August 22 – Speaking in Saransk, Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko again repeated that there would be no change to the number of cities hosting the 2018 World Cup and that it would remain as 11, with a further 20 cities hosting national teams.
FIFA president Sepp Blatter had suggested that the Russians drop the number of host cities by one, to ten, as well as dropping one stadium from the originally planned 12. But Russia is already in full swing and will start building work on six venues this August and September.
Mutko was in Saransk with a FIFA delegation who are inspecting Russian plans and venues.
“The concept of the championship has not been changed and all earlier announced 11 cities will be hosting the matches as it was initially planned,” said Mutko. “Twenty more cities will have the right of housing the accommodating bases for the [participating] teams.”
Saransk is scheduled to hold at least four matches. “We plan to invest at least 32 billion rubles [$882 million] from the federal budget into [Mordovia] republic’s infrastructure,” Mutko said. “The republic has done a lot but there is more to be done by 2018.
“The important issues remain in the spheres of security and transportation as well as in the preparations of people in the service sphere and volunteers movement,”
Russia had initially proposed 13 cities as potential hosts but then dropped Krasnodar and Yaroslavl from the list. The current plan is for 12 stadiums in 11 cities. The cities are Moscow (two stadium), St. Petersburg, Sochi, Kazan, Saransk, Kaliningrad, Volgograd, Rostov-on-Don, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg and Samara.
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