It is easily forgotten that the EU referendum fell in the days between Roy Hodgson’s hapless England football team grinding out a 0-0 draw with Slovakia to advance to the last 16 of Euro 2016 and it losing 2-1 to Iceland in a humiliating exit from the tournament. Donald Tusk tweeted presciently or gleefully: “UK-Iceland, 1-2. Winter is coming.”

Who knows how a swan song Wayne Rooney hat-trick in that game might have affected voting intentions a couple of days later? What is certain, however, is that only a government as insouciant or incompetent as David Cameron’s would have called a vote on Britain’s European future while fans clothed and tattooed in the flag of St George were defending the honour of our boys in the fountains and pavement cafes of France – and our up-and-at-’em footballing nation was sensing a new humiliation at the hands of those sophisticated operatives from across the channel.

In hindsight, the most telling image of England’s campaign was that of our travelling supporters army scarily outnumbered and battered by tooled-up Russian ultras, who delivered what appeared to be a calculated missive from the Putin government. The message on the stadium advertising hoardings underneath that image was the French tournament’s unfortunate motto: “Rendez-vous with history”.

David Goldblatt’s latest encyclopedic book on the reach of the global game misses no possible nuance in the symbolism of that particular stand-off. In analysing England’s football culture over the last 30 years he makes the point that it was at the generally joyful 1996 tournament that the union jack was abandoned by England’s fans and a new narrower nationalism emerged. He notes, too, the split that occurred between the followers of the national team, “more white and more working class”, and the audience for the sleek product of Premier League. “The innumerable St George’s flags were usually appended with the name of a club, mostly smaller northern and Midlands towns. The big clubs from England’s most globally connected cities (London, Manchester and Liverpool) were conspicuous by their absence.” That particular schism plays into the primary thesis of this book: that football, the most visible and entertaining expression of extreme global capitalism, has also been subject to the countervailing movement of populist jingoism.

Goldblatt’s previous books – The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football, Futebol Nation: A Footballing History of Brazil, and The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football – all had a slightly more hopeful cast than this one. They generally viewed the arc of the beautiful game, it seemed, as bending toward harmony between nations, the ultimate leveller of playing fields. Just over a decade on from that first book, however, Goldblatt emphasises more troubling evidence of the ways in which the sport has been used to divide peoples. As his analysis wanders across the globe, from Africa to Europe and South America, he provides thousands of examples of such political manipulation.

In the Middle East Goldblatt argues a three-sided match: “Regime v Street v Mosque”. He shows how football has been used both as a proxy for imperial ambitions in the Emirates – buying up foreign assets, parading the World Cup in Qatar as the ultimate bling on the world stage – and as a force of rebellion against Qur’anic stricture in Iran. Having originally outlawed football, Isis, under siege, typically “developed a more opportunist and pragmatic football theology”. They used tournaments as a way of recruiting students in Jordan and indulged foreign fighters with Xboxes and Fifa. In Mosul, in 2015, they allowed the Barcelona v Real Madrid “el clásico” to be broadcast for the first time in cafes and homes only to burst in and smash TV sets when they discovered that there was a minute’s silence at the match to honour the dead of the Paris terror attacks.

Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister. Photograph: Laszlo Balogh/Reuters

What is clear from Goldblatt’s indefatigable study is that, almost anywhere in the world apart from North America, no would-be dictator or democratic rabble-rouser or theocratic patriarch can afford to neglect the passions aroused in the hearts of football fans. Some have risen directly on that sentiment. The Bolivian president Evo Morales, in power since 2006, emerged from a poor family of llama farmers brandishing a football. Aged 13, he founded a club, Fraternidad, and went on to star in the side then captain and coach it. He did the same when he became head of a local union, running on the platform: “I would die fighting for people’s rights, but if I don’t get the chance, I would like to die playing football.” He subsequently combined the presidency with playing in the second tier of Bolivian football, and cemented 13 years of power by recruiting Fidel Castro and Diego Maradona in a regional protest against the Fifa directive that no international matches could be played above an altitude of 2,750m – Bolivia’s key weapon in qualifying tournaments against Brazil and Argentina. “Wherever you make love,” he announced, “you should play.”

That message – the supposed virility of strongman leadership – finds in football an easy symbol. Erdoğan in Turkey and Xi in China make football a campaign strategy; nationalists everywhere question the loyalties of multi-ethnic national sides. As Romelu Lukaku, the Belgian striker, noted, when things were going well “they were calling me Romelu Lukaku, the Belgian striker. When things weren’t going well, I was Romelu Lukaku, the Belgian striker of Congolese descent.”

Viktor Orbán, leader of the dictatorial Fidesz movement in Hungary, was, in Goldblatt’s account, a “fearsome five-a-side player” in a team called Fojikasor (“the beer is flowing…”). The future Hungarian president and the parliamentary speaker played alongside him. Among Orbán’s first acts in power was to create a central fund to rebuild the football grounds of every first and second division club in Hungary. Contracts went to Fidesz construction companies. The most lavish scheme was in Felcsút, Orban’s home village (pop: approximately 1,500), in which a stadium was created for the local team featuring a polished mahogany superstructure with fan vaulting.

Goldblatt could go on and often does. He references situationist theory and post-Marxist analysis, Guy Debord and Walter Benjamin as a twin strike force, to substantiate his persuasive belief that pretty much all of the hopes and inequalities and fears of contemporary society are played out in the spectacle of 11 v 11. This is not a book for the armchair reader of either football or global politics, but it is an irrefutable argument against anyone who might still suggest that either is only a game.

• The Age of Football: The Global Game in the Twenty-First Century by David Goldblatt is published by Macmillan (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99