Eighty-one years ago today, on November 13, 1945, Soviet champions Dynamo Moscow walked out at Stamford Bridge in London and handed every Chelsea player a bouquet of flowers. Then they came back from 2–0 down to draw 3–3 in front of a crowd officially counted at 74,496, with estimates of 85,000 to 100,000 actually inside, a record for a British club match at the time.
It was the opening game of the first tour any Soviet side had ever made to the United Kingdom, arranged just months after World War II ended.
Four games, no defeats
- November 13: Chelsea 3–3 Dynamo, Stamford Bridge, 74,496 official attendance.
- November 17: Cardiff City 1–10 Dynamo, Ninian Park, 40,000.
- November 21: Arsenal 3–4 Dynamo, White Hart Lane, in thick fog, 54,000.
- November 28: Rangers 2–2 Dynamo, Ibrox, 90,000.
Add up the scores and Dynamo went unbeaten, scoring 19 goals and conceding 9. That total became the title of the Soviet book celebrating the trip, 19:9. Adding the four listed crowds gives 258,496 spectators, and that figure undercounts the overflow at Stamford Bridge.
The match at Stamford Bridge
Chelsea had just signed England striker Tommy Lawton from Everton for a club-record fee of about £14,000 and borrowed two players from Fulham. Fans queued for up to five and a half hours, and some climbed onto the stand roofs for a view.
Dynamo pinned Chelsea back early, hitting the post twice in the first 20 minutes, but Len Goulden scored in the 22nd minute and Reg Williams in the 28th. Leonid Solovyov then struck the post with a penalty. After the break Vasili Kartsev pulled one back from 25 yards on 67 minutes and Yevgeniy Archangelski leveled on 73. Lawton headed Chelsea in front again on 81, before Vsevolod Bobrov equalized from close range two minutes later. Thousands of fans ran onto the pitch at the final whistle.
How the Soviets got there
Britain invited a Soviet club after the Allied victory, and Moscow sent Dynamo, the 1945 Soviet Top League winners. Manager Mikhail Yakushin learned of the plan only when summoned to the Kremlin after his side lost the Soviet Cup final. The squad landed at Croydon Airport on November 4 in two C-47 transport planes after an 11-hour flight.
Arrangements were rocky. The Football Association first put most of the players in the Wellington Barracks, which lacked pillows, sheets and running water, before moving them to a hotel. Dynamo also presented a 14-point list of demands, including that every match be against professional clubs and that gate money be split down the middle. Before kickoff, some in the British press dismissed them as amateurs.
War minus the shooting
A planned fifth game against an England Select XI at Villa Park was dropped when the team was called home, where players received bonuses of 10,000 rubles each. A return Soviet tour for English clubs never happened as the Cold War set in. George Orwell’s essay The Sporting Spirit, published on December 14, 1945, described the tour as “war minus the shooting.”
Find more football and other sport in Badiyaa’s Sports section. The same date also marks the opening of New York’s Holland Tunnel in 1927. In 2022 a Russian film about the tour, Eleven Silent Men, earned more than 150 million rubles at the Russian box office.
Further reading
Image: Ank kumar, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
