ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the complex interplay of football, fascism and conflicting national identities in Spain in an attempt to better understand how the problems and spectres of the past, exemplified in the Francoist sports film Campeones (Ramón Torrado, 1943), are prevalent today and still shape contemporary public discourses about national identity, gender and class mobility. The movie is analysed in four complementary ways: first, a textual analysis of its audiovisual and storytelling structure tackling how nationalism is constructed and negotiated through mise-en-scène; second, an evaluation of the film’s reception upon its release in 1943 by both mainstream and specialised press, to better grasp how the social, class and gender issues of the time were experienced by audiences; third, an overview of other Francoist fútbol movies released in the following decades that enforced similar strategies of propaganda and cultural assimilation; and finally, a closing hypothesis relating the three previous layers to the current state of affairs in Spain, offering a critical reading of the 2010 World Cup triumph and its impact on the country’s social and national fabric.
