Cold War Football: A History in Ten Matches (460)

0:00Alan McDougall:Welcome to Cold War Conversations, the home of real stories of the Cold War.

0:30Tony Shaw:Shop and save on pro-grade storage at the Home Depot. How pros get more done.

0:36Alan McDougall:On the West German side, they're a bit unsure how to play the game. East Germany are tactically very well prepared. And East Germany have a lot of good players in 74. You know, the Magdeburg team, with several players of which, including Sparwasser, are in the East German 11. You know, he'd beaten AC Milan to win the European Cup Winners' Cup in May. It was an upset victory, but it wasn't seismic, I would say. It wasn't maybe like North Korea would be seen in 1966, for example. In their new book, Cold War Football, A History in Ten Matches, Tony Shaw and Alan McDougall explore the surprising and fascinating links between football and the global struggle between capitalism and communism.

1:19Alan McDougall:From East Germany's famous victory over West Germany at the 1974 World Cup To North Korea's remarkable run in 1966, they show how football became much more than a game. Tony and Alan reveal how football was used to support democracies, strengthen dictatorships and win influence in the developing world. These matches gave people a rare glimpse of life on the other side of the Iron Curtain, sometimes bringing enemies closer together and sometimes helping to spark unrest and revolution. Packed with legendary players, unforgettable goals and controversies both on and off the pitch, this is a wonderfully rich history of how the Cold War shaped football and how football in turn shaped the Cold War.

2:06Alan McDougall:I'm delighted to welcome Tony and Alan to our Cold War conversation.

2:12Tony Shaw:Alan and I come at this from slightly different angles. I'm a historian of Cold War propaganda or propaganda in war generally, I suppose. I've written quite a lot about Cold War media, the role of film during the Cold War. And it struck me that looking at the wider cultural angle of it, what about sport? And Alan knows a lot more than I do about the history of football. But it struck me that nobody had written a juicy book about football in the Cold War. And quite a lot of people actually, when they hear or heard that I was writing the book, they went, sorry, can you say that again? A lot of people wouldn't actually make a connection between the Cold War and football.

2:56Tony Shaw:So I thought about, I thought that made it even more intriguing and looking at the role of footballers, of football clubs, different countries across the globe as far and wide as possible. Maybe Ireland could come in.

3:11Alan McDougall:Well, yeah, I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? I mean, I think for a lot of maybe your listeners, when you think of the Cold War and sport, you tend to think of the Olympics, I think. You know, that's what I remember growing up, listening to the East German national anthem as they won yet more medals in winter and summer Olympics. And obviously the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. But of course, football, as we know, is probably, depending on how you measure it, the most popular global sport. And so, you know, when Tony came to me with this idea, you start thinking about some of the different ways, as we see through the 10 matches that the Cold War impacted football and football impacted the Cold War and it wasn't always a straightforward story of East versus West and of course sometimes there were internal rivalries within the communist world sometimes there were friendships across Cold War alliances and Cold War lines and so yeah it was intriguing the difficult thing was whittling it down to 10 games I guess.

4:10Alan McDougall:And that is the inevitable challenge with this what I found fascinating was the history goes back to even before the second world war so you've got spanish civil war influences there and one of the matches i'd like to talk about that you you cover in there is the spain against the soviet union in uh madrid in in june 1964 which is sort of billed as communism against fascism historians of spain and the franco dictatorship would i'm sure have definitions of the Francoist dictatorship that may or may not include the word fascist. But, you know, it's interesting that there is, as you say, this sort of echo of the 1930s in this clash that takes place in a very different political climate.

4:58Alan McDougall:The mid-Cold War, I guess, after the Berlin Wall, with tensions somewhat eased in Europe, I would guess, with Spain, which has been under Franco's dictatorship since 1939, moving more closely to the West, trying to parlay its anti-communism into a closer alliance with the European economic community, the United States, versus a sort of reformist Soviet Union after Stalin under Khrushchev. So yeah, there's some ghosts of the past in this game, but it's also the beginning of a new football tournament that we now know the Euros has become a huge thing, but is also sort of a nascent tournament in the 60s.

