One wonders quite what Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, now makes of the punchline to his speech at the opening ceremony of the 2018 World Cup. Standing alongside President Putin, he quipped, “As of today, for one month, football will conquer Russia. And from Russia, it will conquer the world.” Of course, precisely the reverse was true. One must also wonder what Infantino has done with the Order of Friendship medal that Putin bestowed upon him in May 2019.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia had long bent the game to its own purposes, and if football has not quite allowed it to conquer the world, it has made a decisive contribution to the regime’s political armoury.
Putin himself does not appear to have any regard for the game, preferring the public political theatre of more manly pursuits like bareback horse riding, professional ice hockey and sambo, the Russian military’s version of judo. But this has not blinded him of football’s utility. Since he came to power in 2000, most of Russia’s major football clubs have passed into the hands of pliant oligarchs, state-controlled corporations or, as in the case of Akhmat Grozny, which is run by Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of the Chechen Republic, have become the fiefdoms of client warlords.
