Transport problems mean that Moscow is not a perfect city to host games in the 2018 World Cup, but the situation will improve by the time of the tournament, FIFA official Jurgen Muller said Wednesday.
Muller is leading a FIFA delegation visiting 13 candidate cities in Russia to eventually settle on a final 11. The delegation is scheduled to inspect three stadiums Wednesday in Moscow, a city notorious for traffic jams.
Like cities hosting games at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, Moscow has its drawbacks, Muller said.
“Moscow is a big city, and this is not to ignore," he said. "But we are organizing World Cups in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, so we cannot give a World Cup to the perfect environment,” said Muller, who heads FIFA's department organizing the next three World Cups.
“It’s part of everybody’s life, I’m sure there will be a solution found.”
Hosting the 2017 Confederations Cup would provide a crucial test for attempts to avoid gridlock in Moscow’s transport network, the head of the Russia 2018 organizing committee, Alexei Sorokin, suggested.
“I think that this question of transport logistics will be solved closer to the time when we host the Confederations Cup,” he said.
Sorokin confirmed that Russia 2018 and FIFA were not looking at any other stadiums to host the final beside Moscow’s Luzhniki, as it would be the only ground in Russia with sufficient capacity.
“This stadium is the only one that will be capable of holding the necessary number of spectators for the final. That’s 80,000 people,” he said.
“As far as we know, there are no plans to build another stadium like it in the Russian Federation.”
Including Luzhniki in the final list of stadiums was “obvious,” Muller said.
Muller would not be drawn on whether or not the FIFA delegation had been satisfied with what it had seen in Russia so far, saying that the public would have to wait for the officials to visit all 13 candidate cities.
“You are like my daughter, she likes to open the Christmas gift always in summer,” he chided journalists.
“We cannot reply, it would not be fair to the other cities.”
The FIFA delegation canceled its April visit to the southern city of Sochi after its flight was unable to land in heavy fog, and this will be rescheduled for “the end of May, the start of June”, Sorokin said.
At least two of the 14 candidate stadiums in 13 cities will be cut from the final roster by FIFA’s executive committee. Current plans envisage 12 grounds being used, as stated when Russia bid for the tournament, Sorokin said.
The delegation has already visited the cities of Krasnodar, Rostov, St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad and Yekaterinburg and is yet to see Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Saransk, Samara and Volgograd, which are all included in a planned five-day whistle-stop tour in late June.
