Umberto Eco – Travels in Hyperreality: The World Cup and Its Pomps (1978)

“Many malignant readers, seeing how I discuss here the noble sport of soccer with detachment, irritation, and (oh, all right) malevolence, will harbor the vulgar suspicion that I don’t love soccer because soccer has never loved me, for from my earliest childhood I belonged to that category of infants or adolescents who, the moment they kick the ball — assuming that they manage to kick it – promptly send it into their own goal or, at best, pass it to the opponent, unless with stubborn tenacity they send it off the field, beyond hedges and fences, to become lost in a basement or a stream or to plunge among the flavors of the ice—cream cart. And so his playmates reject him and banish him from the happiest of competitive events. And no suspicion will ever be more patently true. … And perhaps for this reason I (alone, I think, among living creatures) have always associated the game of soccer with negative philosophies. This having been said, the question could arise as to why I, of all people, should now discuss the World Cup. …”
ARE
Umberto Eco’s “Eternal Fascism” And The Long Shadow Of The Past
W – Umberto Eco

Mussolini and his black shirts march on Rome, October 1922