When football became a weapon of the Cold War

Summary

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HistoryExtra Podcast Summary

Episode: When football became a weapon of the Cold War
Date: July 5, 2026
Host: Spencer Mizzen
Guests: Tony Shaw, Professor of Contemporary History, University of Hertfordshire; Alan McDougall, Professor of History, University of Guelph
Main Theme:
Exploring how football (soccer) became a battleground for ideological, cultural, and political rivalry during the Cold War—through stories of iconic football matches and the historical context surrounding them.

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1. Episode Overview

This episode of HistoryExtra explores the intersection of football and Cold War politics, framed by Tony Shaw and Alan McDougall's new book, Cold War Football: A History in 10 Matches. Through in-depth discussion, the historians illuminate how key football matches during the Cold War became proxies for broader ideological competition, shaped national identities, and sometimes had dire consequences for players involved.

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2. Key Discussion Points & Insights

a. Choosing the Ten Matches (04:02–05:57)

• Tony Shaw: The challenge was to select only ten matches from thousands, aiming for both geographic and chronological diversity, with matches from Europe, South America, and Africa—not just the familiar U.S.-Soviet lens.
• Alan McDougall: The book covers 1945–1991, starting with Dynamo Moscow’s tour in postwar Britain as a "preview" of Cold War football and ending with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the first FIFA Women’s World Cup in China (1991).
  • “We wanted to find some matches which are real Caucasus…and some games which are slightly quirky games that probably had not been heard of before.” — Tony Shaw (04:26)
  • “Our first game takes us to sort of 1945 and Dynamo Moscow's tour of the UK…which, as we argue, is kind of a bit of a preview of the Cold War in footballing terms.” — Alan McDougall (04:57)

b. Arsenal vs. Dynamo Moscow, 1945: War Minus the Shooting (05:57–10:12)

• The match: A foggy, chaotic clash at Tottenham’s ground, wrapped in intrigue and mutual suspicion, as both nations jockeyed for political advantage and sporting credibility.
• Political significance: Both sides saw football as a tool to display postwar power and ideological superiority.
• Memorable moments: Disparity in playing styles and rules, accusations of cheating (e.g., Soviet referee, illegal substitutes), and colorful anecdotes like the British player who refused to leave after being sent off.
  • “Stalin was…trying to use sport, and football in particular, to show…that maybe people living in the west might want to think about communism more broadly and what it has to appeal to you.” — Tony Shaw (08:25)
  • “All manner of tricks get played…I mean, the game was a nightmare, mainly because there was a Pea Super of a fog that descended…” — Tony Shaw (08:54)

c. Why Football Became the Chosen Battlefield (10:12–11:37)

• Alan McDougall: Football, already the world’s most popular sport, becomes a tool for national identity (notably in decolonizing Africa/Asia) and a vehicle for soft (and sometimes hard) power.
  • “Football and national teams are intrinsic to Cold War struggles to free countries from colonial overlords.” — Alan McDougall (10:40)
  • Cites the FLN Algerian team as an example, even if no single match fit the book’s criteria.

d. The Hungary “Golden Team” and 1954 World Cup Final (11:37–16:19)

• The tactical revolution: Hungary, fueled by a mix of pre-war Central European football culture and state-backed sporting ambition, dominated early 1950s football with Puskas (“The Galloping Major”) as the star.
• Impact of defeat: Their stunning loss to West Germany in the 1954 World Cup final was a national trauma, sparking political unrest and contributing to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
  • “The football team is this one shining light…it’s almost assumed it’s going to be a coronation…when that doesn’t happen…there’s an immediate political backlash in Hungary.” — Alan McDougall (14:46)

e. Spain v. Soviet Union, 1964 European Nations Cup Final (18:29–22:26)

• Historical grudge: Rooted in the Spanish Civil War and World War II alliances, this final pits Franco’s Spain against the USSR, both at transitional moments in their regimes.
• Outcome and aftermath: Spain’s win is used by Franco’s regime for propaganda; the Soviet coach is sacked, and Khrushchev is ousted months later.
  • “So as you can imagine, the Spanish regime makes great political capital of this victory. It’s a victory for Franco.” — Alan McDougall (21:57)

f. Zaire vs. Yugoslavia, 1974 World Cup: Cold War in Africa (22:26–27:33)

