What is political in modern football? ft. Cas Mudde

What makes modern football political? And what is the role of football in civil society? In this episode co-hosts Guy and Francesco speak to Cas Mudde, political scientist, football fan and enthusiastic groundhopper. Cas points to various developments taking place in modern football, from stadia as political arenas for both fans and the authorities around them, whether footballing or government. He notes the presence of illiberal regimes, including the growth of surveillance in and around grounds to footballing authorities' embrace of intolerant governments as well as the efforts made by fans to push back.

Cas also touches on his own experience as a podcaster and the insights he has gained from speaking to different voices in the football community as well as his undergraduate "Soccer and Politics" course, which he teaches at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Cas's RADIKAAL podcast episodes can be found here. Cas's Guardian op-ed that he mentions in the episode is available here.

Transcript

What is political in modern football? ft. Cas Mudde

Francesco Belcastro 00:08

Hello, and welcome to a new episode of FootPol, the podcast for football meets politics. I'm one of your co-hosts, Francesco Belcastro, and here is my other co-host, Dr. Guy Burton. Hello Guy, how are you? 

Guy Burton 00:19

Hi, I'm Francesco, I'm good, thanks, and how are you doing today? 

Francesco Belcastro 00:22

I'm all right. I'm all right. I'm very excited about today's episode. 

Guy Burton 00:25

Yeah, how come? Who are we speaking to? What are we talking about? 

Francesco Belcastro 00:28

Well, we're speaking to someone whose work I've admired a long for a long time was academic work and someone who has worked extensively on an academic field that we are interested in and has now moved to research on football and politics. 

Francesco Belcastro 00:41

So we are very, very happy to have him on board. Before we do that, before we introduce our guest, can I just say a little word of thank you for listeners and guests that have suggested who we should invite. 

Francesco Belcastro 00:57

Because some of the best episodes, some of the favorite episodes so far have been based on the suggestions, but in terms of topics and in terms of guests, that either listeners or other guests have done. 

Francesco Belcastro 01:08

So I just want to thank people for their help and keep going with the suggestions. They're very important for us. 

Guy Burton 01:14

Yeah, definitely. 

Guy Burton 01:15

Okay, so look who we're gonna be talked to I mean we have to tell that tell the the audience because actually I have to be honest, we're pretty excited both of us about this, aren't we? 

Francesco Belcastro 01:25

We are, we are, we are. So we're talking to Cass Mudde. Now Cass is a political scientist, he's a professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia in the United States. Most people, we know him, a lot of the listeners will know him as well for his work on far -right and populism. 

Francesco Belcastro 01:43

Specifically, not actually, but particularly on North America and Europe. He's written several important books on this topic, including Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe and Populism: A short introduction. 

Francesco Belcastro 01:56

So his work is very well established in this field. But luckily for us, he's also a big football fan, and he's also interested in, he's working on football and politics. He's got an excellent podcast called Radikaal that I would encourage listeners to go and check, because he's very, very interesting. 

Francesco Belcastro 02:14

He's a football fan and he's also a groundhopper. So Cass, welcome to the podcast, welcome to the show. 

Cas Mudde 02:22

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm enthusiastic too. 

Guy Burton 02:24

And can you tell us before we start, because we always ask guests: do you have a particular team that you follow at all? 

Cas Mudde 02:33

Do I have a team that I follow? This is the best timing to actually ask me about it! Because I've been a fan of PSV Eindhoven since I was three years old. And I think for the first time in decades, I'm actually enjoying my team. 

Cas Mudde 02:49

They're not only winning games, but they're creating insane numbers of chances. They play really attractive football. They even play attractive football when they play away against big teams. So it's been a joy to watch them. 

Cas Mudde 03:06

I have another team since I was five in Germany, which is Borussia Mönchengladbach. 

Francesco Belcastro 03:12

Mm -hmm. 

Cas Mudde 03:13

They provide a bit less fun there as they're always in the middle of the pack. But I watch virtually every game of both teams. 

Guy Burton 03:25

And it's easy to do that in America? 

Cas Mudde 03:27

Yeah, they're both on ESPN. And we also mentioned that you're a groundhopper as well. So how do you find that in the States, particularly when it comes to football? 

Cas Mudde 03:37

Yeah, so I'm I love absolutely love going to games. But for me, I go to football for culture, much more than for like, the best players. And so last December, for example, I went to ground hop with my brother, and myself, I think I saw 10 games in 14 days. 

