Football: Hard for Russia, Qatar to beat Brazil's carnival of football

Russia's President Vladimir Putin was in Rio de Janeiro for the World Cup final and ceremonial handover of host duties for soccer's marquee tournament, which next takes place in Russia in 2018. Photo / AP

To Russia, with love. But the renewal of the people's vows with the World Cup will be severely tested by its money-driven forays into the uncharted territories of Russia (2018) and Qatar (2022). Was Brazil the last great folk festival?

"Global Stadium" is a phrase you will be hearing a lot from now on. It is Fifa's giddy marketing term to describe a World Cup that is everywhere and nowhere. It lives on smartphones, in video clips, Twitter blizzards and Facebook shares. The stadiums could be anywhere.

As a great Germany team scooped up their garlands for beating Portugal, France, Brazil and Argentina en route to their coronation in the Maracana, the new face of the World Cup was showing itself with Fifa's claim that "a billion fans" used its digital platforms over the past five weeks. One wonders whether the report due to be published this month on alleged corruption in the 2018-2022 bidding process will attract as much social media chatter as Mario Gotze's comely winning goal in Rio.

In this digital landscape, which employs technology to intensify the World Cup experience for the non-attending spectator, a tournament in Russia is only notionally spread across 12 stadiums in 11 cities: Moscow, Kaliningrad, Yekaterinburg, where the last tsar was executed in 1918, Volgograd, Kazan, Samara, Sochi, Saransk, St Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Rostov-on-Don, near the border with Ukraine, which is beset by nationalist fighting.

You sense Rio, Fortaleza and Belo Horizonte will be a distant dream by the time the oligarchs and corporations who feed off Vladimir Putin's power have splashed 10.89 billion ($21 billion) that is expected to rise dramatically, as Sochi's did for the Winter Olympics.

Given the outrage over the Brasilia stadium budget overrun, the Russians are understandably sensitive to the inference that only their political and corporate classes bid for tournaments so everyone can get rich from building and infrastructure costs.

Russia's sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, told Reuters: "It's absurd. Russia has a stable social and political system. There is no point in putting forward this argument. Russia won the right to host the tournament fairly and is a faithful partner."

But with Putin's presidential term up in 2018, and the country seeking global powerhouse status, a Russia World Cup is bound to be a political project, in the style of the Sochi Games, or the Beijing Olympics of 2008. "Our football is like murky water, a gateway for corruption. This is not going to go away in the run-up to the 2018 World Cup," said Alisher Aminov, president of Russia's national Fund for the Development of Football.

This Brazil World Cup tested the fortitude and the spending power of fans, who turned up in their hundreds of thousands but faced immense logistical difficulties travelling to games. Many adopted a backpacker's mentality, and accepted that the first World Cup in Brazil for 64 years was going to be a giant road (or air) trip. Their reward was more than a month of scintillating football.

Brazil is indeed "not for beginners", but culture, spirit and context shaped the football and the mood. Brazilian exuberance was evident right to the end. The worry is that Russia will feel like an economic project.

Compared to Qatar, Russia will be Woodstock. The 2022 World Cup is the one that evokes Munch's The Scream. Unless direct hard evidence is found linking the Qatari bid team to vote-buying then Fifa is unlikely to enact the zero option of reopening the ballot. Thus we would be subjected to the farce of a World Cup in a country with no football culture, highly repressive laws, multiple construction deaths and temperatures too high for a summer tournament.

The 2014 World Cup was made by the players and the fans. The players ran themselves to a standstill and the supporters fell in love all over again with a tournament that belongs to everybody. A World Cup's energy comes not from above but the ground up. Not from a Kremlin, not from potentates.