• Mobutu’s ambitions: Zaire’s dictator oversaw a disastrous campaign, involving threats to players and unpaid wages. Their 9-0 defeat was compounded by fear and confusion.
• Iconic moment: The infamous free-kick violation against Brazil, often misinterpreted as ignorance of the rules, was in truth a desperate act amidst political intimidation.
  • “Mobutu then says to the team, if you get beat in your final game against Brazil, the World cup holders, if you get beat by more than three goals, you are not going to be seeing your families again.” — Tony Shaw (25:22)
  • “And Mwepo Ilunga…runs out from the wall and hoofs the ball as far as he can…The truth is very different…a combination of fear, anger, frustration…” — Tony Shaw (26:34)

g. The Lutz Eigendorf Case: East v. West, and the Stasi (27:33–30:29)

• Defection and demise: The East German “Beckenbauer” fled to West Germany, only to die in suspicious circumstances likely tied to Stasi reprisal.
• Footballers as political symbols: The case illustrated the personal risks of being a pawn in Cold War rivalry.
  • “There are rumours…that Stasi operatives did this kind of blinking operation where they flashed lights…forcing him to crash…” — Alan McDougall (28:57)

h. Why Eastern European Teams Have Faded since the Cold War (31:21–33:56)

• Collapse of socialism: The loss of state support and infrastructural breakdown led to the decline of East European club football in the Champions League era.
• Transformation of global football: The commercial, free-market globalization of football marginalized Eastern teams.
  • “After communism collapses, a lot of the infrastructure for football…falls apart.” — Alan McDougall (32:17)

i. What’s Been Lost Since 1991: “Stepping into the Unknown” (33:56–36:34)

• Loss of mystery: In the Cold War era, matches brought together teams and playing styles that had never clashed, introducing spectators to a “step into the unknown” and an aura of the exotic.
  • “That exoticness…we can’t recapture that true glamour, I think, these days.” — Tony Shaw (35:26)
• Today’s hyper-visible global game: Now, fans are familiar with most top players and teams; much of the mystique has gone.
  • “There’s nothing new under the sun at the 2026 World Cup…” — Alan McDougall (35:43)

j. Personal Picks: Favourite Cold War Footballer (36:34–39:12)

• Tony Shaw: Eusebio—especially for his heroics in Portugal’s 1966 comeback against North Korea.
  • “Take a look at Eusebio, find some clips from Eusebio and do some reading around Eusebio.” — Tony Shaw (37:19)
• Alan McDougall: Ferenc Puskas—“the Galloping Major,” a portly, magical playmaker whose career traversed regimes and sides of the Iron Curtain.
  • “Pushkas was…this very elegant playmaker. Bit of a character as well…he kind of resisted…being politically typecast…” — Alan McDougall (38:12)

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3. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The Cold War cast a shadow over all aspects of life, including the world’s favourite sport. All sides of the ideological divide used football to score political goals.” — Spencer Mizzen (02:14)
• “On the face of it, the British government wouldn’t be interested in a match between Arsenal and Dynamo Moscow. But we know, sort of behind the scenes…[they] played a role in getting Arsenal to choose a few guest players…” — Tony Shaw (06:56)
• “Football and national teams are intrinsic to Cold War struggles to free countries from colonial overlords.” — Alan McDougall (10:40)
• “Pushkas was really like many of the players in our book, mostly interested in playing football. He loved the game and so he kind of resisted…I think, being politically typecast.” — Alan McDougall (38:38)

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4. Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment Topic | Timestamp | |--------------------------------------------------------------------------|-------------| | Introduction to theme and guests | 02:14–02:41 | | Selecting the ten defining matches for the book | 04:02–05:57 | | The Arsenal vs. Dynamo Moscow, 1945 match and political intrigue | 05:57–10:12 | | Why football was the chosen battlefield of the Cold War | 10:12–11:37 | | The Hungarian “Golden Team” and 1954 World Cup Final | 11:37–16:19 | | Spain vs. Soviet Union, 1964: Ultimate Cold War grudge match | 18:29–22:26 | | Zaire v. Yugoslavia, 1974: African football under dictatorship | 22:26–27:33 | | Lutz Eigendorf and Stasi retribution | 27:33–30:29 | | The decline of Eastern European teams post-1991 | 31:21–33:56 | | Loss of mystery since the Cold War: “stepping into the unknown” | 33:56–36:34 | | Favourite Cold War footballers: Eusebio, Puskas | 36:34–39:12 |

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5. Conclusion

This episode reveals the profound and often turbulent ways in which football became an extension of Cold War politics—a mirror of ideological battles, proxy for national pride, and sometimes an arena for genuine cultural exchange. The stories and analysis offered by Tony Shaw and Alan McDougall provide depth, nuance, and lively color to the history of both global politics and the beautiful game. Their closing reflections on the loss of mystique in modern football offer food for thought—as does their reminder of the sport’s enduring power to both divide and unite.

