Fans and stars of international soccer are arriving in Russia as the country prepares for the World Cup that kicks off on Thursday.
The month-long tournament will begin with Russia playing Saudi Arabia in Moscow. National teams have been arriving for the past week, spreading out to team bases across the 11 cities that are hosting the tournament, from Sochi on the Black Sea to Ekaterinburg on the western edge of Siberia.
Russian authorities have said they expect around one million fans to visit. In Moscow on Tuesday, small groups were beginning to appear around the city in brightly-colored national dress.
A massive fan zone, capable of holding 25,000 people, has been constructed in the shadow of the Stalinist skyscraper of Moscow State University, looking out over the city’s main Luzhniki stadium, where the World Cup final will be played. A viewing area has been set up on Red Square by the Kremlin, more widely known abroad for the tank parades that roll across it each year.
Just off the square on Tuesday, a small crowd of pleased and bemused-looking Russians watched as a group of elderly Brazilian fans played drum music and sang. Most of the fans nearby were from South American countries, such as Peru, Columbia and Uruguay. Thousands of Americans are still expected to travel, with over 88,000 tickets sold to U.S. fans, despite their team’s failure to qualify.
More visible than the fans so far in Moscow was the massive security presence being deployed to guard the event against fan trouble, and in particular Islamic terrorism. Thousands of extra police have been called up from all over the country and there are extra patrols in many areas.
Concerns about security have been prominent, with attention particularly focused on potential violence from Russian soccer hooligans, who ran amok at the last major international competition involving Russia, the 2016 European Championship in France. But worries that Russia could see a repeat of the chaotic street battles that took place in Marseilles there have been overblown amid an intense crackdown by Russian security services against the hooligan groups.
Hooligans have described to ABC News receiving calls and house visits from police and officers from the FSB security service informing them to behave. They said their groups’ leaders are under surveillance, with their phones tapped.
Zhenya, a veteran member of a hooligan group that supports CSKA Moscow and who didn’t not want to give his full name for fear of repercussions, told ABC News how armed police had raided his house as a warning.
A wave of arrests last year has also chilled the violent fan scene, while anti-hooligan practices long common in Europe, such as stadium bans have been introduced.
“The movement is effectively paralyzed,” Ivan ‘Il Duche’, a well-known former fan leader, told ABC News.
Under such pressure, over a dozen former and active hooligans told ABC News that they expect no major violence.
Source-ABC
