To anyone cowering in a cellar in Kharkiv or Mariupol with Russian explosives raining down outside, sport must seem pretty peripheral.

But even to these poor people, a pack of cards or a ball might provide some sort of distraction, however fleeting. So even in the worst of predicaments, games-playing is not entirely without value.

Witness also those front-line World War One football games.

To the demagogues and autocrats busily trying to revive nationalism in its ugliest, most destructive guises, sport has value too.

Or more accurately, winners have value: that, one must at least for now presume, was the point of the medals photographed last week at that infamous Moscow rally.

A rally which, of course, was held in a sports stadium.

That is the other useful function of sport for leaders seeking to fan the flames of nationalistic populism: its infrastructure is ideal for mass gatherings and associated propaganda, especially given how modern stadia are usually equipped with, or able to accommodate, the paraphernalia of cutting-edge broadcasting technology.

War, unless it is civil war or class war, defines you by territory; so, albeit plainly in a far less brutal way, does international sport.

This is what George Orwell was getting at when he wrote, "At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare".

Re-reading once again his famous Tribune article, "The sporting spirit", dating from 1945, the year in which World War Two finally ended, and directly inspired by the visit of a Russian football team to Britain, one is struck by how pertinent much of it remains.

Take, for example, the sentence which follows the handier soundbite cited above: "But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe - at any rate for short periods - that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue."

Yet even a brain as penetrating as Orwell’s was anchored in its time.

One of the big things that has changed in the intervening 76 or so years is that big-ticket sport has become primarily an experience witnessed via the medium of a screen.

This accelerated the process of sport’s internationalisation, which itself mirrored the direction in which the world seemed to be heading until about 10 years ago.

It also showered some sports - most particularly association football - with gold.

However, as with the world in general, this internationalisation process was still incomplete when the backlash set in.

Hence the objectively absurd fact that all teams participating in the most globally popular week-in-week-out sports competition that the planet has ever known - the Premier League - happen to be based on a small, cloud-infested island lurking somewhere off the north-west coast of continental Europe.

Indeed, the territory from which teams are drawn does not even cover the whole of this small, cloud-infested island: the northern-most regions - ie Scotland - are excluded.

In almost all other respects - personnel, ownership, fan-base - the Premier League has globalised.

Seen in this context, the much-ridiculed Super League was an idea that concretised at just the wrong time, but which may yet become inevitable in some form if the complex currents of international affairs start once again to flow in its favour.

The one other respect in which the Premier League remains local is through the physical spectators - the fans - who continue to populate the stadia where participating clubs play.

In raw economic terms, these fans have become less and less important to the clubs they support over a period of around 20 years, but the atmosphere they create is thought to add to the league’s appeal, as well as inspiring the polyglot millionaires paid such fabulous sums to perform on the pitch.

This state of affairs has now produced another bizarre phenomenon: that of the English football fan whose world view has become abruptly and dramatically aligned with the individuals or organisations which happen to own - and fund - their club, enabling it to win more matches.

Everybody’s favourite publishing platform, social media, has made this phenomenon all the more noticeable.

While internationalisation of world affairs was in full swing, international sport seemed to play a benign, even wholesome role by providing a self-contained outlet for those left bemused or uneasy by the apparent withering of the nation-state’s importance.

Our day-to-day lives might be more and more impacted by decisions brokered in remote, multilateral bodies in Geneva and Washington, Doha and Brussels, but we could still cheer wholeheartedly for Team GB.

With nationalism - memorably defined by Orwell as "the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige" - reawakened, there is a risk that, unless we are very careful, international sport will start to make things a little worse, not a little better.

To judge by his article, indeed, Orwell would have thought this inevitable. It is the pressing task of today’s principal international sport decision-makers to prove it is not.