The 1914 Christmas Football Truce was a courageous effort by rank-and-file British and German soldiers that managed to stop the bloody carnage of World War I. 

On the Western Front at Pont Rouge, just like at countless other outposts along the line of battle, for Christmas Eve German troops decorated their trenches with trees and candles. 

They sang Stille Nacht (silent night), a tune and carol most of the British troops knew equally well too. Astonished by this moment of commonality, the two sides applauded each other joining in with songs of their own, with those choruses that were familiar sung out togerher.

December 25, dawn. The guns are silent. A German NCO advances across No Mans Land carrying a Christmas tree towards the British lines. A British soldier goes to meet him, soon others follow, gifts are exchanged.

A football is produced. Greatcoats, caps and helmets for goals. The “match” ends 3-2 to the Germans. 

By lunchtime on Christmas Day the guns had fallen silent on two-thirds of the British sector. More games were played before hostilities recommenced.

The fact that football was this means of connection amidst such a bloody conflict is the perfect illustration of its centrality to working-class life in Britain, and across Europe too, by the early 20th century. 

A very different expression of this core meaning of football was at the Battle of the Somme, July 1 1916, when Captain Nevill of the East Surreys offered a prize for the first platoon to kick a football up to the enemy trenches. 

A moment of senseless slaughter immortalised by this popular poem from the time. 

“On through the hail of slaughter,

Where gallant comrades fall,

Where blood is poured like water,

They drive the trickling ball.

The fear of death before them,

Is but an empty name;

True to the land that bore them,

The Surreys played the game”

— Mandrake, Daily Mail 1916 

Does this sobering change in what football meant for WWI mean the Christmas football truce centenary is not worth bothering about? I would argue it most certainly is worth the bother for three reasons. 

Firstly, however briefly, for 90 minutes perhaps, those footballing soldiers did stop a war. 

Their sport, football, represented the common humanity which was, and remains, a powerful bulwark to division, hatred and conflict. Symbolic certainly, but no less powerful for all that.

Secondly, any progressive politics worth its name needs such symbols, a means of starting a conversation, a popular language. Think of race. 

There are few moments that touched the nerve of a multicultural GB more effectively than London 2012’s “Super Saturday” when Mo Farah, an asylum-seeker, won gold, followed by the mixed-race Jessica Ennis winning gold in the Heptathlon, not forgetting Greg Rutherford’s gold won in the long jump pit too. 

Were Jess and Mo’s medals celebrated any less than Greg’s, a white athlete? No, of course not. 

Together they came to represent what Great Britain, the team and the state, has become. 

Did this mean a discourse framed by anti-immigration rhetoric was stopped in its tracks? No athlete, no sport can do that on its own. 

But such moments, the football truce included, can help initiate a process towards challenging not only racism but also the imperial and martial tradition from which it emerges.

The rest however is up to campaigns and politicians. The former often lack a popular imagination, and too many of the latter lose any convictions they might once have had as soon as a Ukip-led backlash takes ugly shape.

Thirdly, without any kind of intervention and challenge these moments are left to the Establishment to shape to their own ends. 

The resistance of those soldiers to war mythologised an anti-war message, questioning why and how on one day a game of football takes place, the next the two teams are blowing each other to smithereens, and to what end, what good? 

Or even worse this moment of history scrubbed up and dusted down to make a supermarket commercial for flogging their choccie bars. 

What did Marx say? “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” 

A commodification of history that deserves to be contested. A popular cultural politics to locate, revisit and celebrate the art of the possible, football v war, that the Establishment and the TV adverts would rather we wouldn’t mention. 

Greatcoats for Goalposts? A game of football that stopped a war should leave us all with something to savour apart from the holly and the ivy this season of not much peace and too little goodwill. 

Philosophy Football’s Christmas Truce Centenary Party in association with the RMT and supported by Thompsons Solicitors is on Saturday 20 December, 7pm at Rich MIx Arts Centre, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road London E1 6LA. Tickets £9.99 Advance booking essential from www.philosophyfootball.com or call to book 01273 472 721.