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Transcript

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[Tony Shaw]

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[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

The Cold War casts a shadow over all aspects of life, including the world's favourite sport. All sides of the ideological divide used football to score political goals. In this episode of the History Extra Podcast, Tony shaw and Alan McDougal talk Spencer Mizzen through some of the most explosive Cold War footballing clashes. It's a story that takes in Pele, North Korean upsets and a galloping major.

It's a pleasure to welcome Tony Shaw and Alan McDougall to the history Extra Podcast. Thank you very much for joining us today, chaps. So we're a couple of weeks into the 2026 World cup and I've already watched the likes of Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe, Harry Kane and Erling Haaland struck their stuff on football's biggest stage. However, when it comes to footballing cast lists, I think your new book, CALDWELL History in 10 matches takes quite some beating. We've got Pele, Eusebio, Beckenbauer, Matthews, Puskas. I mean, not to mention Franco, Castro, Khrushchev and the Beatles. So, with that in mind, the Cold War spanned more than four decades. Were a lot of football matches played in that period, and in a lot of them, the participants were trying to score political goals against one another. So given all that, how much of a challenge was it to pull this book together? How did you kind of go about picking out the 10 games that for you best encapsulate geopolitical rivalries in the Cold War period?

[Tony Shaw]

You're right. On the face of it, it might be really difficult to disentangle from thousands of match a good old 10. But what we were trying to do is several things. We're trying to, on the one hand, be as global as we can be. So we're trying to get matches from Europe, from South America, from Africa, because most people think of the Cold War as principally a Soviet Union versus the United States, or they think of the Berlin blockade in Europe, etc. So we wanted to do that. We wanted to try and find some matches which were real Caucasus. Some of the matches we've got. The 1966 game between North Korea and Portugal is a 5, 3, sort of World cup classic. We wanted to find some games which are slightly quirky games that probably had not been heard of before. So we've got. One of the games that we look at is a game between Yugoslavia and Ireland from the mid-1950s. Alan, do you want to think of other reasons?

[Alan McDougall]

Yeah, I mean, I think those two factors were pretty important. I mean, we wanted to sort of spread across the whole of the span of the Cold War. I mean, historians generally date the Cold War to 1947 is, I guess, the official start date of the Cold War in many historians eyes. But our first game takes us to sort of 1945 and Dina Momosco's tour of the UK just at the end of World War II, which, as we argue, is kind of a bit of a preview of the Cold War in footballing terms. And then we take it all the way through to the year in which the Cold War ends, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the fall of communism there in 1991, which was also the year in which the foot, the first official FIFA Women's World cup took place in China, just two years after the Tiananmen Square massacres. So one of the surviving Communist regimes, in cahoots with FIFA, to host this sort of groundbreaking women's tournament. So, yeah, geographical range, sort of chronological range, and a mixture, as Tony says, of matches that are iconic and matches that hopefully will be new and exciting to readers.

[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

Now, it was in December 1945, I believe, that George Orwell described international sports as war, minus the shooting. And a game that I guess may have been near the front of his mind when he uttered those words is one you just mentioned there. And that was the clash between Arsenal and Dinamo Moscow a month earlier in November 1945, which, as you just said, sort of kicks off your book. So, Tony, why did this game prove so acrimonious? I mean, the Cold War hadn't even started yet and Britain and the Soviet Union were ostensibly, at least, still allies.

[Tony Shaw]

Both countries, Britain and the Soviet Union, on the face of it, saw this tour as a way of solidifying the grand alliance which had just defeated Hitler. Hitler's six months dead by this point. But really behind the scenes, what both countries are seeking to do is to use football to flex their political muscles. On the face of it, the British government wouldn't be interested in a match between Arsenal and Dynamo Moscow. But we know, sort of behind the scenes, we know that perhaps the government played a role in getting Arsenal to choose a few guest players, one of which was Stanley Matthews, the great wizard of the wing who played for Stoke at the time. And Arsenal brought in a number of guest players to bolster. That was perhaps fair enough. A number of their best players were still on duty militarily overseas. So it made sense that was what was done in the Second World War, to bring in guest players. But we also know that the British Foreign Office had been in contact with their embassy in Moscow to try and get the real inside information on how Daniel Moscow played. And even the Moscow embassy even fed information on how Daniel Moscow took penalties. So that's interesting. And Stalin. Stalin was really, of course, trying to show that the Soviet Union was the great victor of the Second World War. It had been very isolationist before the war. Here we have the Soviet Union trying to use sport, and football in particular, to show a. That it played sport brilliantly. And it did, Daniel Moscow played in a really innovative way. British people had never seen a Soviet team play before and they played in this pacavochka style, which was short passing Movement of players around the pitch in a way in which Holland played total football in the 1970s. And Stalin's wanting to use football victories a way of showing that Soviet football was stylish. Soviet football was progressive. Maybe you people living in the west might want to think about communism more broadly and what it has to appeal to you. The game was a nightmare, mainly because there was a P Super of a fog that descended across White Hart Lane. It wasn't played at Highbury. Highbury had been attacked by the Luftwaffe, so the game had to play, played at Yr Lane. And the Soviet teams and the British teams then played by different rules. So if you were Soviet, you were allowed to pull shirts. If you were British, you were allowed to barge goalkeepers. The referee was, bizarrely, a Russian referee who'd come with the tourists. And the Russians insisted that in this game against the best team in Britain, they want their referee to play. And the referee, unfortunately can't see what's happening on the fog, foggy pitch. The players can't even distinguish opponents from their teammates. And so all manner of tricks get played by both teams. You know, rumors circulate that the Soviet team bring on the 12th man. There's a case of one Arsenal player, George Jure, is sent off by the referee for hitting a Soviet player. And he gets to the other side of the pitch, away from the referee, and he decides not to go off the pitch after all, he stays on the wing and he carries on playing the game. So there's violence in the game, there's disputes over the way the game ought to be officiated. The Arsenal manager is accused of trying to stop the game when Arsenal are behind because he's laid a big capitalist bet on Arsenal winning. The Soviets win four three classic game. And really showed as a number of other matches on the tour that the Soviets were really better at football than the Brits were.

