World Cup sponsors begin to flex muscle

It’s not hard to imagine what the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad depicted in the monument on St Petersburg’s Victory Square would make of the fact that they are overlooked on one side these days by a Bavarian brauhaus complete with locals serving beer and sausage while dressed in German traditional garb.

Russia, though, has changed so much in so many ways since the events of the last war that nothing much can surprise those who have witnessed even the transformation of the past couple of decades.

Its current president, Vladimir Putin, will address the 2,000 or so guests assembled this afternoon at the city's Konstantin Palace for the draw of the qualifying stages of the 2018 World Cup.

The event is a small but significant stepping stone towards an event originally intended to help Russia’s image abroad keep up with its surging economy at home. Unfortunately, the war in Ukraine and fuel price instability have changed things somewhat since then.

Racism

Both may recede as issues over the next three years, but the underlying concerns about Russia as a World Cup host nation are likely to endure.

Hulk, the Brazilian star who plays his football with local side Zenit, said this week that racism is a feature of the game here on a weekly basis.

It’s hard find a credible voice that disagrees, but yesterday it was announced he would not after all be participating in the draw, with the organisers citing previously unexpected club commitments.

Gay rights are pretty clearly an issue from the top down too, but Russia may have been fortunate on this front to have won the right to stage the tournament at the same time as Qatar which has, on a few other fronts, been hogging the attention with regard to host nation homophobia.

Sepp Blatter, of course, once joked that gay visitors should simply refrain from having sex while in the country, just one of the many blunders with regard to social issues and individual rights that the Swiss has committed over the last few years.

Under the circumstances, Local Organising Committee chief Alexei Sorokin describing the soon to be ex-Fifa president as “a victim” of all that has gone at the federation in recent times only seems to add to the avalanche of “wrong signals”.

Still, on allocating the game’s greatest tournament, it has to be said Blatter was far from the worst of them and whoever ends up succeeding him is likely to wish the countries staging the next couple of World Cups came to the party with rather less baggage attached.

Although if Michael Platini manages to get the job, it will be comforting to know that in relation to Qatar, he has to carry a significant portion of the can himself.

Pourquoi , Michael?

If Platini’s support for Qatar is not inexplicable, then the Frenchman has to make a decent fist of explaining it and the Uefa president needs to do so if he is not to be tainted himself as Fifa president.

In the meantime, it is hard to take all that seriously, the stronger line being taken by sponsors just now.

Visa have led the calls for a radical overhaul of things over the last few days.

They, along with McDonald’s and Coca-Cola are, at their behest, to meet with Fifa next month in order to lay down what they feel needs to be done.

Regime change is not all that hard to call for when the Feds have already handed out 14 indictments and obliged everybody else to take their responsibilities a little more seriously.

Still, rhetoric or not, the commercial partners have to be taken seriously as planning for life post-Blatter goes on.

A word from the sponsors

Jerome Valcke, the organisation’s embattled general secretary admitted yesterday that not one major renewal or fresh deal has been signed since last year’s World Cup.

With some €5 billion in 2018 related revenue at stake, that can’t be allowed to go on but, says Valcke, “I’m sure until the [presidential] election, until the 26th of February, there will not be major announcements.”

It would, if he really were capable of embarrassment, be a humiliating end for Blatter who continues to fight for as much control as possible over the reform procedures being established so as to shape and protect some small part of what was supposed to be his legacy.

He will be encouraged, though, by the fact that most of the likely candidates being mentioned to replace him are men with a reputation for football realpolitik; men who might know where the federation’s bodies are buried or, at the very least, who might know but nevertheless feel it is best, “going forward” just to let them lie there.

Some sort of process is inevitable at this stage. The sponsors along with the more straight-laced blazers will, having gone public, demand it and more heads may well roll but as a few in these parts know from bitter experience, things don’t always turn out quite the way they were intended to.