Paul Rouse

Top down.

And it could have gone either way.

It's like you look at what happened to Welsh rugby after clubs were forced together in the wake of professionalism in the middle of the 1990s and the struggles of Welsh rugby to drive itself forward again.

The complete opposite was experienced in

in Italy where clubs were forcibly merged under fascist leadership, but they provided a spectacle that was only in the making at that stage.

You must remember that that world of the 1920s, it's not like there was generational devotion to a particular club.

What this is, is a new world which has been forged, that world of commercial sport based around associational culture as well, where people are joining clubs.

And it becomes more of a modern thing to do in the 1930s, in particular from the early 1930s onwards with the establishment of the Italian League and Cup and

The fact that there was a rail system which allowed people to travel the country, both to play games and to support the teams that were representing their city.

Without it, you just couldn't do it.

And look, the birth of modern sport, the construction of all of these things is made possible by the modern technologies of transport.

And international sport is not possible without the steamship and then the airplane.

But it's also about new media technologies.

So it's newspapers and the dedication now of the sporting press in Italy, which advertises these games online.

reports on them creates that celebrity culture around the best sports so people can read the preview read the report get the creation of stars and identify during the week with the team which they see play at the weekend that's so interesting because actually when i think even about how i experienced football growing up in the 70s and 80s i didn't go to games there weren't that many games on tv for me it was actually this is a weird thing to say about football it was a kind of

And presumably you had the comic books as well.

It's Roy of the Rovers and everything that goes with that.

And Roy of the Rovers, famously the most unlucky man in sport.

Yeah.

So many plane crashes.