Living the dream in Soviet soccer

‘Comrade Jim – the Spy who played for Spartak’, is an amazing soccer story.

Jim Riordan was not a spy but an Englishman studying communism in Moscow in the 1960s. Writing a dissertation on Russian sport, he made friends with Spartak Moscow’s full back Gennady Logofet, who invited him to join a training session in 1963.

The following Sunday, Riordan had already played 90 minutes with his parks team when he got a phone call asking him to come to the Spartak stadium, with his cleats. When he got there, this amateur nobody from Portsmouth, whose soccer had gone no further than the British Army of the Rhine team, was told the regular center back was hung over, so he would be taking his place in front of 50,000 fans.

"I was in a daze – I could not believe it," Riordan, now aged 71, told NoShortCorners. "But in Moscow in those days so many extraordinary things happened when you look back at it. I went along after my Sunday match all sweaty around two o'clock, and then this bombshell was dropped: I would be playing for Spartak that afternoon."

Riordan was ushered out of Moscow barely a year later after writing an article allegedly critical of Soviet rule, but went on to become a Professor of Russian in England, an authority on Russian sport and he remains a close friend of former Chelsea midfielder and Russia captain Alexei Smertin.

His name was Russianized into Yakov Eeordahnov by Spartak, but his version of history has still been challenged, a situation not helped by that country's desire to forget its past.

"There was an enormous amount of corruption, bribes and not playing by the rules in Russian football," Riordan recalls. "A friend at the BBC told me you won't get them to admit you played because you weren't registered. If the league discovered that even now, Spartak could get in trouble. But Alexei (Smertin) has spoken to some people in Moscow who confirmed they remembered me.

I played again for Spartak two or three weeks later, so I obviously wasn't that bad. It was forty years ago but I can still see the captain Igor Netto in the dressing room and my shirt not being long enough! I remember the crowd whistling but I wasn't sure if it was for me or against me!"

Beyond the soccer stories, Riordan's autobiography is a riveting read covering a key period in modern history. In Moscow he met Nikita Krushchov and Yuri Gagarin among others, and in the book there is a photo of him beside Lev Yashin, one of soccer's greatest-ever goalkeepers.

"Two games and that was the end of my Spartak career, though I did play a few times for the reserves. I am still the only Englishman to have played for a Soviet football team! Some of the players weren't terribly friendly I have to say, especially Netto, whom I met many years later playing in a veterans team here in Portsmouth. He remembered me at once and instead of saying ‘Oh Jim, how nice to see you’ he said "You weren’t fit, you let us down!"

Comrade Jim -The Spy who played for Spartak (ISBN 9780007251148), is published by Fourth Estate.

-Sean O'Conor