Stage Fright: Can Russia Avoid Falling Flat on its World Cup Stage

19:51 PM, 25 JUNE 2018 
COSMOS ARENA - SAMARA, RUSSIA

It’s a balmy evening in Samara and the Russian national team are on the ropes. Exhausted and desperate, the men in red know that their time in this, their domestic World Cup, is ebbing away. They have spent 90 minutes chasing shadows in the evening heat, watching on helplessly as the far superior Uruguayans have notched up a 4-0 lead. A dreary 0-0 draw against Saudi Arabia, followed by a comprehensive 2-0 defeat to Egypt had left them staring at the abyss of elimination before this game even began. Now the ignominy is almost complete.  

Second follows agonising second – the players, the crowd, they all know that the embarrassment is about to reach its resounding crescendo. Boos echo around the ground as the referee brings his whistle to his lips, confirming the grim reality - Russia have been dumped out the 2018 World Cup at the earliest opportunity. Babushkas bellow, grown men weep and humiliated players thump the pitch in frustration. They are a worldwide laughing stock, a national disgrace…  

Football fact or football fiction? Only time will tell, however, few would truly be surprised if Russia, ranked by FIFA at the time of writing as the second-worst team in the tournament, become the only host nation after South Africa to exit a World Cup at the group stages. Indeed, according to a poll carried out by the state-funded Public Opinion Fund in April, only 4 percent of Russians actually believe that their country will be world champions come July – which equates to at least an English level of optimism before this summer’s football kicks off. 

While, clearly, Russian fans and their government alike would prefer to avoid any footballing humiliation, success for Russia is significantly more likely to be measured by events off the pitch than on it. Moscow, an international pariah after events in Syria and Ukraine in recent years, knows that the tournament is a PR opportunity, a stage to boost both Russian national pride as well as striking a blow against its critics in the West. However, for that to happen, there is a lot that needs to go right and this is a World Cup where an awful lot can go wrong. 

Certainly, there is a severely limited enthusiasm for this tournament from English football supporters. In many ways, Russia lost the battle for these fans’ hearts and minds a long time ago – corruption allegations surrounding the bidding process for hosting rights in 2010 embittered many, but it’s Russian hooliganism which has really poisoned attitudes, possibly indelibly. While violence in the Russia-England game during Euro 2016 may have brought the issue under the microscope, English supporters with rather longer memories will recall the events around England’s 2-1 defeat in Moscow in October 2007 when they were on the receiving end of such organised violence for the first time. Some fans have publicly stated that they wouldn’t go back to Russia again after that experience, let alone go to a tournament there. 

Add this to reports of accommodation prices being hiked up some 18,000% in some host cities – the Independent noting that the ‘best value’ dwelling in glamourous Kaliningrad was a tent priced at £63 a night – and lingering concerns ranging from logistics to racism, it hardly looks like an attractive prospect. Talk of a boycott might be more or less restricted to Prince William and a few world leaders such as Polish President Andrzej Duda, but you do start to wonder who in their right mind would bother making the effort – and that is a real tragedy, both for fans who will have missed out on some of Russia’s hidden gems and for Russia’s own endeavours to soften its image. 

Russia, for all of its bravado on the international stage, has a real image problem and it will have few better opportunities to fix that than hosting a World Cup. Major sporting events increasingly have become the preserve of authoritarian (or at least semi-authoritarian) states and with good reason – there’s not much more powerful or legitimising than sport when it comes to getting the international community to warm to you. Doses of sporting diplomacy have been seen from Baku to Beijing, so it’s hardly a shock that Russia would want to replicate such a successful blueprint. 

The World Cup is a chance to re-set global opinion of Russia, at least to a certain extent. Countries have done a great job of this before – Germany, for instance, not just demonstrating itself to be a paragon of efficiency but also fun-loving and welcoming when it hosted the 2006 edition. While, of course, this is rather an extreme comparison considering the Germans hardly had the same level of bad blood and international criticism to counter, there is precedent for Moscow to follow. Besides, there are often a plethora of issues and negative reports heading into a major tournament like this (Brazil certainly wasn’t immune from media scrutiny in 2014, for instance) and there is often a tendency for these problems to melt away once the football starts. The global public, it shouldn’t be forgotten, have a pretty short attention span and this is something the Kremlin will be counting on. 

Boris Johnson created a humongous stir when he recently suggested Putin might use the World Cup in a similar fashion to how Adolf Hitler used the 1936 Olympics, likening it to a propaganda circus. In response, Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, said the Foreign Secretary was “poisoned with venom of hate, unprofessionalism and boorishness”. If nothing else, this exchange illustrates the extent to which diplomatic tensions have been strained heading into the tournament. Tensions are undoubtedly high and Russia has work to do to win over the world and pull off a successful PR coup. 

However, a World Cup should be more than than just a PR exercise. It should create memories, inspire locals to become the next Lev Yashin or Andrei Arshavin (maybe) and make for a welcoming, positive experience for visitors and hosts alike. There is a spectre of potential misfortune which looms heavily over this World Cup and Russia will need to deliver something close to perfection to silence its doubters. If Moscow fails, it could be another missed opportunity to heal an increasingly gaping chasm that exists between it and the West.