Russian officials said the resignation of Fifa president Sepp Blatter would have no impact on their preparations to host the World Cup in 2018 and insisted there could be no question of revisiting the decision to hand Russia the tournament.
“It’s not about Russia or Qatar, it’s about respect to football players,” deputy prime minister Arkady Dvorkovich told the Guardian on Wednesday. “Any political interference into football affairs is illegal. Our preparations are going very well, much better than in some other World Cup countries. We have learned from them.”
Also on Wednesday, a planned meeting of the 2018 organising committee was held in Rostov, the southern city from which Russia is accused of conducting its covert invasion of Ukraine in recent months, and which is also a 2018 host city.
The discussion was focused on World Cup planning issues; the subject of changes at Fifa was not even discussed, a source said. Deputy prime minister Igor Shuvalov told local officials he wanted to see “a working airport with the most modern infrastructure” in place by the time the World Cup began. The recent economic downturn in Russia has led to the government looking to cut costs in a number of areas.
Asked about the possibility of cancellation or boycott, Russian Football Union spokesman Yevgeny Dzichkovsky said football and politics should be kept separate, adding that the Sochi Winter Olympics showed that Russia was able to conduct such international competitions at a “high level”.
“Why deny everyone a World Cup in a country that’s ready to hold it?” he asked.
Privately, however, there are worries about the changes at Fifa and how things will work in the months ahead, especially after Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, expressed strong support for Blatter.
“You can’t deny the Americans’ consistency,” the pro-Kremlin TV presenter Vladimir Soloviev wrote on Twitter on Tuesday night. “They forced Blatter out. Forced him out. The old man has resigned. The World Cup 2018 in Russia is under threat.”
Putin last week compared Blatter to Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and painted the US investigation into Fifa as part of a dark plot with anti-Russia overtones. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that the situation around Blatter’s resignation was “not simple” but declined to comment further.
Last week, Putin called the arrest of Fifa officials “another blatant attempt by the United States to extend its jurisdiction to other states,” arguing that Washington intended to prevent Blatter’s re-election.
Igor Ananskikh, head of the parliament’s sports committee, said on Monday that calls by British officials to take away the competition were a case of “those who didn’t get the chance to host this World Cup being sore losers”.
State media outlets picked up the theme. Dmitry Kiselev, who hosts a weekly patriotic television show, said it was thanks to Putin’s tough stance that Blatter had survived. One columnist for the state agency RIA Novosti said the whole scandal was a “tried and tested American method of brain control” to divert attention from allegations of NSA spying.
Another columnist, Timofei Sergeitsev, went further, stating that the “disgusting” American meddling in football was meant to “take the 2018 World Cup away from Russia and demonstratively bring the last independent organisation in the world under its control.” The overall goal, wrote Sergeitsev, was to compensate for the US loss of face involved in John Kerry’s recent visit to Russia to speak with Putin about Ukraine and Syria.
Sports minister Vitaly Mutko, a member of the Fifa executive committee, called Blatter’s surprise resignation a “courageous decision with love for Fifa”. He suggested it had been made under pressure due to the corruption investigations and called for a replacement to protect Fifa.
“Under this pressure, with this approach, changes would have come to nothing,” Mutko said. “Now it’s important to offer the football world a single leader who will gain universal support and defend Fifa from attacks.”
Many Russian Twitter users joked that Blatter would probably be offered a juicy job at a Russian state corporation, an eventuality that is not beyond the realms of possibility. MP Alexander Sidyakin has already suggested the Russian Football Union should offer Blatter a job: “A man with such colossal experience will be needed by the RFU in the runup to 2018,” he wrote on Twitter.
There have been some voices calling for Fifa to revisit the bidding process for 2018, notably coming from the English FA, but also in Kiev, where many feel Russia’s actions in Ukraine over the past 18 months should preclude them from hosting the tournament.
President Petro Poroshenko, whose forces continue to clash with Russia-backed separatists in the east, despite a ceasefire, wrote on Facebook that Blatter’s resignation gives hope that “certain corruption-motivated decisions” by Fifa will be cancelled. He has previously called for other countries to boycott the event.
