In the most ambitious Hypothetical XI to date, James Dutton imagines a historical parallel football battleground, between the old lines of east and west…

Let’s indulge in a bit of parallel modern history. What if the Cold War had continued on into the present day, stuck in the rut of its 1950s origins?

Based around the opposing ideologies and world doctrines of the time, NATO and the Warsaw Pact were the literal manifestation of the polarized split of world politics in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was assembled in 1949 as a trans-atlantic alliance against the rising tide of Communist agitation in the East of Europe and Asia.

The Warsaw Pact was, likewise, a mutual defense treaty but agreed between the eight Communist states of Eastern Europe and signed as a reaction to the integration of West Germany into NATO in 1955.

In this alternative reality fantasy, NATO and the Warsaw Pact’s founding member states have lowered their nuclear deterrents for the sake of humanity, preferring to shift their opposing political struggle to the less deadly but no less serious theatre of Cold War conflict: the football pitch. Continue reading →