Cas Mudde 04:02

But including three games in Andorra, which was like the experience was just amazing, no one there, but like the vistas were amazing. Now here in the US, it's really hard. So we now have Atlanta United, close by by US standards, that's one and a half hours. 

Cas Mudde 04:24

Before that, the closest MLS team for us was DC, which is nine hours. Just this weekend, I went to see two games, Lexington SC, which is in the US League, one third division kind of, and FC Cincinnati. 

Cas Mudde 04:42

And that meant that I drove 1000 miles, about 1600 kilometers for two games. 

Guy Burton 04:48

That's commitment!  

Francesco Belcastro 04:50

We forget how spoiled we are in Europe, I'm in London, I've got about 25 professional clubs! 

Guy Burton 04:57

And I just, when I just walk down to the bottom of the hill to watch my team here in Brussels! 

Cas Mudde 05:03

That's great. I lived in Antwerp for a long time, and of course, in the Netherlands, where I'm from. And if you just go in a radius of two -hour drive from these type of places, you have three, four different countries and leagues and hundreds of teams. The US is just a different ballgame. 

Francesco Belcastro 05:22

Well, let's move on a bit to your work. Now, your interest in football is very much in the area of intersection between sport and civil society. I know you're working on different projects at the moment. 

Francesco Belcastro 05:33

Can you tell us a bit more about this research? What are you working on? Why is it an area of interest in civil society and football? 

Cas Mudde 05:42

Yeah, so I did research on civil society in the 1990s and early 2000s when I worked a lot on the so -called post communist Europe. There was a lot of debate about civil society. Now, I very simply state that civil society is the space between the state and society and includes all kind of different groups. 

Cas Mudde 06:04

And I've always been interested in that and the myths about it. And to me, like football and sports in general is a space between society, let's say, the family and the state. And it's actually one of the arenas where most people are involved. 

Cas Mudde 06:30

Like almost everyone is passively or actively involved in sports during one time of their life. It's a very important social space. But it's also an important political space. Now, I'm not so much interested in recreational sports. 

Cas Mudde 06:48

So for example, there's this famous book by Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone, which also looks at sports as part of civil society. But he focuses mostly on it as a space to create what is called social capital. 

Cas Mudde 07:04

You learn how to behave as a democratic citizen. I'm more focused on professional sports and on stadiums, and particularly men's soccer, although increasingly women's soccer as well. And so I see stadiums as political arenas. 

Cas Mudde 07:24

They're spaces in which citizens can express themselves traditionally and do express themselves, maybe not in the most narrow party political terms. Like you won't see people shouting up labor or something like that, right? 

Cas Mudde 07:43

But there is, as we all know, there's a lot of expression of identity, for example, be it regional, be it national, whatever it is. But there are other spaces, there are other interesting expressions as well. 

Cas Mudde 07:59

And you see that more than anything, I think, in the Bundesliga in Germany, where you have so many banners with comments on, of course, modern football and like prizes against the securitization of football, but also about, I mean, LGBTQI rights, all these kinds of things. 

Cas Mudde 08:22

Now, what I'm particularly interested in is how has that changed with so -called modern football? Like, and I see two threats to this open space. One is from illiberal actions, let's say authoritarianism. 

Guy Burton 08:40

Hmm 

Cas Mudde 08:41

SWhich is in part comes from authoritarian regimes, like think about Erdogan's regime in Turkey. When I went to Turkey to see Besiktas for example it was almost impossible to get a ticket you have to show your passport, you have to like you work through a system that is both corrupt and authoritarian. They know exactly where you sit. You're surveilled all the time, right? But this surveillance also happens increasingly in so -called democratic regimes. Like, I mean, if you go to a game in the Premier League for example you're surveilled all the time. It's even worse for Champions League or UEFA things. And the other thing that has an effect on- that closes this space for political contention is, for the sake of argument, neoliberalism. The fact that it's all about massive amounts of money now. And clubs and leagues become brands. And brands want blandness to a certain extent. Outside of their own brand everything else should be bland because that's divisive. And again to me the Premier League is the best example. Leaving aside that it has pretty much like gentrified the atmosphere out of the stadiums, there is virtually no political expression because it is not allowed. Like they will directly draw your banner down because people in China might be upset right or people somewhere else might be upset. So that's what I tried to look at, by at the same time acknowledging that the sanitization of stadiums also has some positive aspects. Like I went to games in the 70s 80s... 

