Following the recent ‘Euro 96’ championship, Jim Phillips looks at two earlier international football tours which had major political and ideological connotations. In November 1945 Moscow Dynamo became the first Soviet football team to visit Britain, playing in Cardiff, Glasgow and twice in London. With English, Welsh and Scottish crowds witnessing Russian footballers for the first time, the tour was an immensely important sporting development. But at a time of unusual — yet uneasy — official harmony between Britain and the Soviet Union, Dynamo’s visit also carried wider political and social significance.