5:38Alan McDougall:So yeah, it's one of the most obvious obviously ideologically freighted matches in the book, I think. And for both sides, winning it was a huge deal, of course. And while Spain was neutral during World War II, they did send a division to fight the Soviets on the Eastern Front. So they were a combatant against the Soviet Union. But Franco's a bit wary of this, though, isn't he? because I think it's the 1960 European Championships. He decides to boycott that. Yeah, so sort of foreshadowing one of our later chapters where we got onto a different kind of World Cup boycott in 1973. In 1960, which was the year of the inaugural Euros, this new competition for European nations, Spain and the Soviet Union were drawn to play each other in the quarterfinals.

6:33Alan McDougall:And yeah, Franco pulled the plug on that in 1960. Probably at a time when Cold War tensions were a bit hotter in Europe, you know, in the middle of the Berlin crisis. And of course, Franco, predictably, was pretty rabidly anti-communist throughout his life. So his suspicion of Bolshevism ran very deep. And although there were sort of hawks and doves in his administration, some of those who saw the benefit of reaching out through football to kind of launder Spain's reputation on the international stage, which he decided in 1960 to kind of prevent the Spanish team from going to Moscow for the game against the Soviet Union.

7:10Alan McDougall:And then the situation came around four years later, this time with Spain hosting the Euros, which I think makes a difference. And this time the doves among his advisors won the day, sports administrators, members of his government who realised that Spain by then was on a more liberal economic path. It didn't want to have this reputation as a kind of relic of the 1930s. It wanted to show that it was modernizing. And of course, what better way to do that than to be a bit more magnanimous about a match with the Soviet Union? So yes, very different outcomes from 1960 to 1964. And you've also got some great photos in this book.

7:48Alan McDougall:I mean, the photo of the two teams lined up on the pitch with the red shirts of the Soviet Union and the dark blue shirts of the uh falange party for the uh the spanish team sadly that photo's in black and white yeah so you know the budget couldn't run to giving us color pictures unfortunately and but yeah the and of course it's funny now because of course i'm sure just like me most of our listeners would associate spain with the the red kit the royal red i guess of the modern spanish team so yeah it's a little jarring to think about spain in 1964 in in the blue color that was associated with the Falange movement, which was the Spanish fascist party, which was part of the umbrella organizations of groups that supported the Francoist dictatorship.

8:35Alan McDougall:So yeah, it's a sort of evocative image of not only sort of Cold War football, but yeah, echoes of the great ideological conflict of the first half of the 20th century, you know, fascism versus communism, of course. So these two meet in the final of the European Championships. How do their paths end up intertwined in that final. Tony do you want me to just carry on as this is one of Yeah yeah yeah buy me. Not wanting to argue the mic here. Yeah I mean you know the thing to remember about the Euros in 1964 it's only the second edition it's a very small tournament compared to the increasingly bloated tournaments we see in the World Cup and the Euros in the 21st century so the way it worked was you played a bunch of kind of elimination matches up to and including the quarterfinal, home and away.

9:24Alan McDougall:And then a host nation would host the semifinals and the final. Spain, despite the fact that it had basically forfeited its place in the 1960 Euros, was chosen by UEFA to host the 1964 Euros. Mostly, I think, or partly because it had arguably Europe's two best stadiums, the Bernabeu in Madrid and the Camp Nou in Barcelona, of course. And so the semifinals were played at those stadiums. Spain and the Soviet Union came through those matches. Spain's was the more difficult match against another communist team, Hungary. And so then the final was set for Madrid on the 21st of June. Franco is in attendance with his entourage.

10:06Alan McDougall:And yeah, you know, I think on both sides, it was this huge pressure game. There's rumours, as we talk about in the book, that the head of the Spanish Football Federation was thinking about poisoning some of the Soviet players, the kind of Cold War machinations you often hear from sort of East German Stasi stories. So there's a lot of tension around the match before kickoff. Can you talk me through how the match finishes? Yeah, so I mean, two early goals cancelling each other out. Spain take the lead. The Soviet Union equalise very quickly. It's interesting watching some of these early matches.

