The World Cup: an ad for Putin’s Russia?

Whoever said sport and politics don’t mix? If there’s one thing we can already say for sure about this World Cup, said The Independent, it is that it’s virtually a “global party political broadcast” for Vladimir Putin. Political leaders from all over the world are endorsing him just by turning up. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia was a highprofile guest at the opening event. President Macron will attend if France makes it to the semi-finals. Theresa May and Prince William kept away – the Salisbury poisoning made that inevitable – but Robbie Williams was there to make up for it. Boycotting the World Cup was the one chance the West had to embarrass Putin for his provocations – annexing Crimea, colluding with Assad in the use of chemical weapons and so on – and it flunked it. No wonder Putin likes to take risks in foreign policy: he always gets away with them.

This has to be “the sleaziest global sporting event since the 1936 Berlin Olympics”, said Robert Hardman in the Daily Mail. It was “a perversion of justice” the moment Fifa awarded it to Russia in 2010. Football’s governing body has since been exposed as an international extortion racket; a whole cabal of its “corkscrewshaped” officials have been indicted. But such is “the vast bubble of hype” surrounding the event that the opening brought “barely a bat squeak” of protest, even when Peter Tatchell – one of the few people to raise the issue of Russian homophobia – was arrested outside the Kremlin for protesting the treatment of gay people in Chechnya.

Russia and Fifa haven’t entirely got away with it. The World Cup is one of the world’s most watched events, yet advertisers have kept away – only 20 of the 34 main sponsorship slots have been sold, said Andrew Hughes on The Conversation. It’s soft power of a sort: these days, brands like to take a stand on “issues” and fear they’ll come across as “inauthentic” if consumers see them as linked to tainted “brands” like Russia and Fifa. Yet Russia has spruced up its image to present a friendly face, said The Economist. It has spent $11bn on infrastructure; taxi drivers have been told to brush up on language skills (“I’m already tired of saying khello,” as one Moscow cabby puts it) and surly train drivers “to smile at customers”. The World Cup may be compromised by greed, said Barney Ronay in The Guardian, but the fans’ excitement and the football’s brilliance is hard to resist. For that reason, this “belching, burping circus” remains, at its heart, unexpectedly pure and “impossibly moreish”.