Open Access
American Research Journal of History and Culture
ISSN (Online): 2379-2914
DOI: 10.46568/arjhc
Soccer under Fascism: A Comparative Analysis of the Death Match in Nazi-occupied Ukraine (1942) and Real Madrid 11-1 FC Barcelona in Francoist Spain (1943)
Shanghai Starriver Bilingual School, Shanghai-China.
Ziyang Ge, “Soccer under Fascism: A Comparative Analysis of the Death Match in Nazi-occupied Ukraine
(1942) and Real Madrid 11-1 FC Barcelona in Francoist Spain (1943)”, American Research Journal of History and
Culture, Vol 9, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1-9
Abstract
George Orwell declared that sport is “mimic warfare” — “ war minus the fighting”; others call it a “continuation of warby other means” (Orwell 1945). A comparison of the 1942 Death Match in Nazi- occupied Ukraine and the 1943 Real
Madrid versus FC Barcelona (Barça) game in Francoist Spain reflects that political divisions carried into the stadium,
and that soccer became a proxy for actual rebellion. For both Ukrainians and Catalonians, soccer served as a potent
symbol of national dignity and a vehicle for asserting cultural identity. Under fascism, soccer was the “opiate of the
people” (Brohm 1978) — a distraction created by the oppressors to deprive the oppressed of political consciousness —
but for Ukrainians and Catalans, it also functioned as a form of cultural resistance and identity. Long after WWII ended,successive generations used these matches to inform historical memory and created myths around them.