10:42Alan McDougall:We have a couple, obviously, from 45 and 54 as well. 64 is a bit of the cusp of the television age so the kind of media coverage of the final is beginning to change but it's still obviously black and white so you've got some pretty grainy footage so anyway it stays level for most of the game and then with about six or so minutes to go there's a cross from the right and Spain scored this astonishing header past one of the iconic Cold War football figures the Soviet goalkeeper Lev Yashin and that gives Spain the 2-1 victory late on. And so Spain wins its first international trophy. Khrushchev is furious.

11:23Alan McDougall:He's not quite in Moscow at this point, but on his way back to Moscow from a tour of Scandinavia. So he fires the Soviet coach a couple of days after the game. But as we talk about at the end of the chapter, Khrushchev himself is not long for this political world because he is going to get canned later in 1964 and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who was a much bigger football fan than his predecessor. So, yeah, a huge victory for the Franco regime. What it meant in the long term, I guess, is open to debate. But, you know, certainly in 1964, I think you could compare it to another game we talk about later on, Argentina winning the World Cup in 1978, where the celebrations for a football mad nation were so big that they crossed political lines.

12:05Alan McDougall:So in both 64 in Spain and 78 in Argentina, even imprisoned communists were celebrating victory, we're told. So, yeah. Was that defeat received back in the Soviet Union? How was it covered in their press? It's interesting. The press for this were quite magnanimous, actually. You know, I think a lot of coverage in the Soviet press focused mostly on the game itself and how the match went and tried not to pull too many ideological implications from it. Obviously, that would have been different, I think, if the Soviet Union had won. In contrast, the Francoist press, as you can imagine, was pretty triumphalist and talked about the victory over communism to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Franco coming to power.

12:52Alan McDougall:So in the Soviet Union, it was portrayed as a football defeat, a narrow football defeat with no wider political implications, which is understandable. Of course, behind the scenes, Konstantin Beskov was sacked immediately as Soviet coach, and there was a lot of disquiet, particularly at the idea that this match, which was broadcast across the Soviet Union on television, would have ended with the beaming Spanish players and a happy Franco showing on television screens. That was a big propaganda defeat for the communists, however they portrayed it in the sports media. I know this isn't featured in the book, but did the Soviets ever try using drugs to improve their performance as a football team?

13:36Tony Shaw:No, we didn't come across anything like that from a Soviet perspective. No, we didn't.

13:43Alan McDougall:Yeah, I mean, it would seem unlikely that football teams from Eastern Europe did not have some access to various state doping systems, right? I mean, it feels like even now we know much more about Cold War doping and East Germany because so many records became available than the Soviet Union, where, you know, we're sort of still reliant on whistleblowers and, you know, the documentary evidence isn't as strong. And, you know, as you know, in football, it's a more difficult game to dope for than, you know, the 100 meters or swimming or rowing, I guess. Certainly there's evidence I know from other Soviet bloc countries like East Germany that there was some access to, you know, the state doping plans.

14:27Alan McDougall:But I guess what you could say, broadly speaking, was that if they were doping behind the Iron Curtain, it didn't necessarily have that much success in football because Western Europe, in a European context, tended to win club competitions, the international competitions, and the communist bloc. Unless it was the Olympics where they could play their state amateurs, was playing second fiddle. So, yeah, we never came across anything on the various games involved in the Soviet Union where this came up. In contrast, of course, to the 1954 final, where there were lots of allegations swirling around the capitalist West German team.

15:02Alan McDougall:So that was the main doping story in the book, I guess. One of the matches I'm glad to see in the book, because I would have been severely disappointed if it hadn't been included in there, is West Germany versus East Germany in 1974. Fascinated by this. Now, they had met before at the Olympics, but then you've got this whole amateur professionals issue again, haven't you? Yeah. I mean, this is another of my matches, so I feel like I'm talking way too much here, Tony. Sorry, Tony. I've chosen, you know. No problem. That's fine. You can make my voice.

15:42Tony Shaw:Alan, you're doing a fantastic job, mate.

15:44Alan McDougall:Good. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, there's the game at 72 at the Olympics, But as you say, it's, I mean, it's like these Germans behind the scenes knew that this was meaningless. Of course, you know, Cold War propaganda meant that, you know, the East German sports media played up winning Olympic medals in football and beating the West German amateurs in 72. But in reality, you know, the party, the sports organizations, the Stasi, the secret police, they all knew that none of that mattered because the top West German players weren't there. So, yeah, the 74 game really was the one and only time that East and West Germany played in a match that mattered.

