It was an unusually frosty November evening in Moscow when FIFA president Sepp Blatter turned the envelope to face the audience and pulled out the piece of paper with the word “Russia” printed on it.
The international campaign for the right to host the World Cup in 2018 had by then gotten quite nasty, culminating in Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s unusual decision to circulate a statement through a PR agency on why he would not be going to the announcement ceremony in Zurich.
“I see it as an unfair competition before the vote to choose future hosts of the FIFA World Cup.”
Russian journalists, eager to read between the lines, thought: “He must know the verdict and doesn’t want to seem a sore loser.”
But Putin came out on top, swiftly departing Moscow around midnight for a promised press conference in Zurich, where he sat alone behind a giant table and confidently took questions.
When he read a statement in English about how Russia will deliver the great World Cup it has promised, there was an echo of his multilingual speech in Guatemala City, where Putin backed, and delivered, Russia’s bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics to be held in Sochi, which these days is up to its ears in construction.
And yet, aside from avid soccer fans, the news that Russia will host the World Cup did not seem to generate a wide chorus of cheers.
Morning newspapers, in near unison, wondered how the country would foot the bill. The estimated cost of the Olympics in Sochi has already snowballed from the announced $10 billion to $30 billion (the Russian federal budget is just over $2 trillion).
But Sochi is one city. Russia’s FIFA bid lists over a dozen Russian cities where World Cup events will be held, some over a thousand miles apart. Vedomosti used the data from Russia’s bid to calculate that construction on all fronts will cost nearly $50 billion, or about five times what South Africa spent for 2010.
While clinching the World Cup is a shining achievement for Putin, average Russians were little aware of the bid ahead of time and surely have no idea of its implications. One of the host cities mentioned in the bid is Saransk, the capital of Mordovia with a population of 300,000. How many people in this city know anything about the giant stadium to be built there? Where will the city put the hotels that will be needed? Can its airport handle the traffic?
Sochi residents may have a few things to tell the people of Saransk. When clearing the way for the 40,000 seat Central Stadium (to host the largest Olympic events) proved difficult, a local court evicted two dozen Sochi locals; they had three days notice before bulldozers crushed their homes. Many are now temporarily living in a local sanatorium and say that it would be impossible to buy a house in Sochi with the compensation they received. (Sochi’s Central Stadium is to be outfitted to meet FIFA standards, so that it will not be a complete “white elephant” after the Olympics are over).
On Moscow’s Sparrow Hills, where a giant screen was erected to broadcast FIFA’s decision, only about 30 young people were watching and cheering, sending paper balloons into the sky.
“People need bread and circuses,” a Sochi blogger wrote on the website privetsochi.ru. “Surely we have lots of circuses, but will we have enough bread?”
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
Russian Life 73 Main Street, Suite 402 Montpelier VT 05602
802-223-4955
[email protected]
