By Paul Nicholson
August 1 – Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko has said that the 2018 World Cup will be played in 12 stadiums across 11 cities, and that there is no need to reduce the number of venues.
Mutko has returned from visits to Ekatirenburg and Volgograd, who along with Kaliningrad were the three cities considered to be in most danger of losing their World Cup hosting status.
“While there are no prerequisites for reducing the number of cities that will be used for the World Cup matches, we have,” said Mutko, “final approval of stadium construction (that) will be done in October.”
Speaking about FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s comments after the Brazilian World Cup where he said that it was possible to reduce the number of venues hosting a tournament, Mutko said he had “opened the door for us”.
But Mutko seems comfortable that Russia has its hosting plan right. However, he did say that there were some concessions in the hosting plan around training facilities that could be made.
“We had in every city to have four training bases, two for each team. We thought, why four, let two sweat (do the job), and (have one) one backup. And they (FIFA) went for it,” said Mutko.
Russia 2018 is currently schedule to be played in the following 11 cities: Moscow (Luzhniki Stadium and Oktritie Arena), St Petersburg, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Saransk, Kaliningrad, Volgograd, Yekaterinburg, Samara, Sochi and Rostov-on-Don.
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