How Russia won the 2018 World Cup - Inside World Football

By David Owen in Zurich

December 2 – The Spanish bid chief executive officer Miguel Ángel López was part right: all the fish WERE sold – only not to the Spanish.

We can now surmise with some confidence that the shock decision by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin not to come to Switzerland prior to the vote stemmed not from a sense that support for his country’s bid was ebbing away, but confidence that the result was in the bag.

The comfortable margin of Russia’s victory – by 13 votes to seven for Spain/Portugal and two for Holland/Belgium in the second round – supports this conclusion.

This is not to deny it was a daringly ballsy strategy.

Clearly, Russia’s win was not the result of developments over the past couple of days, but legwork done, largely out of the spotlight, earlier in the campaign.

I believe, though individual voting records are not disclosed, that FIFA President Joseph Blatter supported the notion of taking his organisation’s flagship tournament to the virgin territory of Eastern Europe.

It looks, moreover, as though the three-strong bloc vote of CONCACAF, the North and Central America and Caribbean Confederation, including that of arch FIFA power broker Jack Warner, also went Russia’s way.

The bid will have been helped too by the impressive fist Russia appears to be making of preparing for the Winter Olympics that will be staged in the Black Sea resort of Sochi in 2014.

Not only has the Olympic Organising Committee raised more than $1 billion in marketing revenue – more than any Summer Olympics prior to Beijing – but it has shown that the country is capable of bringing to fruition an almost “virtual” bid.

With 13 new football stadiums to be built over the next seven years – and air transport upgrades almost certainly necessary – Russia 2018 was essentially a “virtual” project.

FIFA could not have countenanced endowing it with football’s ultimate prize if it did not believe firmly in Russia’s capacity to deliver.

As I wrote this afternoon, Russia’s presentation in Zurich was workmanlike.

It pressed many of the right FIFA buttons, urging Executive Committee members, for example, to “let us make history together”.

But it was far from inspirational, in the manner of London 2012’s landmark Olympic bid presentation in Singapore in 2005.

In the immediate aftermath of the victory, the biggest individual winners look set to be Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov – probably the only man in Zurich who knows what it feels like to kick a football at minus 50 degrees C – and his boss, Vladimir Putin.

Shuvalov started the day looking like the fall guy and ended it clutching the World Cup.

As for Putin, in two hours’ time as I complete this story, he stands to stride into a media conference one floor below where I am now sitting – having undertaken the reverse of Lenin’s famous sealed train ride from Zurich to Russia in 1917 – as cock-a-hoop as any victorious general.

Orwell’s dictum that war is politics minus the shooting has become a cliché since he first committed it to paper.

But it was rarely more clearly demonstrated than today.

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