What awaits England fans at the World Cup?
Les supporters anglais attendus en Russie.
En 2010, la Russie était désignée pour organiser la Coupe du Monde de football 2018. Huit ans plus tard, la situation géopolitique a évolué et les tensions diplomatiques se sont multipliées, notamment entre la Russie et le Royaume-Uni. Par ailleurs, les hooligans russes promettent depuis plusieurs mois un « festival de violence » aux supporters anglais qui auront fait le déplacement. Alors, à quoi doivent s’attendre ces derniers pour cette nouvelle Coupe du Monde ?
For many England fans, talk of the World Cup in Moscow has been soured by those clashes in 2016.
In a Moscow pub decorated with British football memorabilia, a Russian supporter of local side CSKA was happy last week to reassure English fans planning to travel to this summer’s World Cup. Konstantin, or Kostya for short, says he doubts there will be violence because the toughest Russian hooligans have already lost their taste for fighting England supporters.
2. “It’s like being a mountain climber,” said Kostya, a member of one of the Russian capital’s prominent CSKA “firms”, after recalling how a group of Russian fans smashed through a contingent of English fans in Marseille in June 2016, using extreme violence. “Once you’ve reached the summit, you don’t do it again. There’s no point in beating them again. So they don’t have to be afraid to come to Russia, nothing’s going to happen.”
NOT THE BEST POSSIBLE TIME
3. The summer of 2018 does not feel like the most auspicious moment for the eyes of the world to be directed towards Russia. For
1. memorabilia souvenirs (objets) / side ici, équipe / CSKA club de football russe basé à Moscou / tough ici, coriace, violent / taste goût, penchant. 2. mountain climber alpiniste / prominent principal, important / firm "firme" (bande de hooligans) / to smash through se frayer un chemin à travers... (par la violence) / no point in... inutile de .... 3. auspicious propice / many England fans, talk of the World Cup in Moscow has been soured by those clashes in 2016, as well as incidents of racism, and a litany of major international disputes, from the conflict in Ukraine to the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, which the British government has blamed on the Kremlin.
4. Geopolitical tensions and a weak pound have already driven down British tourism in Russia. Maya Lomidze, the executive director of the Russian Association of Tour Operators, told the Observer that the number of British tourists had dropped by an average of 10% each year since 2014.
ENGLAND SUPPORTERS’ BEHAVIOUR
5. And then there is the behaviour of England supporters abroad. Twenty-five were arrested after clashing with police in Amsterdam before their friendly with the Netherlands in March. Some threw beer bottles at police. It all looks a bit volatile. Yet Russian journalists, commentators, and even hooligans here scoff when asked about the possibility of serious violence this June. “No offence to the French police,” said Dmitry Navosha, the head of the respected independent website Sports.ru, making reference to the mayhem in Marseille, “But the Russian police hold big sporting events with a lot more personnel and they are a lot tougher.” 6. In Russia, for instance, it’s not unusual on match day for more than a thousand riot police, colloquially called “cosmonauts” for their heavy helmets, to stand shoulder-toshoulder all the way from the metro to the nearest football stadium. Alcohol sales are banned in entire neighbourhoods.
EIGHT YEARS AGO
7. More than a decade has passed since Russia opened its bid to host the 2018 World Cup. In 2010, Vladimir Putin, giving a rare speech in English, said he was “honoured from bottom of my heart” that the country had been chosen to stage it. At that time, the president was Dmitry Medvedev, Russia was recovering from the 2008 financial crisis and oil prices averaged more than $70 per barrel. The World Cup decision was made “long before the critical phase of confrontation with the west”, Navosha said.
8. Fast forward eight years, and much has changed. Relations between London and Moscow are at their worst since the cold war. Putin has lost patience with the west. And it doesn’t seem like a successful World Cup can do much to change that. To a certain degree, the tournament is a relic from a bygone, slightly more innocent past, when Putin might still have believed that Russia could woo the west by successfully
putting on prestige sporting events and eventually be accepted into the club of great nations as an equal. That clearly no longer interests him.
9. But the tournament will go on. Twelve venues in 11 cities are hosting matches this summer, including uncommon tourist destinations such as Saransk and Rostov. From an infrastructure standpoint, the endeavour is even more imposing than the Winter Olympics, which cost the government an estimated $50bn. Indeed infrastructure – with some stadiums still not ready, despite being due to hold matches in just three months – can be a touchy subject: Russian officials still bristle when they recall criticisms from foreign journalists over the preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics (a BBC photograph of a single bathroom stall with two toilets raised particular ire).
A SYMBOLIC VALUE
10. The World Cup, meanwhile, would show a successful mastery over Russia’s vast expanses and one of its traditional problem areas: transport. It would also carry symbolic value. “I think the original idea was a demonstration of Russia’s greatness for both the outside world and a domestic audience,” Navosha said.
11. As to the football itself, Russians are hedging their bets. Perhaps Russian football’s greatest moment in the last decade came in the quarter-finals of Euro 2008, when a young squad boasting a pre-Arsenal Andrei Arshavin, scored twice in the final minutes of extra time to win a thriller against the Netherlands. In St Petersburg, thousands of fans jubilantly poured out of bars and cafes onto the streets as though Russia had just won the World Cup. Russia haven’t made it past the group stages in international competition since then. Gusev, the commentator, said that Russia’s youngest generation had not yet produced new stars, and that this was the weakest side the country had fielded “since I was a boy”.
HOOLIGAN CULTURE
12. Despite the violence in Marseille in 2016, there is something of a reverence for British hooligan culture, or a mythicised version of it, in Russia. Russian “firms” often give themselves British names, for instance.
13. “I don’t know if you get this in the UK, but these Russian ultras, the ones who don’t get football without fighting, it’s an imitation, almost a caricature of the British hooligan subculture,” Navosha said. “It’s like in [hardman author] Dougie Brimson, in films such as Green Street or The Football Factory.” Kostya, the football fan, grew up in a military family near Moscow and went to his first CSKA game nearly two decades ago.
14. Before the police beefed up their presence, he said, networks of CSKA fans would link up on game days and scour the city “trying to find the biggest group of Spartak guys to fight them”. Now, many of the fights were pre-planned and held in forests, he said. They were often attended by a new breed of Russian hooligan who eschews alcohol and often goes through mixed martial arts or other combat training.
15. “Fighting in the forest is not hooliganism,” said Kostya, who said he did not participate in those fights. “The point for me is to go to some country or city, drink, have some fun, and if someone is aggressive, we give them the answer. And that’s it.”