The second-division team from a distant and ill-favoured coastal town are in the cup final. They’re playing in a big stadium against the country’s most glamorous and history-laden club. They go two goals down, and a pall of inevitability settles over the match. But then, suddenly, they start to score. The first goal receives applause. The second gets a cheer. When the third goes in, the place erupts.

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Except this is not a football stadium. This is a cinema in central London last week, at the closing event of the annual Russian film festival. This is a gala screening of Coach, attended by an audience containing many shaven-headed men who look as though they had to be reminded to leave their hardware at home and an unusually high proportion – for a football film, anyway – of good-looking young women in Sloane Street fashions.

This is a Russian-made, Russian-language film, and your correspondent – who read about it that morning and snapped up just about the last remaining ticket – is one of a handful of non-Russian speakers present at the National Film Theatre. That much becomes clear when the audience reacts to the jokes in the script. The English subtitles can be read before the actors have finished saying the lines, but not until they have been spoken does the laughter erupt. Your correspondent has not felt so isolated on home territory since he was one of possibly only two non-French people in the Royal Albert Hall the last time Johnny Hallyday played in London.

Football being the universal language of the modern age, Coach – Russian title: Trener – is not hard to understand. This is not Eisenstein, Tarkovsky or Sokurov we are talking about here. This is a combination of bits of Escape to Victory, Rocky, Invictus and – perhaps most of all – Brassed Off, that lovely little film in which a raggle-taggle brass band from a depressed colliery town defy the odds, and all that Margaret Thatcher’s pit-closure programme can throw at them, to triumph in the national championship.

The director, Danila Kozlovsky, also stars as Yuri, hero-captain of Russia’s national team. Looking a bit like Adam Lallana, or perhaps Isco, he disgraces himself during a crucial home match against Romania by grabbing the ball from the regular penalty taker, trying something flashy and blowing it. “Why choose a Panenka at a moment like that?” one of his teammates remonstrates. Yuri loses his rag, gets sent off and has a fight with furious fans on the way to the tunnel.

So far, all a bit The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, albeit with match sequences constructed via expensive CGI and green-screen technology and the use of a cast including real professional footballers. Inevitably Yuri sinks into the slough of despond – represented by a spell in amateur rugby on pitches that resemble the outskirts of Stalingrad after the siege – before being offered a second chance with the Russian equivalent of Grimsby Town, where he overcomes dressing-room conflicts with embittered old pros, falls in love with the club’s beautiful, sensitive young female physio (maybe there’s a bit of The Tommy Docherty Story in there, too) and returns to glory with that climactic victory over Spartak in Moscow.

As the cinema lights go up, it seems no oligarchs are present; there are no VIP hospitality boxes in NFT1. But at the very end of the film their presence is suddenly apparent. As the credits near their conclusion, the screen is filled with special thanks to three people without whom, it seems, the film could not have been made. One name is unfamiliar and scrolls up too quickly to be noted down. The other two are very familiar indeed.

One is that of Vitaly Leontiyevich Mutko, well known to those who have followed Russian sport in the post-Soviet era. Mutko is a 60-year-oldlawyer who worked with Vladimir Putin to set up the 1994 Goodwill Games in St Petersburg, became president of FC Zenit, founded the Russian Premier League, was elected to parliament, became president of the Russian Football Union, was appointed minister for sport and ran the country’s successful bid to host the 2018 World Cup. Two years ago Putin promoted him to deputy prime minister.

He was also implicated in the saga of Russia’s alleged state-sponsored sports doping operation during the Olympics in London and Sochi. Dick Pound, the head of an investigatory commission set up by the World Anti-Doping Agency, introduced his findings by saying of Mutko: “It was impossible for him not to be aware of it. And if he’s aware of it, he’s complicit in it.” Mutko rejected the allegations. In December last year the International Olympic Committee banned him from all Games-related activities for life, but he remains Putin’s No 2.

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The other name on the screen as the recipient of special thanks is that of Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea FC, another close ally of Putin and a long-time influence on Russian football, notably through his very visible support for the World Cup bid. The last scene of Coach sees Yuri’s little cup-winning team making their debut in European competition – against Chelsea, naturally – at a resplendent, sun-drenched Stamford Bridge.

Unseen at the Bridge since his UK visa was not renewed earlier this year, in recent days Abramovich has been named by British intelligence among a group of Putin-friendly oligarchs to be targeted as part of a response to the tactics employed by Russia’s secret service when playing away from home. The denouement to that movie is much less predictable.