Note: this was originally slated to be a commentary piece for a non peer-reviewed expert journal that shall remain nameless. For reasons I still don’t understand, the editor never wrote me back after commissioning and receiving the piece. I found it again recently during some computer cleanup, and given that it’s over a year past the date they said they would publish – it was aimed for before the 2018 World Cup – I’m going to share the draft here.

Abstract

Beyond the glories of elite sport, mega-events like the Football World Cup bring to light issues of geopolitics, national development, and social exclusions. This analysis considers the original motivations for hosting the World Cup in Russia and explores the promises that guided the preparations. It then compares these to the outcomes in 2018 across three domains:  international integration, sports development, and urban development.

Kickoff: More than sport

In the stadium, the shrill whistle blows and tens of thousands of fans roar as men on a field dash and dance with a ball. Around the globe, in nearly every country on earth, billions of people follow the action on television or computer screens. Triumph, heartbreak, money won and lost, and new stories added to legend. The FIFA Men’s Football World Cup is arguably the most popular sporting event in the world and its impacts – both social and economic – are immense.

It is expected that Russia 2018 will match or exceed the records set at Brazil 2014, where the tournament reached an in-home audience of 3.2 billion people through television alone, and where FIFA (running on a four-year financial cycle) from 2011-2014 took home USD $5.7 billion in revenue, against USD $5.3 billion in expenses. Clearly, big sport is big business, but there is more happening here besides sport and money. The World Cup is steeped in geopolitics, enmeshed in both identity formation and urban development projects, and often embroiled in controversy.

The Russian World Cup is different from previous mega-events, however. Between 2010 (when they won the right to host) and 2018, the nation’s political and economic contexts shifted dramatically at both international and domestic levels. These new circumstances sometimes conflict with the original motivations for hosting. In many respects, then, the 2018 World Cup is a holdover from a different time.  

Before Russia was chosen to host the World Cup, organizers submitted a candidature file, or bid book, for consideration by FIFA. According to the Russian bid book, the nation had three primary motivations for hosting:

• To improve cooperation with the west, continuing the path of political and economic integration.
• To boost the quality of football infrastructure in the nation and thereby to benefit public health.
• To add a development impulse in order to accelerate infrastructure construction and modernization across western Russia, where 80% of the population lives.

Notably, in their bid, the Russian organizers present themselves as a new country, a young but stable democracy – albeit one with ancient traditions of hospitality – and ready to prove themselves worthy of the club of great nations. Overall, hosting the World Cup was to improve Russia domestically while accelerating and cementing their integration with the west. By 2018, after a string of contentious developments (from Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2011-2012, the protests and reprisals at Bolotnaya Square and beyond, the annexation of Crimea and the quagmire in eastern Ukraine, a string of western sanctions, the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight 17, the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, and the allegations of interference in foreign elections, to name a few), the situation could hardly be more different. So how do the World Cup promises and plans from 2010 look in the context of 2018?

First half: International integration

The 2018 World Cup highlights Russia’s conflicted and contradictory international position. As Russia welcomes football teams from 31 nations and fans from around the globe, they are also suffering economic sanctions imposed by many of those same nations, to say nothing of how often they are portrayed in the west as a pariah or a villain. The result is peculiar: broadly speaking, Russian national pride, the fear of being besieged by enemies, and the sense of injustice at being excoriated in the western media are clashing with the cultural cornerstone of Russian hospitality and an earnest desire in the general population to mingle with international visitors. The Russian organizers seem aware of the difficulties of their position even as they elide the integrationist ideals that originally informed their bid. “We are tired of how they show us abroad. It does not matter what we do – the western press will always show the worst,” said an executive in the Russia 2018 Organizing Committee. “But we are not worried. We have experience from Sochi [the 2014 Olympics] and Kazan [the 2013 Universiade] and we know that athletes value our capabilities. As for the others, we’ll show them, that’s all.” The defensive pride displayed here is common among both organizers and citizens.

Regarding the west, the tone coming from Moscow since 2014 has been notably frosty and occasionally belligerent. President Vladimir Putin’s March 2018 address to the Federal Assembly, in which he introduced a new generation of unbeatable nuclear weapons, is a typical example of this discourse. Levada Center polling has demonstrated that popular attitudes towards the European Union and the United States may be trending more positively, but they still are not close to recovering from the precipitous drops of 2014. Indeed, in polls, a majority of Russians react negatively to them or even consider them enemies. There is a general insistence, certainly among elites but also broadly in the population, that Russia be taken seriously as an independent nation, a great power, and a leader in global affairs. In contrast, when the World Cup bid was submitted, Dmitry Medvedev was president, few commentators expected Vladimir Putin’s return, and the tone from Moscow was one of integrationist modernization. This was reflected unambiguously in the bid: “Russia’s future now depends on cooperation and integration with the world community.” Instead of demanding respect as a great power on the international stage, the bid portrayed Russia as “a new country with bold ideas and fresh dreams… dynamic, stable, and growing.” To be sure every bid is guilty of some hyperbole, but nevertheless even an echo of this rhetoric seems inconceivable today. This radical shift in attitudes between the times of bidding and hosting serves as a reminder of how significantly the nation has changed in less than a decade, and of how badly relations have soured. The original integrationist goals of the World Cup bid have been made irrelevant.