[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

So it's pretty acrimonious. But one question this sort of raises, why football? Why did, say, the Soviet Union and other nations during the Cold War choose football in particular as a vehicle to sort of exercise soft and in some cases you could argue hard power.

[Tony Shaw]

Alan.

[Alan McDougall]

I mean, I think the basic answer to that question is that football, then as now, was the world's most popular sport. It was the sport played on all continents. It's a sport that becomes, in the Cold War, for example, a very important driver in decolonization in Africa and Asia, where football and national teams are intrinsic to cobalt struggles to free countries from colonial overlords. One Game we were trying to get into the book was from the Algerian national team, which joined up with the revolutionary movement, the FLN, the National Liberation Front, in the late 50s. And effectively the national team became a sort of touring exhibit for the cause of Algerian independence from French colonial rule. Unfortunately, there wasn't really a game that was good enough or striking enough to kind of fit in. But all around the world, football was a huge spectator sport, particularly in this period after the war when people were desperate for entertainment and football grounds across Europe, not just in Britain, were packed to the rafters. So it's this huge cultural phenomenon, leisure activity, and it is played everywhere in the world, which is not really true. I don't think of many other sports.

[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

Okay. I'd now like to turn to one of the, I guess you call them the most storied teams of the Cold War period, and that's the Hungary side of. Of the early 1950s, which of course featured the brilliant Ferenc Puskas. In the book you write, by competing against their Cold War rivals or enemies, countries introduced new ways of thinking about the game, revolutionizing it tactically. Alan, was this hungry team one of the ultimate sort of expressions of that?

[Alan McDougall]

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, obviously at the end of the Cold War, capitalism, quote, unquote, defeats communism politically and arguably in football terms as well. But probably the greatest team, or certainly one of the most beloved teams from the entire Cold War period is the great Hungarian team of the early to mid-1950s. And in some ways they're built on what Tony was talking about in our opening chapter. Dinamo Moscow came to Europe in 1945 and played this short passing style with a lot of fluidity of movement, more of a sweeper keeper, a bit of a deeper lying forward, a sort of a collective approach that communist politicians in the Soviet Union and Hungary and elsewhere were quite keen to put down to kind of a manifestation of communism, sort of collective ethos. I mean, the history of football in Hungary actually tells you that Hungary's brilliance and football went back to long before the communists came to power in Hungary after World War II. There was actually a lot of British influence in early Hungarian football, which was at this sort of nexus of Central European football, along with its neighbor Austria, where some of the early revolutionary football tactics had first developed. So it's kind of a combination after World War II of this rich pre communist history in Hungary of football traditions married to a ruthless communist regime that sees football, a bit like Stalin, as a way to kind of really polish its reputation abroad. And, you know, you often need luck in these things. Right. Just by chance, a generational group of of players developed, based at the Army Club honved on the outskirts of Budapest. And as you mentioned, sort of the star figure of that was the so called galloping major Ferenc Puskas, who led Hungary on this long unbeaten run in the early 1950s, including the Olympic title in 52, two iconic victories against England at Wembley in 1953, and then again in Budapest just before the 1954 World cup, which leads into Hungary then going to that World cup in 1954 as the hottest of hot favorites. And then we get to the final

[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

of course at which they lost to West Germany, which from reading your book was great surprise to lots of people. To what extent did that defeat puncture hunger's sense of self confidence, prestige?

