Russia 2018 to take FIFA on tour of potential World Cup host cities

By David Gold

April 4 – Russia 2018 will later this year accompany FIFA officials on an inspection of prospective host cities for the World Cup in six years’ time, ahead of the final selection of venues.

The tour begins next week and runs until June 22, beginning in the southern cluster of prospective host cities.

That group consists of Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don and Sochi, the host of the 2014 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Russia has divided the 13 prospective host cities into four sections – the southern cluster, the Moscow cluster, the northern cluster of Kaliningrad and St Petersburg and the Volga River cluster of Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Saransk, Samara and Volgograd.

There is also Yekaterinburg, located far to the east of all the other host cities, on the border between Europe and Asia, which is likely to host games and is in contention to stage a semi-final.

St Petersburg though is the favourite ahead of Yekaterinburg for that particular honour, with the other semi-final and final of the World Cup set to be played at the Luzhniki Stadium (pictured) in Moscow, which will be renovated ahead of the competition.

Two stadiums in Moscow will be used for the 2018 World Cup, with the other one likely to be either the home ground of Russian Premier League rivals Spartak Moscow or Dynamo Moscow.

The Russia 2018 and FIFA delegation will be visiting Krasnodar, Sochi and Rostov-on-Don on April 10, 11 and 12 respectively.

They then move north to St Petersburg (pictured) on April 26 and Kaliningrad the following day, before travelling east to Yekaterinburg on May 14.

The next stop will be Yaroslavl, followed by Moscow on May 16, with the final group of visits – to Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Saransk, Samara and Volgograd taking place between June 18 and 22.

The final selection of the 11 cities that will host matches during Russia 2018 is to be made by FIFA in September, after the decision was brought forward a year to give as much time as possible for preparations.

During the visits, the delegation will be inspecting the sites of venues intended to host matches, though Russia will be either renovating or building anew every stadium for 2018.

They will listen to regional organising committees and candidate host city presentations as they bid to win the right to stage games in 2018.

Training sites and fan venues will also be considered as the delegation assess hosting concepts of each candidate city.

There are few worries over the construction of stadia at present, with the main issue likely to be with transport infrastructure, the key concern FIFA highlighted during the 2018 World Cup bid process.

With such vast distances between venues, Russia will need to upgrade its airport capacity and infrastructure to cope with demand, as well as improve road and rail links.

Russian Railways already have begun work on improving the networks and bringing in higher speed connections, while Russia 2018 chief executive Alexey Sorokin (pictured) told insideworldfootball earlier this year that during the group stage of the competition, efforts would be made to limit the travelling teams are required to undertake.

He suggested that it was likely that countries would only play in one or two neighbouring clusters during the group stage of the World Cup, in contrast to 2014 hosts Brazil, whose schedule requires some teams to travel the length and breadth of the country.

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