After all, they had just defeated the reckless Argentineans, presumed arrogant and violent by the crowds of fans. Nazzasi, Cea and his cohorts had not only beat a team of eleven players over the grassland, but rather their rivals from the other margin of the Rio de la Plata. For the succeeding Cup, Mussolini's fascist government prepared the Italian soccer team as if it were an army. The conquest of the Jules Rimet was presented to the folks at the boot-shaped peninsula as a conquest of the regime. Shortly after, the real war blows up, with rifles, artillery, cannons, bombs.
Soccer is out of the scene and the conflicts are resolved without a ball as mediator.
No festivities, only anguish and misery. Halfway through the century, in the 1950 Cup, Brazil saw an opportunity to exhorcize its demons, frighten them away. Implausible defeats were attributed to a strange sense of inferiority, to the fear of confronting the foreign opponent. The same lack of confidence would have been responsible to a loss against the Italian squad, in the Cup of '38. In the first post-war Cup, Brazil remained intact until the finals, then suffered a defeat by Uruguay.