uh, you know, it's, it's kind of a more modern, I think, description of itI don't think the Italians ever played a beautiful game, to be honest.

It was a very brutal type of soccer, a very violent form of soccer.

So any sport that had a degree of violence to it, I think, was okay with the regime.

The regime knew their push into football would work as a way to bring the nation together because Mussolini had discovered something profound, not just about football, but about human psychology itself.

You know, Mussolini was a student of Gustave Le Bon, the sociologist/psychologist who talked about crowds and how to influence crowds.