Krasnodar gets the cold shoulder
KRASNODAR: The 2018 World Cup has visited 11 Russian cities this summer, a sprawling tour of the country that stretched from Kaliningrad on the Baltic to Sochi on the Black Sea to Yekaterinburg, in the shadow of the Urals. But it skipped Krasnodar, arguably Russia’s most football-mad city, and to those who live here, that decision still makes little sense.
“The most soccer-mad city was shut out,” Sergei N. Galitsky, the local billionaire who bankrolls the city’s biggest club, wrote on Twitter when Krasnodar was excluded in 2012.
Krasnodar was on the proposed host cities list but was removed at the last moment in 2012. Among others, it lost to the city of Saransk, with a population of 314,000 and scant football following.
Many locals pointed to the fact that Krasnodar is the only Russian city outside Moscow that had two teams in the top league - Galitsky’s Krasnodar and the municipal Kuban, one of the oldest teams in Russia.
Russian authorities said the final selection had been made by Fifa. And Vitaly L. Mutko, Russia’s sports minister at the time, said that with the capacity of 34,000 spectators, the Krasnodar stadium was not big enough. But residents have been quick to note that some of the current host cities have smaller arenas.
Whenever people visit Galitsky’s academy here - Spain lived and trained at the facility during the World Cup they show nothing but “astonishment,” said Maksim A. Savostin, its sporting director. “Many people when they hear about Krasnodar think that this is just some small city,” Savostin said. “It is when they come here that they understand how unique this project is.”