PARIS—It was late-1945, and distrust of Russia was rising. British military planners had recently hatched secret plans, codenamed “Unthinkable,” to attack the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill’s famous “iron curtain” speech that foreshadowed the onset of the Cold War was just months away.
But as they stood on the brink of what would become decades of nuclear-tipped enmity, the British and Soviet governments found a patch of common ground in football. Responding to an invite championed by a British government minister who later won the Nobel Peace Prize, Russia flew the newly crowned champions of the Soviet league, Dynamo Moscow, to Britain for a ground-breaking goodwill tour.
Over the course of November, the Soviets thrashed Cardiff City, 10-1, beat Arsenal, 4-3, in a fog-bound match at Tottenham’s stadium, White Hart Lane, and drew against Chelsea (3-3) and Glasgow’s Rangers (2-2).
Why reheat this old history now? Because football is again being dragged into the cool, if not yet cold, war brewing between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Western governments alarmed by his administration’s behavior.
As in 1945 the same question is being asked: Could football, should football, be employed, in the approach to the June-July World Cup in Russia, as a political tool? Might a month of 32 teams playing each other across 11 Russian cities be exactly what the world needs amid the darkening geopolitical gloom? Could squabbling nations take a breather, however fleetingly, around a shared passion for the global game? Or should governments, even teams, stay away, to punish Putin for the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy and other outrages his government is accused of and denies?
Certainly, the World Cup won’t be the party that seemed possible when Fifa selected Russia as host in 2010. Then, with Dmitry Medvedev in power after the first two of what has now become four terms as president for Putin, it was tempting to imagine the World Cup as a celebration of the Cold War’s end and to picture football fans partying where Soviet tanks and missiles paraded on Red Square.
But that was before the Russian annexation of Crimea, its military backing for the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad and for separatists in eastern Ukraine, before the hacking of Western democracies and institutions, and before Sergei Skripal and his daughter were found unconscious on a public bench in the English city of Salisbury on March 4. Britain says they were poisoned with a Soviet-made military-grade nerve agent known as Novichok.