Francesco Belcastro 10:30

Mm. 

Cas Mudde 10:30

...It was not a particularly welcoming space for most people, including some white men, but definitely everyone else, right? The sanitized stadiums of the Premier League are much safer for families, are much safer for minorities, be they sexual or gender or whatever. 

Cas Mudde 10:50

And so I'm not blind to that. Like I'm not, for me, while modern football is almost completely bad, traditional football was not pure. Like it had a lot of dark sides. 

Guy Burton 11:05

Some of the work that you've been very well known for in your political work in recent years has been very much about the far right and populism. And yet this project you're talking about of civil society and football is much broader than that. 

Guy Burton 11:18

But if I was to ask you whether or not there are elements or components of that far right and that populist politics, do you see that in the stadiums or do you see that being superseded by other elements in relation to civil society and football? 

Cas Mudde 11:35

Yeah, so some of the political science work, let's say, on far right and populism that I've done definitely informs my thinking. And to be clear, though, I always studied the far right and populism within the context of liberal democracy. 

Cas Mudde 11:52

So like, I'm not an anthropologist, I'm not even fascinated much by the far right. I know what they stand for, I know who they are. I'm interested in how they affect liberal democracy, broader society. 

Cas Mudde 12:07

And so I'm also not particularly interested in far right hooligans, I think hooliganism gets way too much attention in the media, and academia, and the relationship to the far right is, most of the time, highly problematic. 

Cas Mudde 12:26

But I think that where I see similarities is the far right and populism are threats to pluralism, like to the essence of liberal democracy, the fact that you have different groups with different values and interests, but they're all legitimate. 

Cas Mudde 12:49

And I see in modern football, this urge and pressure towards a homogenization of culture. But I said, I also see an increasing importance of illiberal regimes. I've talked about Turkey, but Hungary is a very good example. Like the Orban regime, not only surveils its potential dissents, oddly enough, particularly the team, Ferencvaros, or Fradi, which is actually a team that pretty much since the end of communism has had right wing politicians as its presidents. 

Cas Mudde 13:35

But nevertheless, security there is enormous, because he's afraid that that there will be anti Orban protests there. But he's also spent massive amounts of money in football. both in Hungary and in Hungarian -speaking communities outside of Hungary, to kind of strengthen his appeal, and you see that more broadly. 

Cas Mudde 14:01

I think the other thing that you see in football, that you see in society, is the mainstreaming of illiberal regimes of far right. I mean, we have UEFA big games being played in Azerbaijan, in Hungary, Budapest, and you see UEFA and FIFA bend over all the time. 

Cas Mudde 14:24

I mean, we have the Qatar issue with the One Love band. It's a very good example of the mainstreaming and the normalization. They're just a country like anything else. And as we saw in a lot of the debate about Qatar, for example, particularly in the global South, it was this, well, these are your values, like in the West, and we shouldn't have to adapt those. 

Cas Mudde 14:53

And that makes football and sports in general, but football in particular, has the most popular sport. A very useful venue for far right and illiberal actors to get their message through. And I think, finally, you see some element of radicalization of the right among fans, but I think that's strongly exaggerated. 

Cas Mudde 15:25

I mean, James Montague has a really good book, like Ultras, which I think does a really good job at not exaggerating that. But he also explains that particularly in Italy, you see a radicalization of the right in society, and you then see that also among the fans, you see the same in Poland, for example, but you don't necessarily see it everywhere. 

Cas Mudde 15:50

And finally, you see the resistance to it. And so you see left wing groups in the stands, again, Germany being a very good example, but you also see these kind of alternative structures, fan owned clubs, and I'm looking at those also a little bit in like, is there a way to live around, for the sake of argument, capitalism? 

Cas Mudde 16:17

I must say I'm skeptical. I love all the initiatives, but they're very small. 

Guy Burton 16:22

Mm. 

Francesco Belcastro 16:23

And I say for the benefit of listeners that we have an episode, an excellent one, with James Montague a couple of months ago, and they can find in previous episodes. And also, I would like to draw the attention of listeners to an episode with David Goldblatt that we had at the very beginning, where there's quite a lot on sort of this relationship between football and political space that I think would be of interest. 

Francesco Belcastro 16:46

Cas, if we could talk a bit about your own podcast, Radikaal. You host this podcast that looks at football, sports, football in particular, politics and music, which I think are your three sort of passions in work and life. 

