As long as the oil and gas keep flowing Russia has the money to deliver a world-class soccer tournament in 2018. But the hosts have their work cut out for them, writes World Cup veteran Emmet Malone
THE LAST I SAW of the Luzhniki Stadium, where the final of the 2018 World Cup will be held, was a few hours after Manchester United had beaten Chelsea on penalties to win the 2008 Champions League final. Sitting on a media bus at about 4am, waiting to return to my Moscow hotel, I watched as what seemed like thousands of the soldiers who had provided security for the game marched by in formation. Most of the Fifa executive committee members who took part in Thursday’s ballots to decide which countries would host the next two World Cups were probably looking on from the nearby VIP vehicles. They will have travelled home knowing that, wherever else they might fall down over the next seven and a half years, lack of manpower will not be an issue.
Like the South Africans this year, the Russians will doubtless deal with security by throwing bodies – lots of them – at the problem. Other difficulties, however, will have to be tackled long before then, and they may prove more difficult to solve.
Accommodation will have to be a priority. The influx of supporters of just two English clubs for that Champions League final caused hotel prices to rocket. When a colleague asked how much mine was costing, I suggested it might be prudent not to mention the figure in print. Journalists talk, though, and a day later the number was thrown at me in a radio interview, as an example of the sort of lunacy that was going on “out there”, by a sceptical presenter who had no idea I was the lunatic involved.
At least there were hotel rooms to be had in Moscow. A quick internet search this week failed to produce a single one in Saransk for a midweek night when there isn’t a World Cup in town, and the situation in several other host cities might best be described at this early stage as unpromising.
Supporters who travel for the tournament will also have to make some difficult choices in terms of where to base themselves. South Africa is big, but it is on nothing like the scale of Russia, with its nine time zones. The lone Irish supporter I met who attended something like 32 games in 31 days this summer will have his work cut out to repeat the feat in 2018.
In an attempt to address the issue, the Russians have divided their bid cities into geographical clusters, but getting, for example, from Kaliningrad – Königsberg to nostalgic Germans – to the other city in the northern cluster, St Petersburg, takes a handy 26 hours by train.
If your team is based in the southern cluster, on the other hand, and you decide to hole up in, say, Krasnodar, you should probably bring something to read. Lonely Planet’s website lists three things to do in the city of 700,000 people, and the third one is seeing a statue.
Long before they get there, of course, any Irish fans intending to travel will have the delight of dealing with the embassy staff in Dublin, where a tiny bit of the old Soviet Union is, it seems, being kept alive.
For some of those who made it past the Orwell Road bureaucracy and travelled for Ireland’s ill-fated European Championship qualifier in September 2002, things turned nastier when they arrived in Moscow, where some of them were attacked by local thugs and others were shaken down by police who demanded cash for alleged infringements of one type or another.
Racism, xenophobia even, appears to be a significant issue in Russia, whose football supporters can turn violent. On a recent trip home the Irish international Aiden McGeady, who moved during the summer from Celtic to Spartak Moscow, told of getting on the team bus after an away game against Anzhi, in Dagestan, and being startled by what he saw.
“The boys were just putting their bags up against the windows to protect themselves. There were things hitting off the bus: stones, whatever [the fans outside] could get their hands on. This is normal, apparently, the players told me. When I was taking a corner during the game,” he added, “I looked up and there was a big riot going on. The police got involved; I don’t know what happened. I just saw the Anzhi supporters running up, tearing up seats and throwing them at the Spartak supporters. It’s intense down in that region, apparently.”
Asked if this was reminiscent of the famously ill tempered Old Firm derbies he had taken part in back in Glasgow, he laughed. “No,” he said, “it’s a different world out there.”
For all of that, the Russian authorities handled the Champions League well, and they won’t set out to spend €8 billion, mainly on stadiums and transport, in order to host a month-long PR disaster.
Their bid for the tournament was impressive, and the computer-generated images of the sparkling venues that will be built in cities like Kazan, Yekaterinburg and Yaroslavl look wonderful, certainly suggesting that the football end of things will be done well.
On these sorts of occasions, though, the bigwigs in Fifa see themselves less as the cosseted leadership of a sports organisation and more as noble agents of international economic and social transformation.
But, having got to slap each other on the back after their gamble on South Africa paid off, and having chosen Brazil for 2014, they will be regarded by some as riding their luck a little by going this week for Russia rather than, say, England or Iberia.
Reading the electorate well, though, the Russians pushed all the right buttons for the Fifa suits. Qatar, having a little less social and sporting legacy to play with, simply threw money at its winning bid to host the 2022 tournament, not least in South Africa, where it rented something like 25 high-end apartments at the hugely expensive Michelangelo hotel in order to do its wining and dining.
As long as the oil and gas keep flowing, both will, at least, have the money to deliver on their extravagant promises.