[Alan McDougall]

I think it had a huge political impact. I mean it might be strange for listeners to think now, but yes, in 1954 West Germany were the big underdogs here. The team was just recovering from the war. They hadn't played that much competitive international football. Hungary was this sort of steamroller who'd won every game since the early 1950s basically, or hadn't lost. So I think a lot of Hungary's sort of national pride, if you like, in the early 50s under communist rule was invested in the football team. This was a period of really brutal, repressive dictatorship in Hungary. The peak of sort of Cold War tensions between east and West. Stalin doesn't die until 1953. So there's this kind of very Stalinist government in Hungary which is deeply unpopular. So the football team is this one shining light. It's almost assumed it's going to be a coronation in Switzerland in the World cup in 1954. So when that doesn't happen, when West Germany beat Hungary 32 in the final in quite a contentious, exciting game, there's an immediate political backlash in Hungary. There were protests on the street in Budapest, stones are thrown at the windows of the apartments of the manager, Gustav Sebes, who's also Jewish. And there's kind of abuse of Ferenc Puskas and some of the other players as well. Now things don't happen politically immediately in Hungary, but certainly from the period from 1954 through to 1956. You could argue that the sort of the loss in the 1954 World cup final begins a path that leads to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution when there's a massive of popular uprising against communist rule that is only defeated by the entrance of Soviet tanks in the autumn of 1956, at which point many of Hungary's great players from this period, including Ferenc Puskas, decamp abroad and never return to Hungary under communist rule. Pushkas goes abroad to play brilliantly in Spain for Real Madrid.

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[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

I mentioned Franco and Khrushchev at the top of the podcast and in 1964 both these leaders became embroiled in what could be described as sort of the Ultimate Cold War grunge. That was the European nations cup final between Spain and Soviet Union. Alan, why did this particular match seize the attention of these two ideologically opposed leaders?

[Alan McDougall]

Well, I mean, this is, as you say that this is probably the ultimate Cold War grudge match, because there's a lot of history here. We can go back briefly to the 1930s here when the Soviet Union supported the Republicans fighting against Franco and his loyalists in the Spanish Civil War from 1936-39. A team representing the Basque country in northern Spain had toured the Soviet Union in the 30s to kind of to raise political support for the beleaguered Spanish Republic. So there's a lot of long standing bad blood between the Soviet Union and the Franco regime. Franco Spain had been neutral officially during World War II, but had obviously been politically very sympathetic to Hitler and Mussolini, against whom the Soviet Union, of course, was fighting. So there's a lot of pre Cold War history to factor in here. And then, of course, in the Cold War, Soviet Union is the sort of main force against capitalism in Europe after the Cold War. And Franco Spain is this interesting country that is in some respects a fascist or pseudo fascist dictatorship that has survived World War II, unlike regimes in Italy or in Germany. But it's also, interestingly, as part of its sort of Cold War moves, trying to get closer to the Western Allies, particularly the United States, militarily, economically. And so by 1964, both of these regimes, interestingly, the Soviet Union and Spain, they are dictatorships, you might say, in simple terms, a communist dictatorship versus a fascist dictatorship. But they're also both of them, interestingly, at these moments of sort of liberalizing or at least relaxing elements of their economic and cultural policies under Khrushchev and Franco. And the big difference here really is from 1960 in the first European Championships. In 1960, Spain and the Soviet Union were drawn to play each other in the quarter finals. Franco pulled the rug on that. He didn't want to contaminate the Spanish team by sending them to Moscow into the heartland of Bolshevism. Four years later, Cold War tensions a bit more relaxed in Europe after the building of the Berlin Wall in 61. Spain is looking to liberalize and sort of soften its reputation as this reactionary anti communist force from the 1930s. The Soviet Union under Khrushchev is also sort of looking for a bit more international contacts with the West. So in 1964, second time around, when the teams are drawn to play each other in the second Euros, which are held in Spain, Franco Perhaps with gritted teeth, listens to his more liberal advisors this time and says, okay, we'll let the Soviet Union come and play. And they play the semifinals against different teams in Spain. And then the final in June 64 pits communism against fascism, the Soviet Union against Spain.

[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

And who comes out on top?

[Alan McDougall]

Well, there's no spoiler alerts for a game from 1964, but Spain win the day two one in a pretty decent game. Hot weather in Madrid, closely fought game won by a fantastic header from the Spanish striker Marcelino Past. Another of the legendary figures in our book, the great Soviet goalkeeper Lev Yashin. And so as you can imagine, the Spanish regime makes great political capital of this victory. It's a victory for Franco. It's the 25th anniversary of Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War. And back in the Soviet Union they're pretty angry and humiliated. The Soviet coach is sacked a couple of days after the final. And Khrushchev is not long for that political life either. He's ousted from power in October 1964. Not necessarily because of the finals of the football, but it probably didn't help.