Francesco Belcastro 17:02

And you've interviewed and spoken to a lot of interesting people that dealt with the relationship between sport and politics specifically. Have you learned any lessons? Can you summarize a bit for us what are the main insights, if you want, that you gained from hosting Radikaal? 

Cas Mudde 17:21

Yeah, I'd love to. I don't do Radikaal anymore because of mostly time. I did everything by myself. It's a lot of time. But it started as many podcasts started, like a middle -aged man in the pandemic who thinks, what can I do? 

Cas Mudde 17:44

But it also started very much and was always really a podcast for me. Not about me, because I rarely really featured in it. I just asked questions. But I interviewed those people that I wanted to listen to. 

Cas Mudde 18:01

And that was particularly the case with music and sports where I just knew less than about populism, far right. And the essence of Radikaal always was, there is politics outside of the traditional arenas that we think about. 

Cas Mudde 18:22

We too often limit politics to parties and parliaments and governments. But particularly in so -called lower culture, which is sports and music, there's a lot of politics. And I've always been interested in that. 

Cas Mudde 18:38

And I kind of wanted to share that. And so I think what the podcast did was that it showed that both music and sports are political, deeply political, and in a very complex way. Now with regard to football in particular, I think I learned a lot, which was in part because I also didn't know that much about it. 

Cas Mudde 19:04

And so I think one of these watershed moments for me, for example, speaking to Brenda Elsey about the development of women's soccer, particularly in the Latin American context, I read her co -authored book as well. 

Cas Mudde 19:20

And I was completely unaware that women's soccer had been banned and not just been banned, but for decades. And also I think what I totally didn't know, and I think I'm certainly not alone, was that women's soccer actually was relatively popular before it was banned. 

Cas Mudde 19:39

That there was a reason that it was banned. I think like most other people who ignored women's soccer for far too long, I had this idea that it wasn't popular because it never had been popular. And so for me, that was a real big change. 

Cas Mudde 19:56

I interviewed the Dutch women's soccer player, Tessa Middag, which was really interesting. And she talked about the dilemma of how to develop women's soccer. And whether that should be done autonomously or within the structure of men's soccer. 

Cas Mudde 20:15

And it is a fascinating discussion. And both have strong pros and cons. And again, I had never really thought about that and what it comes with. I loved that. And then finally, guests like Shireen Ahmed, Manisha Tailor, and Luisa Tobino Torres, who discussed how fans, but also players from marginalized communities, tries to carve out a space for them within the sports. 

Cas Mudde 20:51

And then of course, how phenomenally conservative the sport is, both at the level of associations, at clubs, at players, and at fans. And the heroic struggle to just be yourself in the stand. And so yeah, those are things that I absolutely take away from. 

Cas Mudde 21:12

Yeah, it's interesting. 

Francesco Belcastro 21:14

You mentioned this debate, because we've got something very similar in the UK in terms of within the structure of men's football or outside, because there was a big investment in England in particular. 

Francesco Belcastro 21:26

But it's mostly the main clubs, the big clubs are dominating women's football now. So there is a similar scenario. I just want to say that if you ever want to bring the podcast back, we could do a special called the FootPol-Radikaal and join forces! 

Francesco Belcastro 21:42

So consider that as an open offer!

Cas Mudde 21:44

I will do that, I will keep that in mind. 

Guy Burton 21:46

But also, I mean, I mean, and I'm sorry to keep plugging our previous episodes, but some of these points that you raised as well, Cas, was, you know, this, this, this idea of how do you develop a women's football, you know, in the autonomously or sort of with through the women, you know, with association to the men's game. 

Guy Burton 22:01

That's something that came out in our own conversations with Carrie Dunn, uh, in, in our first episode we did last year. Can I actually ask, because also one of the other things you do as well as having done that podcast, uh, you, you have, obviously your, your day job is being, is being a professor at the university. And you actually do teach a course on soccer and politics at the University of Georgia. 

Guy Burton 22:22

Um, so any listeners out there who are thinking about where to study and interested in the subject, you know, maybe Cass's course is the one to go to! And what, what we particularly liked about it, having read the, uh, you know, the overview of it is that you accept the fact that football and sports and politics can't be separate. 

Guy Burton 22:39

I mean, that's the premise on which we work as well. Um, but if you could tell us a little bit about the course, um, you know, how you came to, to start teaching it, how long you've been teaching it, how it's been received and, and, and how it's being developed over time. 

