The Long-Term View: A Russian World Cup

We all hate Vladimir Putin, eh? Right kids? He’s the kind of guy that oversees the looting of a country while occasionally arranging photocalls – generally featuring him doing a man thing – to reassure the Russian people that their tax roubles and wellbeing are being safeguarded by a proper man.

If you’re the family of Anna Politkovskya, the truth-seeking journalist, or Alexander Litvinenko, the truth-telling dissident, you would really hate him in the same way you would hate someone who’d overseen the murder of your loved one.

Similarly, if you were a relative of one of the residents of the Moscow apartment blocks that were blown up in 1999 – a campaign that precipitated the re-ignition of the Chechnyan War that cemented Putin’s reputation as a no-nonsense kind of guy – you’d hate him as you would hate anyone who’d done what he did, whether it forms part of your country’s public record or not.

So, dear reader, fellow football fan, a polite question: are you looking forward to giving him a blowjob? Might as well not sugarcoat it. Or, wait – do I have this one right? – is World Cup 2018, or any football tournament for that matter, avowedly just about the football, with the hosts having no greater relevance than providing the scenic shots at the start of the TV coverage?

Let’s extend that logic to its extremity to get a sense of its dimensions. If the KKK, for argument’s sake, declared themselves lifelong football fanatics and staged a game between Iceland and Latvia, to celebrate all that is glorious about what just happened to be only white footballers, should that just be about the football too? Because there really is no logic, beyond ‘yeah but man I really effing love the World Cup and would accept some pretty dreadful things before I was able to evict it from its protective bubble’.

Do you sense it’s of the old world, that attitude? You don’t exactly have to be all about those News Updates to have noticed that the world has recently taken a swing into darker territory. Remember Hitler’s 1936 Olympics?  This isn’t that, because that was then – this is now, and our version of history, which is Vladimir Putin, at a time when the withering of the Russian economy means he feels more than ever that stoking tensions and making himself a military commander is a way to solidify in the Russian mind that he is their leader.

And now, as a happy distraction and show of strength, here’s a World Cup.

I know the reason why so much of this stuff feels like over-the-hills-and-far-away hokus-pokus is because in this atomised, behind-closed-doors online-profiles BT Sport 4KHD safely-safely wars-on-Twitter memes-for-breakfast version of life we’re getting stuck in, it’s pretty hard to believe in the true meaning of stuff. I know that feeling  – but on this one, it means something and you mean something. Most of you belong to one of the most precious, most dollared-up football TV audiences in the world, and you not being there, not fulfilling your side of whatever bargain FIFA entered into with Russia, is a large, silent vote of the kind that will make the suits in Zurich very nervous, and eventually reach the ears of people in Russia. So…the English love football that much, and yet they’re not watching?

How come? Imagine it, our fan zone empty; the first outright noble display England’s made in what feels like a painfully long time. Putin would be embarrassed, TV goons would have to scramble to ignore it – all things that, in their small ways, count as something against a violent cult of personality.

So sit it out. Check the news on Football365, obviously, but if you have kids – or even if you don’t, put yourself in front of an imaginary kid – do you want them to see you as a) someone who blots out reality and says NO I JUST LOVE FOOTBALL, now pass me those crisps, or b) someone engaged enough with the world that as far as possible, you make a positive difference? I am pretty sure you know which person you’d want them to see. Being 2017 and onwards is probably going to take more sacrifices than being 2016 and before.

But, good news. The England team, by my understanding, is not in fact that derisible collection of malcoordinates who can’t pass a ball across three yards to the intended target. That game, against Iceland, was in fact the culmination of a deep-cover mission on all of our behalves. You knew something had to be amiss with how they were playing – these are patriots, these men, who looked ahead in the football calendar and realised they must sacrifice any remaining affection for the national team in the service of global stability.

You didn’t truly think any World Cup qualifying group could be as boring as the one we’ve got, unless we’d pulled an inside job? You think Harry Kane and Jack Butland don’t look upon the geopolitical significance of an event like a World Cup in a country run under the viciously amoral eye of a dictator pouring money into its military, and want to do everything they can to dampen domestic enthusiasm? You think Roy didn’t know what he was doing? You think Big Sam didn’t? You think Gareth Southgate wasn’t picked as the absolute perfect candidate for the job ahead?

Sincerely though, think of your dignity. It’s worth something, no matter all these people around the place acting like dignity ranks between vegetable oil and olive oil in the list of valuable substances.

Putin. Qatar. Forty-eight teams. Blatter. Platini. And on. Say to yourself in the mirror that nothing, no circumstance of any kind, could make me not watch football, and see how it sounds. If it sounds okay, then watch it.

Toby Sprigings – follow him on Twitter