Shortly before half-time in a Russian Premier League match, Dinamo Moscow goalkeeper Anton Shunin jumped like a startled hare, clutched his face and then rolled in agony on the turf.
The Russian game is marked also by tensions — sometimes racially-tinged — between the established Moscow clubs and the younger outfits from the mainly Muslim North Caucasus.
Shunin had been hit by a firecracker thrown from the stands in a raucous clash with Zenit St Petersburg, an episode which has overshadowed the entire season and become a symbol of the troubles in Russian football as it prepares to host the 2018 World Cup.
The match was abandoned in the 37th minute, Shunin suffered burns to his eyes and Zenit were awarded a technical defeat as the firecracker was deemed to have been thrown by the team’s fans.
While Shunin was lucky to be able to return later in the season, the aftershocks from the November incident are still felt in a scandal that has done the image of Russian football nothing but harm.
Zenit’s owners, the Russian gas leviathan Gazprom, were so outraged by the technical defeat they threatened to set up a breakaway league. This month they unsuccessfully challenged the verdict at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne.
“Just play football, Zenit. That’s what you are good at doing,” wrote the respected daily Sovetsky Sport, underlining how the Russian game is undermined by events off the pitch.
Russian football has undergone its own revolution since the collapse of the USSR, with billions of dollars of investment from private businessmen and state companies attracting a legion of foreign players to the country.
But with often half-empty stadiums, sub-standard infrastructure and abusive fans, the reality has yet to reflect the ambitions of the country’s leaders or the money pumped into the game.
Russia now faces a race against the clock to repair defects in its own football culture ahead of the 2018 World Cup by improving its own league, ending hooliganism and rebuilding infrastructure.
“The potential is there, the possibilities are there and the money is there,” said Alexander Kobelyatsky, deputy editor of top sports news site sport-box.ru.
“The question is how this is all going to be done. All the different structures look after their own patch,” he told AFP.
“Russia is going to need huge efforts from the authorities, Football Union and the clubs,” he said.
The influx of foreign “legionary” — largely drawn from Africa and South America — like Samuel Eto’o of Cameroon, Brazil’s Hulk and Seydou Doumbia of Ivory Coast has exposed lingering racism in Russian society.
Players are still exposed to chanting and crude gestures with bananas. “Those fans who abuse people of a different colour or gays just do not think at all,” Hulk fumed in April.
Meanwhile, the Russian game is marked also by tensions — sometimes racially-tinged — between the established Moscow clubs and the younger outfits from the mainly Muslim North Caucasus.
The fan club of league leaders and cup finalists Moscow CSKA have urged a boycott of the cup final clash with big spenders Anzhi on June 1 which is to be held in the once war-torn Chechen capital Grozny.
Their concern dates back to an eye-popping incident earlier this year when Chechnya’s maverick leader Ramzan Kadyrov grabbed the PA system to publicly insult the referee in a Premier League match.
But the biggest obstacle for making Russian football attractive is the hollow atmosphere created by row after row of empty seats as fans prefer to watch from the comfort of their homes or the pub.
Over the weekend of May 11-12, most of the stadiums hosting matches in the Russian Premier League were at most half-full even though the championship was entering a decisive phase.
Just 16,500 made it to Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium — which has a capacity of almost 90,000 — to watch Russia’s most entitled club Spartak draw 1-1 with Krylya Sovetov of Samara.
Luzhniki — an iconic Moscow landmark which hosted the 1980 Olympic Games and which is expected to be the venue of the 2018 World Cup final — is itself a symbol of Russia’s long road ahead.
After hosting the Rugby Sevens and World Athletics Championships this summer, Luzhniki will close for a massive overhaul lasting several years. But astonishingly, there is not yet any plan over how to rebuild the stadium.
“As far as we know, as of today there is no (building) plan” for Luzhniki, the head of the 2018 Organising Committee Alexei Sorokin told the Sport Express daily. “It’s clear that the stadium as it is does not correspond to FIFA’s demands.”
Other stadiums are in the process of being erected but venues in host cities Volgograd, Nizhny Novgorod, Kaliningrad, Rostov-on-Don and Samara still need to be built largely from scratch.
Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave that borders EU members Poland and Lithuania, needs to build an entirely new stadium. Its current 15,000-seat venue was built by the Prussians in the late 19th century when the Baltic territory was still part of Germany.
Meanwhile, Yekaterinburg’s central stadium, set to be completely rebuilt for the World Cup, has the misfortune of being next door to the city prison, a dilemma the local authorities have yet to resolve.
Russia football reality lags behind ambitions