Guy Burton 22:52

I mean, obviously this work, you're starting to develop this area of work around civil society and football more generally: I mean, how much of that has been influenced by the teaching or, you know, the teaching sort of influencing the, you know, the, the, the research that you're going to be doing. 

Cas Mudde 23:08

Yes, I'm fairly, sadly, I have long done what I thought the discipline required me to do, which was also very much influenced that I've been on the job market for almost half of my career before coming here. 

Cas Mudde 23:25

And while I always was very interested in working on soccer and politics, football and politics, or music and politics, I still want to write a book about the politics of [?] music. That wouldn't get me a job. 

Cas Mudde 23:41

And so the far right and populism did! And so for a very long time, I kind of jumped through the hoops. And being now well established and nearer to retirement, I felt that I could do something else. 

Cas Mudde 23:58

And one of the things I noticed here on campus at the University of Georgia over the years was how many students walk around with jerseys of soccer teams. Unfortunately, almost all the Premier League, and they're almost all the big teams of the Champions League. 

Cas Mudde 24:15

But actually, football is more popular than virtually any other sport outside of our college, American football team, right. And so what I also noticed was they had no understanding of football as I have for them, it is entertainment, there's no culture to it. 

Cas Mudde 24:35

And so I wanted really, as an evangelical, kind of wanted to bring that gospel that football is about culture. And so I started the course in spring 2022-3 for the first time. And it's very odd, because unlike some of my other courses, which are pretty bland, like European politics, it wasn't full at all. 

Cas Mudde 25:02

I had 27 students, and I could take 44. I had probably five real football fans. I had at least 10 students who had nothing with football. And that has a lot to do with risk aversion of students, and it was a new course, right. 

Cas Mudde 25:22

But they all loved it. And they all said it was very challenging. And to a certain extent, it is a more radical course than I teach on many other things. Because as you are well aware, a lot of the literature within the broader domain of soccer and politics, football and politics, is about identity. 

Guy Burton 25:43

Hmm.

Cas Mudde 25:43

And, and a lot of the identity literatures from the humanities comes out of critical studies. And so while in my regular political science work, I would pretty much never use Judith Butler, I did in this course, right, I talk about heteronormativity in this course, which barely comes through the students, I think, overall, their minds were blown about how political football is. 

Cas Mudde 26:13

And, and that came, I taught it direct, like directly after Qatar. And so that in itself already set them up. But it was truly like, for many of them, they just look at, at football and sports differently now. 

Cas Mudde 26:34

I think the course worked for me well, but I had too much on identity, which the, I mean, from a theoretical point of view, the, the identity formation is relatively the same, whether it's a regional, national, sexual gender identity. 

Cas Mudde 26:55

I didn't have too much about the economics of football, a few good articles, I think, but I think can more but particularly what I lack is the governance of football. And in that sense, how football is used. 

Cas Mudde 27:15

And not just the ways that we always think about them by the evil people. Like, we all know the Argentina '78 story and things like that. But actually, it is also very much used and abused in liberal democracies. 

Cas Mudde 27:33

And so I think that I tried to get a little bit more of that in. 

Guy Burton 27:37

There's an element of securitization as well in some of the literature as well. Given what you were alluding to earlier about surveillance and the way that the stadia is structured, I'm struck that when I look at some of the literature, some of that seems to come through or gets quite a bit of attention as well. 

Guy Burton 27:54

So there's a danger that you go too far down that path as well, that this distorts the view of the game and its relationship as well. Francesco, is there anything you want to add? 

Francesco Belcastro 28:08

Yeah, I wanted to ask one thing. Based on your experience, you've developed the podcast Radikaal, and then you've taught football and politics or soccer and politics, if you want, and since you've done it in an American context. Could you perhaps tell our listeners whether you see any areas of intersection between football and politics? So new emerging developments that they should keep an eye on in the kind of short to medium term? 

Francesco Belcastro 28:37

Are there areas that are ignored and they shouldn't be ignored? 

Cas Mudde 28:41

Yes, I think I disagree a bit. I see references to the securitization of football, but I don't see many analyses of them. And I remember reading this article about the fan zones in Zurich during the euros of, what was it, 2008, I think in Austria and Switzerland. 

