“If I perform a Russian dance here in front of you, will you stop asking these questions?” asked Vitaly Mutko, the Russian deputy prime minister and head of the Russian Football Union, at the closing press conference of the 2017 Confederations Cup.
His lengthy rant and fury with media reports implicating the Sbornaya, Russia’s national football team, in doping offences at the last World Cup, poignantly summed up the importance of the “Tournament of Champions” through the host’s prism. Russia wanted to reposition their tarnished and antagonistic role on the world stage. They had failed to do so in 2014 when hosting the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.
Putin had been intent on delivering a memorable, all-encompassing spectacle at the shores of the Caspian Sea. And apart from an opening ceremony hiccup, in which five floating snowflakes transformed into just four Olympic rings, the Russians did deliver. Yet the soft power of sports and image building had gone amiss then as Putin went on a bellicose odyssey by invading Crimea.
The Confed Cup was Russia’s PR event 2.0
The rhetoric of a new Russia – “Hot. Cool. Yours – Sochi’s Olympic slogan, failed. The Winter Olympics didn’t resonate in the international arena and so the Confederations Cup became Russia’s PR event 2.0, with a sense that the country wanted to assert and show itself again. The tournament began with the opening match between Russia and New Zealand in an outer corner of Saint Peterburg’s Krestovsky Island, once a hangout for local princes and today a high-end, urbanised playground for the rich with impressive views of the Gulf of Finland, at the colossal Krestovsky Stadium.
The venue is a low lying spaceship-like construction, with all the requisites for a contemporary spectacle of footballing heroes. It’s perhaps a fitting carbuncle – beguiling in its beauty, but tawdry in its sanitised corporatism – to replace a lengthy history of sports in Russia’s cultural capital.
The Krestovky Stadium, a palazzo of the global game, has a troubled reputation — it’s a “Klondike” for St Petersburg officials, or a “monument of corruption”, exposing the fraught levels of corruption among Russian officials — with bloated bills, missed deadlines and a poor pitch. In 2007, construction began, but the arena ran over its budget at an estimated cost of 41 billion (£567 million).
The stadium highlighted the trademark preparatory pattern that blanketed the build-up to the tournament with costs cuts, disputes over broadcasting fees, fears over violence, ticketing concerns and complaints about workers’ rights. At first, the World Cup dress rehearsal was shaped by plenty of morbid stories, ranging from hooliganism, racism and doping allegations – but still Russia delivered a respectable eighth edition of the Confederations Cup, with the tournament gently meandering towards its conclusion with a Germany-Chile final.
‘I want many problematic events like this’
Much of the football on display was a procession of glorified friendlies. Indeed the Confederations Cup is an outcast among international tournaments, not much loved, and perhaps not wanted either. This tournament might well have been its last edition, but Fifa president Gianni Infantino refused to offer any clarity about the future of the Confederations Cup. “At this stage there is not more to say,” said Infantino.
“If a problematic tournaments looks like this one, I want many problematic events like this,” offered the Fifa president.
The VAR, the video assistant referee, was a thorny issue. The application and implementation were confusing and time-consuming, often with a touch of slapstick, a tech-y and tacky nightmare for Fifa – no more Geoff Hurst powwows and parleys was the credo with Fifa’s reputation as a Luddite organisation “dispelled”, but the revolution backfired. The VAR Cup became a debate club with football matches of less than 57 minutes [the actual playing time in an average match] and dozens of minutes to review the referee’s decisions.
It’s on video, now what?
In the end, video referrals boil down to subjective judgement of the laws of the game, transferring responsibility and interpretation from the on-field referee to the VAR. Overzealous VARs spoiled the group stages, with stop-start matches. Cameroon-Chile was a VAR-gasm. By the time of the semi-finals, when the playing field had been halved with commendable performances from African champions Cameroon and Asian champions Australia, the VAR’s interventionist policies receded somewhat.
In Kazan, Chile defeated Portugal after penalties. The European champions remain dependent on CR7, but the gradual integration of Bernardo Silva and Adrien Silva offers Portugal different outlets and a building stone for a Ronaldo-less universe in the future. Chile marched on with their hysterical football, modelled on Marcelo Bielsa’s philosophy.
They swarm like a hive of bees, but all the stinging wasn’t enough to overcome Germany in the final, a Mannschaft who galvanised the tournament with an ensemble of bright and brazen boys, moulded in a matter of weeks into a triple A team by the impeccable Joachim Low. Cue the laudation of Germany’s formidable grassroots levels and forward-planning. They breezed past Mexico in their semi-final.
Even in the final, VAR and its painful limitations surfaced, but it mattered little on a night that Germany crowned their sojourn in Russia with Confederations Cup glory. With one year to go until the big razzle-dazzle in Russia, Low knows that the future is bright.
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