[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

Okay, I'd like now to turn to another game you focus on in the book, and that's Zaire's clash with Yugoslavia in the 1974 World cup finals. Because this particular example, it kind of proves that it wasn't just European countries that believed they could use football as a vehicle to project power in the Cold War. Also, it was suggest that such attempts could have pretty terrifying consequences for the players themselves. Tony, can you describe what went on in this game?

[Tony Shaw]

Yeah. So the game's in the World cup finals in West Germany in 1974. It's between Zaire, we call now DRC and Yugoslavia. So we've got an African dictatorship against a, you could call it communist dictatorship. Tito is still in power in the 1970s. The leader of Zaire at the time is a guy called Mobutu. He's been the dictator who's been helped into power in the mid-1960s by the CIA. But very cleverly, by the early 1970s, he's been playing the Americans off against the Chinese and he's getting financial and military assistance from both of them. So he's a clever guy. He's also a nasty piece of work. He's built a villa for himself, which compares with Versailles, sort of. He's utterly corrupt and he wants to use the football team, lo and behold, as a way to project his authority within Africa and further overseas. So he builds this soccer team. He Brings back lots of the best players who've been playing in Belgium. Zaire had for a long time been part of the Congo, been a long time part of the Belgian empire. Builds a really strong team and he recruits a, lo and behold, a Yugoslavian as a manager. Former Yugoslav goalkeeper. Yugoslavia have been really clever through the Cold War in sort of advertising the sunshine of socialism by sending players and coaches overseas. Mobutu had hired this guy, a very successful football manager, and we get to the 1974 World cup and Mobutu is desperate for his team. They're obviously huge underdogs. It's the first time a black African team has played at the World Cup. But he has this inflated sense of how good his team is. They get beat by Scotland in the first game, 2, 0, and then they get to play Yugoslavia and they get thrashed. 9 nil. One of the heaviest defeats in the history of the World Cup. This utter humiliation for the whole team. Part of the reason why the game turned out to be such a thrashing is Mbutu had stopped paying the players. There'd been a real mess in who was in control of the team. There were even witch doctors involved in helping to pick the team. A number of Mobutus cronies were involved. So there's a mess in choosing the team. So. So it's a 9 nil thrashing. Mobutu then says to the team, if you get beat in your final game against Brazil, the World cup holders, if you get beat by more than three goals, you are not going to be seeing your families again. So the team goes into that final game a combination of angry with. They feel ripped off, they're scared to death that they may not be allowed back into their country or worse things might happen to their families. And so we sort of fold into the nine nil thrashing. The game against Brazil, which has this fascinating moment in it which lots of football fans will perhaps be aware of. It's a moment where Brazil are in the lead and it looks as though Zaire are going to lose by more than three goals. A free kick has been given away with about 10 minutes to go. Just outside the Zaire box. The wall lines up, the referee blows his whistle, and before Rivellino, the great Rivellino free kick taker can shoot into the Zion goal. He'd already scored a goal by this point, by the way. And Mwepo Ilunga, this defender, runs out from the wall and hoofs the ball as far as he can away from the opposition. And British commentators say this is an illustration of not only the Africans cont play football very well. They don't even know the rules. The truth is very different, as I've sort of hinted at. You know, there's the combination of fear, anger, frustration welling up in these Zaire players. And Mwapo Ilunga is just to he partially also he said afterwards that I was trying to get myself sent off so I may not somehow be responsible for the defeat. It ends up being a 30 victory for Brazil. So Isaiah, the players escape the worst of what could have happened, but when they do get back home to Zaire, they're treated, of course, terribly by Mobutu and a lot of them are finished in football and end up in a life in poverty.

[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

Okay. In the book, I think you tell the story of the brilliant but tragic Dinamo Berlin footballer Lutz Eigendorf. I guess his case captures how football crystallized the intense rivalry and bitterness between the two opposing ideologies in the Cold War. Can you describe what happened to him, please?