Cas Mudde 29:08

And it was mind -blowing to me. And it reminded me again so much of the securitization of spaces as a consequence of G8 conferences and these kind of things. But we now see this. And one of the most remarkable things to me is how easily these type of restrictions are accepted by the public and by both sides in the political debate. 

Cas Mudde 29:37

As soon as you say hooligan, then it seems that every critical thinking stops and the state is allowed to do everything, even though that alleged hooligan is sometimes just one person throwing beer at a player. 

Cas Mudde 29:54

But it's directly linked to the vivid image of thousands of people fighting with each other, which is so insanely rare, and particularly these days. And so I look at the securitization of soccer that alliterates better, not so only from the experience of football fans, which of course, having experienced myself for decades, this type of securitization definitely takes away a lot of the fun and makes football in lower leagues far more fun to go to. 

Cas Mudde 30:34

But also the consequence that it has for liberal democracy, because that's the ironic part of this. The securitization is not just in the stadium, it is around the stadium. And actually, I have an op -ed in The Guardian coming out in the coming days about that and against that. 

Cas Mudde 30:53

But if you go to a game, for example, of PSV Eindhoven, then that securitization starts already at the central station, in the whole space from there, which is actually in the main shopping center of the city. 

Cas Mudde 31:08

And so everyone who is in that space is treated with the same securitization. And generally, once the riot police gets into gear and starts to get really worked up, they don't distinguish much between whether you're a shopper or a football fan. 

Cas Mudde 31:27

And so I also think from a political point of view, we can do more. There is a lot of mobilization against this securitization among fans. And there's even some legal help, particularly in Germany and the Netherlands as well, for football fans. 

Cas Mudde 31:45

But football fans still very much address it as something about football. But for me, the securitization of soccer fits within the broader securitization of society, which goes back in particular to 9/11 and securitization of immigration, minorities, everything. 

Cas Mudde 32:07

And so this is a debate and this is a struggle that I think football fans can only win if they actually make it clear that they are not different. Because as long as this is about football, you run the risk that your average citizen associates football fans with hooligans. 

Cas Mudde 32:30

And once that connection is made, you're gone. So for me, a lot of the discussion and my own work will be about that. And as I said, it will be about how is soccer governed more broadly. And what to drink or what you can say and can't say, what you can drink and can't drink, is what you can wear. 

Cas Mudde 32:59

I'm not talking about far right symbols. Like I was in Brazil at Corinthians against Palmeiras. And just before that, I had gone to a small game of Portuguesa, an irrelevant small team. And I had bought a shirt of that team. 

Cas Mudde 33:16

And I was not allowed to have that shirt in the stadium of Corinthians against Palmeiras. I mean, I smuggled it in under another shirt in the end. But the surveillance and the authoritarian structure around football stadiums, I think, has gone completely through the rest. 

Francesco Belcastro 33:38

Thank you very much. It's been absolutely fascinating. Guy. I know you're a big fan of Cas. So you want to ask him other 15 questions, but unfortunately, you're not allowed! You might be allowed a half question if you want! 

Guy Burton 33:48

We might just ask Cas to come back and talk to us when he's you know develop it develop the work a little bit further Then I can ask all those questions!

Cas Mudde 33:54

Yeah, I would love to!

Francesco Belcastro 33:57

Cas, thank you very much. Thanks for your time. It's been absolutely fascinating. Yeah, and we definitely definitely have to do a Radikaal-FootPol or FootPol-Radikaal episode at some point. Guy? 

Guy Burton 34:09

Yeah, definitely. Well, listen, this has been fantastic, so thanks, Cass, for taking the time to talk to us. Thank you. Before we go, we should just say as well that, again, as Francesco said at the very start, thanks to those who've gotten in touch with us already about topics and guests for future episodes. 

Guy Burton 34:26

So please do keep those coming in. And as ever, could you please also either like, share, subscribe the episode and leave messages about what we could do better in the future as well. It just leaves us for me to- Oh! And also you can do all of that through the various social media that we're on, whether it's Twitter / X, Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, and I'm on LinkedIn as well. 

Francesco Belcastro 34:52

And your home address is, Guy? 

Guy Burton 34:54

No, no, not sharing my home address! So it leaves us just for us to say goodbye. So thanks again to Cas, and also thanks to Francesco, and we'll catch up next week then, yeah. 

Guy Burton 35:06

Okay. Bye. 

Francesco Belcastro 35:08

Bye, bye. 

Cas Mudde 35:09

Bye.