European Championship Stories: 1960, Cold War Football

When the European Championships started in 1960 at the height of cold war tensions, it was inevitable that there would be friction.

With the European Championships to be played in Germany this summer, paid subscribers will be receiving this series over the next few weeks, kicking off with a tournament played out against a background of extremely high tension.

There are plenty of people, not least within the governing bodies of football itself, who would have it that football and politics don’t mix. This is, of course, bunkum, whether we like it or not. The game holds such influence over so many people that it sometimes seems impossible for politicians not to be able to link the two, from the relatively harmless, “You only win the World Cup under Labour” slogans of Harold Wilson’s British government of the late 1960s to the altogether more sinister machinations of the state organisations which ran clubs in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.