[Alan McDougall]

Yeah, I mean, Ludstock Eigendorff was known as the East German Beckenbauer. He was a sort of a rising star in East German football in the 70s compared to West Germany's libero greatest player, Franz Beckenbauer. He played for Dinamo Berlin and we've heard the name Dynamo with Dynamo Moscow and also Dynamo Bucharest in one of our book chapters. Dynamo, generally in communist terms were teams that represented the police and or secret police. So he grew up kind of in the academies and then joined the first team at Dinamo Berlin, which was a team that by the 1980s was beginning to dominate East German football in very controversial ways. Like a few East German players, Lutz Eigendorf ultimately decided he'd had enough of playing under Communism. Communist footballers were technically amateurs. They lived quite comfortably generally, but they didn't have much of an opportunity to make the kind of money that their West German counterparts would make. So Lutz Eigendorff escapes to West Germany in 1979, and as is typical when East German players left the country, which was difficult to do, agents from the secret police, the East German secret police, the notorious Stasi. I'm sure many of your listeners have heard of the Stasi, the biggest per capita secret police organization in the world, by the 70s and 80s, they would send agents to kind of keep an eye on the defectors, also to surveil their families back at home. Eigendorff left family members behind in East Germany. So this story culminates while Eigendorff is struggling a Bit in the Bundesliga in West Germany doesn't really kick on in terms of his talent and career. With Lutz Eigendorf dying at a young age in a car accident around which there are many, many suspicions. And we don't really have any clear answers necessarily. You know, I've read books and watched documentaries about the mysterious death of Lutz Eigendorff. The official verdict was that he'd been out at a pub after a match. He drunk too much and so drunk driving, crashed into a tree just outside Braunschweig in West Germany. But there are rumours, some more substantial than others, that, for example, his drinks were spiked without him knowing it, that Stasi operatives did this kind of blinking operation where they flashed lights from an oncoming vehicle into Eigendorf's vehicle, forcing him to crash into a. So it's a very murky Cold War story that speaks to the political power of football to kind of speak to these political rivalries between east and West. And of course, we deal with that in another chapter because another of our games from 1974 is the big game between east and West Germany, which East Germany win.

[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

Okay, here's a note for our listeners. A little while back, I spoke to journalist David Horschbull about Britain's long love affair with sports, from medieval jousts to the Mega Bucks Premier League. Please do. I'll leave the link to that episode in the notes for this show. Tony and Alan, the Cold War, as you said earlier, officially came to an end in 1991. How do you see that now, looking back from 30 or so years on, how do you see that change in football? I mean, it's kind of remarkable that Eastern European teams rarely feature in, for example, in the latter stages of the Champions League. Can that fact to be traced back in any way to some of the transformation of global geopolitics that have kind of occurred over the past three decades?

[Alan McDougall]

Yeah, I think it can be traced back to the end of the Cold War. I mean, if you look at the sort of mid to late 1980s, the only time really that Eastern European teams won what is now the Champions League, what was then the European cup, occurs in the sort of late Communist era. Staub Bucharest against Barcelona in 1986, and then Red Star Belgrade in the dying days of communism in the Yugoslav Republic in 1991. So in that period, Communism, you know, capitalist teams generally got the better of Communist teams during the Cold War, certainly in European football. But Communist teams were able to sort of punch their weight. Football was a strongly supported activity in many communist regimes, you know, players went to elite academies, certain teams were favored, and so they were able to be competitive. After communism collapses, a lot of the infrastructure for football and indeed other sports in those communists states falls apart. There are huge economic problems in the transition to capitalism in the 90s, which is a bit of a free for all. In contrast to after World War II, when Americans had helped Western Europe rebuild with the Marshall Plan. There wasn't any equivalent of the Marshall Plan in the early 90s for post communist states. So in a lot of them, the infrastructure and support for sport, and football in particular, declined. This coincides with, with football itself transforming globally. You know, for much of the Cold War, football, it's a hugely popular sport, yes, and it's becoming a televised sport. But Certainly in the 70s and 80s, football in Europe was associated with hooliganism, violence, declining numbers on the terraces in many places. But in the 90s, for a bunch of different reasons, whether it's New Order's world in motion, Italia 90 all seater stadium, the Bosman free transfer ruling, a bunch of things happen that make football really popular again. And so this, this happens at a time when those post communist states are really struggling. So I think that combination means that teams in certainly the Champions League become the dominant clubs from Western Europe and, and the post communist clubs in Eastern Europe are left behind. And yeah, they've never really caught up in club football and of course the surviving communist powers, and we talk about this in our final chapter a little bit, certainly in men's football, to a lesser degree in women's football, like China, you know, still a communist regime and dictatorship today has struggled to compete globally in men's football. It's only been to the World cup once and you know, hasn't really tapped into all of the great love for football that exists in that huge country. So yeah, I think the end of the Cold War does lead to a sort of a global shift to sort of the west dominating football even more than it had in the Cold War.

[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

And you also write that what's been lost since 1991 is a sense that what was provided by Cold War encounters was kind of stepping, stepping into the unknown. Football no longer seems to step into the unknown. You argue. What exactly do you mean by that?