16:23Alan McDougall:And so it's one of the matches, I think, in the book that has the most obvious sort of Cold War rivalry between it, the most obvious binary, I guess, between East and West. But as we talk about in the chapter, you know, a lot of these Cold War football stories are quite complicated because football builds bridges as well as knocking them down. So I think we see that in this chapter. But yes, it's on both sides, but probably particularly on the East German side. It's a huge game, yeah. yeah because it's interesting how sort of the cold war politics has changed around that period particularly between east and west germany because the basic treaty is signed between east and west germany so they recognize each other for the first time um you've got two new leaders there in the early 70s with honica and and schmidt and germany is still sort of feeling the scars of the Munich Olympics massacre and things like that.

17:23Alan McDougall:And I get the impression from the chapter, this was quite a down key played tournament. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, in the wider history of the World Cup, 74 is often seen as a turning point because it's the World Cup where Stanley Rouse is ushered off stage and Joe Haviland takes over and eventually FIFA becomes this corporate behemoth and monster that we know in the 21st century. But yeah, I think you're Right, 1974, for various reasons. One of them was just it seemed to rain the entire month of the World Cup in Germany that summer. But as you mentioned, the 1972 Olympics, the Black September terrorist attack on the Olympic village.

18:00Alan McDougall:And I think just this desire to kind of portray sports events in Germany differently to the ghost of 1936 meant that 74 was a bit of a low-key World Cup. And, you know, if you compare it, West Germany, of course, gone to win the tournament. you know it's it's a triumph that is generally not regarded with the fondness of west germany's miracle victory in 1954 which we talk about in the book or even the the victory at that optimistic moment of unification in 1990 in italy so yeah it's quite a strange tournament and the tournament has a weird format which they experimented with which which basically meant there were two group stages so although this match was freighted with a lot of political importance in terms of the actual competition it was more about certainly for west germany at least kind of finding out who they play in the second group stage so there was maybe as we talk about in the chapter there was certainly on the west german side some some maybe difficulty in knowing exactly how to play the game you know how much to go for the victory which i think would have been different if they met in the semi-final or something like that but politically it still remained this hugely significant game and that format could have given them an all-german final at the end of it as well which would have been a hell of a game i mean imagine that yeah instead you know what happens but east germany don't really benefit from this historic victory and spavass's goal because they end up with this second round group of death against argentina brazil and the netherlands which seems i don't think there's ever been a more death-like group of death than that one so there wasn't much reward for the plucky east german underdogs for spavass's heroics we could say um but of course there was a lot of reward in terms of political propaganda and i think speaking to what you were talking about earlier this is kind of you know the kind of golden age of uh east german sport and you might argue east germany more generally at least in the public sphere you know there's the kind of the rise of the olympic success there's honica who's come to power in 1971 and seems at this point anyway to be a bit more liberal than his predecessor Walter Ulbricht.

20:09Alan McDougall:There's a bit of an opening up to the West through the basic treaty, through some cultural relaxation. Of course, as we talk about in the chapter, the Stasi is growing exponentially too, so this isn't the whole story. But I do think 74 captures a brief period of optimism in East German football and maybe in the GDR more widely. That footage of the East German commentator commentating on the game. And it looks like it's a pretty mediocre game up to that point. Yeah, it's not a great game. I would say that's, it's not a great tournament, the 74 tournament. I mean, I think it's one of the lowest, if not the lowest goal averages for a tournament, maybe until South Africa in 2010.

20:52Alan McDougall:So, you know, it's not a great tournament for goals, I would say, apart from the Dutch team that loses in the final. And I think on the West German side, there is this sort of, They're a bit unsure how to play the game. East Germany are tactically very well prepared. And East Germany have a lot of good players in 74. You know, the Magdeburg team, which several players of which, including Sparwasser, are in the East German 11, you know, had beaten AC Milan to win the European Cup Winners' Cup in May. They were on a fairly long unbeaten run, the national team. So, you know, it wasn't household names across Europe like the Dutch team, but there was some very respected players in the East German team.

