Henry Kissinger was perhaps the first global statesman to recognise – and deploy – the football’s soft power. The great US diplomatic chiseller, owing to his upbringing in Germany, was a football enthusiast and would use it in 1970 in the Cienfuegos incident when the Americans were once more worried about the Soviets’ influence in Cuba.

As American military strategists fretted about the possible presence of Soviet personnel in troublesome Cuba, they pored endlessly over surveillance photographs taken from their spy planes which seemed to reveal the presence of new military barracks.

These seemed inconclusive until Kissinger strode into a briefing room and, having taken one glance at the snaps, declared solemnly that Yes, the Soviets were on Cuba. “How can you tell,” he was asked.

He then pointed to an area with white lines that had been laid out in the manner of a football pitch and told President Richard Nixon: “The Cubans play baseball, but the Russians play soccer”.

In 1978, Kissinger was in Argentina to watch the World Cup while enjoying the hospitality of the military dictatorship in Buenos Aires. He was by then fully switched on to football’s power to unlock doors and seal deals in the messy and uncertain process of global geopolitics.

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The Gordon Banks food poison incident at the During the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, the reigning world champions, England were expected to provide the biggest threat to Brazil’s hopes of lifting the old Jules Rimet trophy for the third time and thus take permanent........

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