[Tony Shaw]

I think we're trying to get that a number of these games that we explored during the Cold War are pitching teams against one another that the spectators have never seen before, never maybe even have heard of. So going back to that first game where Dynamo and Moscow come over to, to Britain or let's say the Yugoslavia team of the 1950s goes over to Ireland or when the team from North Korea comes to England in the 1966 World cup, these are teams which people hadn't seen in the flesh, maybe not even seen on the telly before because, you know, the world wasn't as connected and football was a way of connecting people, of bringing people together. You know, it's a point I think we make about the North Koreans coming to England in 1966. They become the favorites of lots of people in the British crowd and form an extraordinarily strong relationship with the people of Middlesbrough nowadays. I mean, Alan can say this a lot more entertainingly I think, than I can, but we know most players, the players that we're seeing in the World cup now, we've pretty much seen all of them. They play a large part in Europe. And so that exoticness of, let's say seeing zaire play in 1974 on TV or Brazil famously in the first truly color televised World cup of 1970, we can't recapture that true glamour, I think, these days.

[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

Alan, anything you'd like to add there?

[Alan McDougall]

No, I think you've summed it up pretty well, Tony. I mean, I would say that, yeah, there's nothing new under the sun at the 2026 World Cup. I mean, if you look at the Democratic Republic of Congo, that star striker plays for Newcastle, you know, you look at Brazil's midfield, it's got players who play for Premier League clubs. So there's nothing that we don't see sort of in the very mediated football saturated culture that we have, the Cold War. There's an element of mystique and mystery to a lot of these teams that I think, you know, obviously encourages political divisions as we talk about in the book, but as Tony rightly says, also builds these magical connections. And without wanting to go all FIFA, you know, the idea that football unites the world is a bit of a cliche that we can greet with some eye rolling. But I think actually Cold War football and our book suggests that football can put up bridges, of course, politically, but it can also cross divides politically as well. And that's one of the great things about the game. Then as now.

[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

Okay, I'm just going to finish by putting you both on the spot and I'd like you both to identify for us one footballer from the Cold War era that you describe as your favourite. Their career really chimed with you. So Tony, I'll start with you. Which footballer from the Cold War era really resonated with you when you were doing the research for this book.

[Tony Shaw]

I'm a person who grew up with football in the 70s and 80s and therefore players like Eusebio. I. Not really, I'd read a lot about and seen clips of, but he plays in this game against North Korea in 1966. This 5, 3 classic North Korea go 3 nil up after 20 minutes. It looks like it's going to be a fantastic giant killing game and. And Eusebio just turns it on, scores four of the five goals, couple of penalties. I think a lot of maybe younger football fans these days wouldn't know about Eusebio. He's not as well known, obviously, as Pele. They both, at the same time were vying for best player in the world. I mean, Pele obviously was that wee bit better. But take a look at Eusebio, find some clips from Eusebio and do some reading around Eusebio.

[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

I'd say great stuff. Thank you, Tony and Alan.

[Alan McDougall]

Well, I would echo Tony on Eusebio being greater than Cristiano Ronaldo. I will say that right here. But my choice would be undoubtedly someone we've already mentioned today, Ferenc Pushkas, the Galloping Major. The star of the greatest team to never win the World Cup. With all due respect to the great Holland team of 1974. I mean, Pushkas was this kind of portly guy who kind of waddled around the pitch. He had this wand of a lady. Obviously the footage from that period is a bit less than we have for Eusebio and Pele a bit later on, sadly. But he was this very elegant playmaker with a fantastic goal scoring record. A bit of a character as well. He later, when he went to Madrid, like he liked his food and drinks, so he bought and ran a salami factory when he was in Spain, you know, and he was this interesting figure because he was in some ways a political figure. The communist regime tried to mobilize him for their way of thinking and their way of life. Pushkas was really like many of the players in our book, mostly interested in playing football. He loved the game and so he kind of resisted, I think, being politically typecast because interestingly, after he flees communism, he goes to play in Franco Spain for Real Madrid, the team of the Spanish dictators. So he's an interesting figure in terms of his career, straddles the Cold War divide. But he's also just a wonderful player and character and the kind of player, I think, to go back to the nostalgia point, that it would be hard to find in in the game, the modern game in 2026.

[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

Great stuff, Alan. Tony, thank you so much for answering my question today. It was great to talk to you. Thank you.

[Tony Shaw]

Thank you.

[Alan McDougall]

Thanks, Spencer.

[Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen]

That was Tony shaw and Alan McDougall, speaker to Spencer Mizzen. Tony is professor of Contemporary History at the University of Hertfordshire and Alan is Professor of History at the University of Guelph. And if you want to find out more about how the Cold War was waged on the first football pitch, then check out their new book, Cold War Football, a history in 10 matches.

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