Ics, football mix like never before

the increasing hardening of Russia’s stance towards the outside world, and especially the West, provides an intriguing lining to a World Cup that will otherwise be defined by footballing geniuses and fervid collectives, by stunning feats of athleticism and outstanding acts of devotion.

This, in many ways, is the paradox of Russia’s World Cup: that a tournament conceived as a congress of nations, a bridge between worlds, a celebration of commonality and openness, is taking place in a country that has done more than any other to burn those bridges, to obscure

divide, to drive those worlds ever further apart.

The consequence of this is that Putin’s Russia is no longer overly preoccupied with what the outside world thinks of it, and is certainly under no illusions that it can get Western sanctions lifted or thaw relations with

United States by successfully hosting a football tournament.

The World Cup will not have any significant impact on Russia’s image,” Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, said: “It is just too toxic.”

So as enthralling and captivating as it will be, this World Cup isn’t being hosted for our benefit. It’s largely for domestic consumption; undeterred by the abject state of the national side, which as most Russians realised some time ago, hasn’t got the faintest chance of actually winning the competition.

This, by the way, is why comparisons with the 1936 Berlin Olympics are not just wide of the mark but rather lazy: the idea of a supreme athletic master race is rather harder to confect when you’re ranked No. 70 in the world and expected to be fighting it out with Egypt to secure a place in the second round.

With no hope of a home triumph, then, the objectives for the tournament have been subtly shifted.

I t ’ s b e c o me a b o u t c o mpet e n c e , professionalism, infrastructure, control: the Putin regime proving to its people that even in the face of sanctions, a staggering economy, falling oil prices and the nasty foreign media, it can host one of these big events just as well as any of the Western powers.

At an economic forum last month, Putin was asked who would win the World Cup. “The organisers,” he replied, to laughter and applause.

In order to pull it off, Russia has kept an uncharacteristically tight rein on a financial and bureaucratic apparatus more often associated with vast inefficiency, broken promises and a sort of modulated, tendentious chaos.

Nine brand new stadiums have been constructed. There have been budget overruns, the odd local row, the odd cut corner, but nothing grotesquely out of keeping with the regular build-up to a global mega-event.

Hooliganism, for all the grisly images emerging from Euro 2016 in France two years ago and the long history of football violence in the country, is not predicted to be a major threat. It’s proof, I suppose, that Russia can do pretty much whatever it wants to when it sets its mind to it.

For those visiting the country from outside, it can seem an intimidatingly intractable place: not so much overtly hostile as deeply, menacingly, wilfully bewildering.

A place where words can mean whatever you want them to mean, where a surreal doublethink reigns supreme, where an obscure and cryptic absurdism clings to every transaction like an invisible film.

And so, will there be racism at the World Cup? Will there be violence? Will there be oppression of gay fans and minorities? Will there be transport chaos, price gouging and heavy-handed security? Of course there will. Of course there won’t. It all depends on where you look.

That’s the thing about something as unfathomably large as the World Cup: glimpse at it for long enough, and you’ll see pretty much whatever you want to.

The girl at the Russian embassy who handled my visa application was the most joyous, chuckling, friendly, hospitable employee of a foreign government I’ve ever met.

Maybe they were under special orders to be polite to the World Cup journalists. Maybe she was just, you know, nice. This is the thing about a Russian World Cup: you can never quite be sure that what you’re being shown is genuine or being staged for your benefit, whether what you’re being told is a statement of fact, or simply a cleverly ambiguous formulation of words and facial expressions, a society of masks upon masks, where racism isn’t racism, where free elections aren’t free elections.

Remind you of anything at all? The absurdity, the lack of accountability, the quasifeudal structure, the culture of casual kleptocracy, the malleability of truth?

FIFA have always been fastidiously keen on people including their name when describing the tournament, but given the setting and the manner in which it was awarded, this may well be the first time it is appropriate to do so.

This does feel, more than most, like the FIFA World Cup: the most FIFA-y, World Cuppiest FIFA World Cup ever. It’s somehow so fitting that a FIFA ethics committee investigation cleared Russia of all wrongdoing with relation to the 2018 bid, albeit after Russia had swiftly and expeditiously destroyed all the bid computers.

None of this need necessarily make the tournament any less watchable, the football any less enthralling, the sense of occasion any less electric. It won’t make Cristiano Ronaldo’s stepovers any less impressive, Kevin de Bruyne’s through balls any less perceptive.

One of the most stubbornly tenacious traits of sporting impropriety is that there’s always the sport to spirit the spotlight away from the impropriety. It’s why the next month will be unashamedly decadent, uproarious, divisive, entrancing, fun.

There comes a time when, for most observers at least, the geopolitics stops and the football starts. Russia will host its World Cup, we will all watch it, and it will probably be fine. Just try not to look too closely, or you’ll see something you’re not supposed to. – The Independent