Russian enforcers are happy to let football do the talking
After the pre-tournament hype and fears, global attention is now firmly fixed on the pitch
The beach shops in the resort of Adler, the town on the Black Sea near to Sochi’s Fisht Stadium, must be among the few in Europe that do not sell knock-off Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo shirts, even on Friday when the latter was playing there.
Instead, the only unofficial merchandise to be had featured the face of Vladimir Putin winking Ronaldo-esque on one, on another wearing sunglasses and military fatigues with an accompanying slogan in Russian. It translated as “friendly, accommodating people”, a Russian joke, it was explained, about the annexation of Crimea. The Russian military had appeared overnight, all of them, so the saying goes in this part of the world, “friendly, accommodating people”. The previous night at the Luzhniki Stadium, Putin had sat with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad Bin-Salman, and their lads-at-the-game geo-political football banter had stolen the show.
The Russian president is more globally famous than any of Russia’s footballers and the occasion was more about which world leader was going to be chronically embarrassed by his own team. Every troubled or controversial modern World Cup finals has a tipping point, the moment when the talk of the politics, the stadium costs, the last-minute infrastructure shortfalls, the legacy nightmares or the public overspend give way to the same gripping narrative of the football.
It took Russia 2018 less than 24 hours for the football to take over. In the 88th minute in Sochi, Ronaldo tugged up his shorts to reveal the game’s most famous quads, football’s equivalent of a 1970s Red Square parade of military might, and dispatched his hat-trick goal in the nick of time. Portugal 3, Spain 3 was the first classic of Russia 2018, soon to be followed by the parade of greats: Messi yesterday, then the Germans this afternoon and Neymar and Brazil in Rostov tonight.
It does not make it right, of course, it just so happens that even in the financial catastrophes that were South Africa 2010 and Brazil 2014, the power of the football was so great that in the end it just overwhelmed whatever else happened. Russia 2018 takes place against a diplomatic fallout unprecedented ahead of a modern tournament and yet the organisers will have known that once the action started, the momentum would be irresistible. In a country that has a genius for public relations, it was never going to be difficult for the Russians to harness the innate power of the world’s biggest sporting event and move the conversation swiftly on from the politics.
In his award-winning book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia, the British television producer Peter Pomerantsev details the role of the Russian “political technologist”. These are the Kremlin’s keenest minds who create what the author sees as the illusions of a modern democracy: opposition parties, modern television shows, NGOs, a place for the hipsters and a place for the extremists. All of it under the auspices of the state. Pomerantsev says the most skilful of the technologists “climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd”. Moscow can feel like “an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime”. How could we have doubted the Russian state’s capacity to pull off the piddling matter of a 32-team football tournament?
In Sochi, on the way to the Fisht Stadium, my taxi driver stopped at the first police roadblock we encountered and suggested I walk the last mile or so to the arresting white stadium, a giant seashell shimmering in the heat haze. The journey took me and others up a motorway slip road, through vast boiling empty car parks and finally over a bridge into the Sochi fanpark. This was finally Fifa-land, where enthusiastic English-speaking young Russians, official Fifa volunteers, virtually insist on helping. A stipulation of the Russian authorities, and for the first time at a World Cup, even the fans are required to wear accreditation, known as Fan ID, joining staff, volunteers, media and others in having a square of laminated plastic dangling from their neck. One might assume that some would find that a step too far, but many seem to wear them with pride. The Brazilian opposition to the 2014 World Cup finals was public, often vociferous and easy to access – anti-Fifa slogans stencilled in paint along the pavements of the Copacabana. In Russia there is none, or not any obvious to outsiders. It already feels a slicker PR operation. Before the opening game there was some criticism of the Russian team and the country’s player development in the English language Moscow Times newspaper, but that was all. The prospect of Russian hooligan violence, especially when England play on Monday in Volgograd, the poorest of the host cities, has been raised, but that too seems to be under control. The football has taken over, as it always does, and that suits the hosts, but there is no question who is in charge, even if they are happy for it not always to be obvious at first glance.