Hi, everybody. Welcome to The Rest is History. So we have a brand new mini-series for you to mark the FIFA World Cup, which is happening in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

So what we're going to be doing is looking at some of the history,

the deep history of the World Cup, and in particular, the story of how dictatorships have

used football and used the World Cup in particular to bolster support for their regimes. So we're

looking at propaganda, we're looking at the personal letters of the dictators, we'll be looking at the stories of the tournaments and how they reflect public opinion and so on, some amazing stories. In future episodes, we'll be looking at the great Brazilian team of the 1960s and early 1970s. That's the team of Palais and Gersino and all these great players. The team that won in 1970, people say the best team of all time.

But this was a point when Brazil had a military dictatorship.

So we'll be looking at how the military dictatorship of Brazil from 1964 uses football.

We'll be looking at arguably the most controversial World Cup of All, which is 1978, Argentina. Some of you may remember we did

a series about Ava Perron, and this is a factor of the sequel to that. So we'll be looking at the

military junta of the late 70s and how they used the 78 World Cup and the team of Mario Kempes,

which won against the Dutch in the final. Big, big story in Argentina. But we'll be

kicking off with Italy and with Mussolini's fascist regime and the World Cups of 1934 and

1938. So it's a really, really great subject. Now, we love our listeners. So this is a special

treat to mark the World Cup. Normally,

this episode would be a bonus episode purely for members of the rest of history club, but

because it is the summer of sport, we are making this first episode in the series with the

brilliant Paul Rouse available to everybody. And if you want to hear the rest of the series, which I hope you will,

you merely have to go, you know the drill, to the rest is history.com to sign up

and you'll get not only Paul's wisdom about Brazil in the 1960s and 70s and Argentina in 1978,

but you'll get all the usual things. You'll get early access to series.

You'll get bonus episodes and an unbelievable range of supplementary benefits.

So what's not to like?

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