Huge new stadium in Russian city dwarfs team

Andrew E. Kramer KALININGRAD, RUSSIA — Nikita Zakharov leads the fan club for the soccer team in this leafy, slow-paced provincial city, and yet he keeps a clear-eyed view of its place in the wider world of soccer.

“We cannot really boast of soccer success,” he said mournfully. The team, Baltika, plays in a second-tier Russian league. In its 64-year history, it has won the championship once and came in second twice.

Its biggest win, it turns out, was not so much on the field as with a field. Rising out of a formerly undeveloped swampy area in the city, a gigantic, glistening $280 million stadium appeared this year, one of six new arenas Russia built for the World Cup. It is a bumper crop of new stadiums that, even by World Cup standards, appear out of proportion with the small crowds drawn by local teams like Baltika, which will use the venues after the tournament.

Their construction, at a cumulative cost estimated at $11 billion along with related infrastructure, illustrates how sports, as with the oil and mining businesses, has become integral to how the Kremlin and Russia’s ultrawealthy financiers, known as the oligarchs, do business together.

World Cup stadiums became a means to reward well-connected businessmen, said Ilya Shumanov, deputy director of the anti-corruption group Transparency International.

“Authoritarian regimes love mega-sports projects,” Shumanov said. “Huge sums are distributed from the budget. It’s bread and circuses at the same time.”

The lucrative deal in Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave between Lithuania and Poland, went to the company of Aras Agalarov, one of Russia’s wealthiest men. The stadium in Kaliningrad is among those that went to cities with no top-tier soccer team. In one instance, a stadium with 45,000 seats went up in Saransk, a city with a population of 297,000.

The designs of the new stadiums nod to local pride. In Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg, both port towns, the stadiums’ look hints at ships. Mast-like towers suspend the roofs. The flying-saucer-shaped Cosmos Arena appeared in Samara, a center of the space industry.

Kaliningrad’s residents have been scratching their heads over what to do with the stadium when the World Cup is over.

The 35,000-seat venue will host four tournament matches in June and then pass to team Baltika, which last year drew an average of 4,000 spectators to matches. These were low-key events, according to videos of the games, where tepid fans munched sesame seeds and watched their blue-and-white clad soccer heroes play.

“There are just not so many soccer lovers here,” said Vadim Chaly, an associate professor of philosophy at Kaliningrad University, and an authority on Immanuel Kant, a city native from the time Kaliningrad was German and called Konigsberg.

Anton Alikhanov, the regional governor, said in an interview that the stadium and related soccer spending will only benefit Kaliningrad. It helped pay for new ribbons of asphalt on roads, an airport upgrade and the filling of swampland.

“The island was a swamp where nothing but cattails grew,” he said. “If we hadn’t built a stadium, we would never have built anything there.”