21:30Alan McDougall:So it was an upset victory, but it wasn't seismic, I would say. You know, it wasn't maybe like North Korea would be seen in 66, for example. I've seen the TV coverage and the East German fans go crazy, but I imagine that to a man, they're Stasi operatives or something like that. To go to West Germany. Yeah, it was probably a vetted craziness, we might say. As we talk about in the chapter, you know, the Stasi and the party, the Communist Party did a lot of pre-tournament screening, you know, which we might be seeing in the 2026 World Cup in the United States, you know, to allow certain people in and not other people necessarily.

22:10Alan McDougall:So yeah, most of the people I think who went to, got to see games in West Germany, in this case in Hamburg, were reliable party members, not necessarily a football fanatics, I would say. But you know, a lot, I mean, there would have been people who loved football there And there were many people who, as we talk about in the chapter, who maybe didn't love everything about the East German regime, but liked giving West Germany the sort of arrogant upstart neighbour, the football superpower, a bloody nose. So I don't think those things were mutually exclusive. With Sparwasser, though, it's quite a heavy burden that he carries being the goal scorer.

22:53Alan McDougall:yeah yeah as we talk about in the opening of the chapter you know there's these kind of two moments where spavasa appears really in in cold war history one of course is this this goal iconic goal in this game to decide that the match for cold war german football supremacy but then of course on a later visit to west germany just before the berlin wall falls he basically seeks political asylum in the West, commits what was known as flight from the Republic or Republikflucht and becomes one of the relatively few East German footballers, but a very high profile one to leave East Germany behind and head West.

23:33Alan McDougall:So, you know, the reasons for that are complicated. I think footballers going from the communist bloc to West Germany. I mean, in Spavos' case, he'd retired, so he was no longer an active footballer. But I do think the burden of that goal and maybe what it was meant to carry politically was a factor in his eventual decision. It wasn't a decision many East German footballers took. We talk in the opening chapter about Lutz Eigendorf, of course, and another famous casualty of Cold War football. The Berlin FC Dynamo player who was possibly allegedly killed by the Stasi after defecting to the West in 1979.

24:12Alan McDougall:Um, so Sparvas' story ends with a similar defection and, um, probably the propaganda defeat for East Germany is less because he's retired by then. But nonetheless, the fact that this guy who'd scored this iconic goal ends up in the arms of the capitalist enemy is, I don't know, perhaps it foreshadows what's going to happen in 1989 in Germany. Hi, this is Rhonda in Virginia, and I support Cold War conversations because I think the work that Ian is doing is critically important. I think it's vital to record the firsthand accounts of people who lived and experienced the Cold War because it illustrates history in a way that a book never can.

24:55Alan McDougall:So thank you so much for the podcast. It's my favorite podcast and I look forward to it every week. To be like Rhonda and help to preserve these incredible stories of the Cold War. As a monthly or annual supporter, you'll be able to listen ad-free. you'll become one of our community, get the sought after Cold War Conversations drinks coaster as a thank you, and you'll bask in the warm glow of knowing that you're helping to preserve Cold War history. Just go to coldwarconversations.com slash donate to find out more. Now, if you've listened this far, you must be enjoying the show. At least I hope you are.

25:35Alan McDougall:The reason I say this is on the Spotify app, you can now leave comments on individual episodes. So do me a favour and hit that pause button and leave a comment. It'd be great to hear from you and your interactions help push Cold War conversations up the Spotify rankings. Whatever you do, thanks very much for listening. And now back to your episode. Let's talk about the North Korean game. This is the 1966 World Cup that people may be familiar with but less familiar with the story of the North Koreans and their huge popularity in the northeast of England

26:20Tony Shaw:Yeah, this is a story which I myself wasn't entirely familiar with and you know, when you're writing a book you think you have a pretty good picture as to what you're going to be saying and then things change so it's a really well known game amongst footy fans is the quarterfinal of the 1966 world cup unfortunately not all the games we cover are wonderful high scoring matches but this one certainly is but what develops is more interesting off the pitch and a lot of our as you've probably already heard a lot of our stories are not just about what happens on the pitch but the strange or interesting things that happening elsewhere.