Away from the World Cup glitz, Russia is falling apart POOR SHOW
THE World Cup stadiums tell you that Russia means business.
Moscow’s new Spartak Arena is dazzling red, with its own dedicated Metro station and 82ft bronze statue of Spartacus towering over the gates. It is eclipsed by the £615 million St Petersburg Stadium and Moscow’s Luzhniki, the latter having been overhauled to withstand the Russian winters after it has staged next summer’s final.
No-one will discuss the overall sum Russia is pouring into the tournament but £20 billion is being discussed as the bill for the privilege of staging the event England so badly wanted.
Journey hundreds of miles away from the bright lights and FIFA’s Confederations Cup corporate signage, though, and you find a true measure of whether this vast nation really wants or needs international football’s ultimate jamboree.
The answers reside in an eighthour road trip from Moscow to Velikiye Luki, in the agricultural lands of the Pskov region out towards the Latvian border.
Scores of traditional Russian wooden houses are in a state of collapse, abandoned to the elements by occupants who have headed up to the cities in search of work. The ‘roads’ in the vast, empty northwest deteriorate into loosely assembled slabs of concrete in places.
The approach by public bus to Nelidovo — another t own in Nowheresville — is best experienced with your eyes tight shut. One side of the track gives up the ghost at one stage and the very basic bus lurches into the path intended for oncoming traffic.
There were hopes of something better than this when Russia was awarded the World Cup, back in 2010. But the oil price crash of 2014 brought recession. Then the occupation of Crimea brought sanctions, counter sanctions and, less appreciated in the west, vast outlay on a symbolic project to build a bridge across the Kerch Strait to Crimea.
‘On account of this bridge, the building of new automobile roads in Russia has been practically suspended,’ one Russian highways agency official has revealed. ‘The country does not have enough money. Therefore we cannot implement everything we want.’
Where the World Cup investment comes from is difficult to ascertain but 83 per cent of the £40bn thrown at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics — President Vladimir Putin’s pet project — was in the form of cheap state loans, says Nikita Kulachenkov of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. For the Sochi Olympics, contracts worth an estimated £5.5bn were picked up by Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s childhood friend. Two of the World Cup stadiums — Volgograd and Nizhny Novgorod — have been assigned to the Stroytransgaz corporation, the oil and gas industry specialist headed by Gennady Timchenko, another personal friend of the president. The St Petersburg stadium has been paid for by the state. Its budget has been revised upwards three times.
Kulachenkov says: ‘The state has been cutting social spending and healthcare spending in the last three years, in the number of dollars spent and as a percentage of GDP. Hospitals have closed. Trying to build stadiums simultaneously is very strange.’
Russian f ootball cl ubs have struggled too — a consequence of 26 of the 36 in the top two divisions being owned by local government.
The host cities are making the best of things. The Mail on Sunday’s 10- day journey around the four World Cup stadiums being tested at the Confederations Cup reveals vastly more progress than chaotic Brazil had managed at the same stage in 2013. Four host cities visited have an infrastructure that will comfortably cope.
England’s FA, on their own trip last week, are thought to have been impressed with the set-up for fans. There are f r ee r ai l s ervices between venues for supporters and free Metro services within them. The high-speed, two-hour St Petersburg to Moscow train, with TV screens and wifi, puts Britain in the shade. The overnight sleeper to Vel i ki ye Luki was basi c but punctual and cheap (£100), for those who want to go off the tournament trail. St Petersburg is the most attractive host city and the tournament can potentially confound preconceptions about the qualities of deeper Russia — from cuisine to streets which appear unthreatening — though there are pitfalls.
Diego Saez, a Chilean sportswriter who landed exhausted at Moscow on Thursday, was scammed for nearly £800 by an airport-approved cabbie for a 30-mile journey across the city which should have cost less than £70. Russian police’s determination to see the country’s image improved saw the driver, whom the j o urnali s t had photographed, apprehended.
Police zero tolerance will clearly also apply to raucous groups of England fans. ‘Police will disperse t he crowds,’ s ai d one f an in Moscow, who asked not to be identified. ‘The English will be OK if they conduct themselves properly and don’t go getting drunk on suburban trains and [encounter] local firms.’ There will be far fewer ticketless fans than at Euro 2016. Visas will only be granted to ticket holders.
Organisers must look to improve baffling Cyrillic- only signs in places and Moscow’s chaotic central road system, while exhaustive security checks will demand high numbers of staff, to prevent long queues forming.
‘The World Cup is on the [same level as] Sochi for the government and the people,’ says Svetlana Bazhanova of Moscow’s l ocal organising committee. ‘ It is a national programme.’ National pride is the priority.
FIFA will benefit, even if the people won’t.