Translated material
Ball and sword
The Luzhniki VIP box at the World Cup qualifying match between Russia and Germany was shown during the television broadcast almost more often than the team coaches. Indeed, it is rare to see such a political pantheon at one sporting event. For once, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who is not much of a fan, came to watch the football. He was accompanied and advised by much more sophisticated sports fans - First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov and Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov. The former was repeatedly seen at football matches, the latter for a long time was a regular visitor to CSKA basketball matches during the Kushchenko-Messina era.
By the second half, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is not particularly fond of football, arrived at the stadium (by the way, the last time he went to football in Moscow, Spartak lost heavily to Bayern in the Champions League). And finally, quite in the spirit of the Spanish Championship, where, according to tradition, at every match the presidents of opposing clubs always sit in the stands next to each other, and it is considered bad manners to express positive emotions if your team scores a goal, the former Chancellor of Germany, and now actually an employee, sat next to Putin Russian Gazprom Gerhard Schröder. It seems that he, like the Russian prime minister, appeared on the podium for the second half. At least Schröder’s reaction to his team’s winning (as it later turned out) goal scored in the first half was not shown. Although after the final whistle, the ardent fan Schröder was unable to hide his smile: the German team once again made it to the World Cup.
Current Chancellor Angela Merkel, who regularly attended Bundestim matches at the last World Cup in Germany, did not come to Moscow for the football: she was too busy forming a new government. But Türkiye and Armenia experienced the miraculous political power of football in the current World Cup qualifying round. The two countries, which remained absolute enemies throughout the 20th century after the tragic events of 1915, entered into an agreement to normalize relations virtually due to the fact that they were in the same qualifying group and the President of Turkey wanted to come to Armenia for the match. True, both teams did not qualify for the World Cup (which is natural for Armenia, but an obvious failure for Turkey), but they had a historic chance to establish at least minimally correct contacts at the interstate level.
It’s a pity that in the USA football, or rather soccer, is not so popular. However, if Russia, following the United States, had qualified for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and the teams would have ended up in the same group in the finals, perhaps a meeting between Presidents Medvedev and Obama at their match could have improved relations between the two countries much more significantly than ordinary diplomatic ones efforts. The atmosphere of the most popular game with always an unambiguous result, unlike political games, is very conducive to this.
A reset could also happen to Russian-Ukrainian relations if our teams compete in play-offs for the right to get to South Africa. At least at the Russia-Ukraine matches, either in Kyiv or in Moscow, the chances of the quarreling presidents of the two countries meeting are immeasurably higher than at any CIS summit.
The main thing is that the ruling elites are smart enough not to make political victories out of football victories. Still, with all the costs of tough competition, refereeing errors, and sometimes the obvious injustice of the result in relation to the course of the match, football is a much fairer game than politics, and should not depend on politics. But the dependence of politics on football, as the above examples show, can be very positive.