Second half: Investing in sport

According to the bid, another motivation for hosting the World Cup was to invest in the nation’s football infrastructure and encourage the population in sport, thereby benefiting the public health. Aside from the main tournament stadiums, preparations for the World Cup have left the nation with significant improvements in stadiums and facilities for lower tier football, ordinary people, and particularly the youth. Russian Federal Government Decree 518, which established the nation’s ambitious infrastructure development plan for hosting, originally mandated the construction of 113 training grounds and associated facilities at an approximate cost of USD $270 million, adjusted for inflation. By 2018, the Organizing Committee reported that 95 training facilities had been constructed, and the latest revision of Decree 518 lists a budget of approximately USD $155 million. Aside from the planned facilities that did not materialize, it is important to underscore the widespread success of these projects. It is easy to criticize broken budgets and overambitious plans, but the fact remains that many people in and near the World Cup host cities now have improved access to modern sport facilities, should they want them. This is particularly important for Russia’s regions, which suffer from relative underdevelopment in comparison to Moscow and St. Petersburg. It is not possible to predict the long-term effect of these investments, but there are two obstacles that stand in the way of the organizers’ aspirations to improve the public health. For one, despite the increase in interest during the countdown to the World Cup, and in contrast to government rhetoric, football remains somewhat of a peripheral sport in Russia. It only takes a glance at ticket sales for an average game to understand that football is not terribly popular, although perhaps this will change in the aftermath of the tournament. The other problem concerns the feasibility of improving public health through sport. There is not much evidence to back up the assertion that hosting sports mega-events leads to more public participation in sport. Nevertheless, the World Cup-inspired creation of new public and youth facilities should be acknowledged, especially as it represents a material benefit for many people who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to play, even if they are a minority.

Overtime: Urban development

Hosting mega-events is expensive and invariably costs more than planned. Authorities often justify these investments by promising benefits to the host population, including a legacy of improved infrastructure. It is not just the construction of new sports facilities that results in busted budgets, then, but also the costly blend of infrastructure projects that are either required to host or promised for the long-term benefit of the region. Complicating matters, the inflexible event deadline – combined with national prestige on the line – can enable price gouging or outright corruption among unscrupulous construction companies and politicians.  

In this, the Russian World Cup is no exception. Like the Sochi Olympics, part of the high costs of the World Cup can be explained by the fact that it is not purely a sports event, but also a wide-ranging urban and regional development project. Both in the bid and in person, organizers emphasize how the World Cup will accelerate Russia’s already existing infrastructure modernization plans. The World Cup is framed as an impulse for national development. “It is not fair to call this the most expensive World Cup ever,” said a member of the Organizing Committee. “We are building for our country… It all would have been built anyway, but this way we can do ten, twenty years of work in a shorter time.” It is not clear why a national infrastructure development project must be tied to a sporting event, but this argument is common among mega-event boosters worldwide and is not limited to Russia.

The World Cup bid shared the urban master plans for a number of potential host cities in order to show how the nation was already on track to meet hosting requirements. Once the bid was won and a deadline established, authorities began pumping funds into developing not just the capital cities but also, notably, the periphery. There have been extensive upgrades to airports and train stations in all eleven host cities and monumental investments into tourist and transit infrastructure. Since organizers wanted to harness the construction impulse of the World Cup to kick-start a wave of investment in the host cities, it is common to see new stadiums sited in areas slated for later development. Examples of this include the stadium in Kaliningrad, built on a mostly untouched island near the city center, and the stadium in Rostov, set on the opposite bank of the Don in hopes that the city will now grow on both sides of the river.

There are established dangers with blending mega-events and development projects, however. Sporting infrastructure tends to take precedence over other projects, and non-sporting projects usually are the first on the chopping block when deadlines loom. There are numerous examples of this tendency in the preparations for Russia 2018. In the bid, the organizers promised an ambitious plan to link many of the host cities with high-speed rail. In the original plan, Moscow was to be linked to Sochi (via Rostov) and to Ekaterinburg (via Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan). The introduction of high-speed rail connections over Russia’s vast distances could have produced substantial long-term benefits after the games. In the end, however, only the connection to Nizhny Novgorod was built and all other high-speed rail connections have been delayed.

There have also been notable project cancellations at the municipal level, as the short-term needs of the event outweighed the long-term needs of residents. In Ekaterinburg, for instance, a long-awaited second metro line failed to materialize, even though the promised expansion was to include a station by the World Cup stadium. In St. Petersburg, completing the stadium came directly at the expense of constructing social infrastructure such as kindergartens (7 cancelled), schools (6 cancelled), and others facilities like museums, health clinics, and housing (17 cancelled). Further, even when projects are completed, it is impossible not to notice how selective are these improvements. In many host cities, for instance, one needs to travel only a single street away from an upgraded boulevard to see roads and buildings in lamentable condition. The World Cup is leaving improved host cities in its wake, but these improvements are selective, spatially uneven, and do not benefit everyone equally.

Final score: Who wins?

Similar to many host nations, the Russian organizers attempted to use the World Cup for reasons beyond sport. Their original goals – to cement Russia’s relations with the west, to invest in the nation’s sporting future, and to develop infrastructure in the periphery – soon were overtaken by shifting political and economic circumstances. In the context of troubled international relations and an uneasy financial situation, the 2018 World Cup looks much different than it was imagined in 2010. Unlike football itself, where the winners and losers are unmistakable, the results of the projects surrounding the World Cup are much more confusing. What is clear is that in a mere eight years, conditions have shifted so dramatically that it is almost as if the Russia that bid for the event is a different Russia than the one that hosted. In this light, the results of the original World Cup goals – mixed and uneven as they are – should still be appreciated, even as they serve to remind of squandered potential in both international and domestic domains.