By Andrew Warshaw
June 17 – Five years before staging the 2018 World Cup, Russia is already coming to terms with the fact that the tournament is likely to cost a lot more than originally outlined.
Just as many organisers of major sporting events discover once actual plans start being put in place, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has admitted that the budget for the World Cup will probably be more than $20b, roughly double the initial estimates.
When Russia won the bid for the World Cup in 2010, President Vladimir Putin projected the costs to be around $10b. But they have since spiralled and Medvedev told his Cabinet that $13b of the new estimate would come from the federal budget without specifying how the rest of the money would be found.
It has also been reported that the completion date for Zenit St Petersburg’s new state-of-the-art $1.1b stadium has been delayed once again, and that it may not be able to open until at least 2017 – a decade after construction work first began. The stadium is set to host a 2018 World Cup semi-final.