World Cup just a sideshow for him
ARGENTINA FAN: LIKE HIS SIDE HE ALSO WANTS TO SCORE
During an afternoon at a Moscow park, Argentina fan Augustin Otelo is counting not the number of goals his team has scored in the World Cup but the number of phone numbers he has collected from Russian girls.
“Four!” boasts the 26-year-old engineer dressed in his country’s blue and white stripes as he competes with his friends to see who can get the most phone numbers.
Otelo said he hopes his “exotic factor” will help him “find love” in the Russian capital.
“We don’t know what to do between matches, so we thought we could try to get to know the Russian people better,” he said.
The Argentinians are flicking through selfies on their phones of Russian girls posing on the popular dating app Tinder.
“There’s a lot of competition because of the number of men who have come to Russia for the World Cup,” Otelo said.
“And very few girls speak English or Spanish.”
But the language barrier has not stopped Russians and thousands of foreign football fans from mixing on the streets of Moscow, despite conflicting messages to Russia’s female population from politicians.
On the eve of the World Cup, Communist lawmaker Tamara Pletneva warned Russian women that flings with visiting football fans could leave them raising children “of another race” alone.
“We should be giving birth to our own children,” said Pletneva, who leads the lower house of parliament’s family, women and children committee.
Another Russian MP, Mikhail Degtyaryov from the ultra-nationalist LDPR party, took the opposite view.
“The more love stories we have connected to the World Cup ... the more children are born, the better,” he said.
The Kremlin said World Cup romances are personal choices.
“Russian women can probably manage their own affairs. They are the best women in the world,” Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
One 25-year-old woman, who gave her name as Maria S., said she had been “impatiently” waiting for the World Cup because it “multiplies opportunities to meet with foreigners”.
“That is probably its main advantage,” said the brunette, who took English classes ahead of the games. – AFP