When football became a weapon of the Cold War

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. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Tony Shaw and Alan McDougal talk Spencer Mizzen through some of the most explosive Cold War football in clashes. It's a story that takes him Pele, North Korean upsets, and a galloping major. It's a pleasure to welcome Tony Shaw and Alan McDougal 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 Messe, Killian Mbappe, Harry Kane and Erling Hallen strut their stuff on football's biggest stage. However, when it comes to football in castlists, I think your new book, Cold War Football, A History in Ten Matches, takes quite some beating.

We've got Pele, Eusebio, Beckenbauer, Matthews, Puskus, I mean not to mention Franco, Castro, Khrushchev and the Beatles. So with that in mind, the Cold War spanned in more than four decades where a lot of football matches played in that period and 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 ten games that for you

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