The World Cup final stadium...
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin!
...now hosting war rallies.
Infantino and FIFA more generally,
they really didn't understand
how serious a player they were dealing with.
This is the story of how football helped Putin to start a war!
How Russian sportswashing fooled the football community
through Oligarchs money and state-owned companies like Gazprom.
The word I use is "putinize". He putinized football.
The football institutions need to take a really long hard look about how permissible this is.
But let's start here.
Fair to say, Putin has an obsession with sports.
Fishing, horseriding, judo and hockey.
All these images play a big role in how Putin portrays himself to the world,
but even more importantly, to his own people.
Putin as an athlete started featuring in the official discourse in 2007.
And 2007, if you remember, was the year when the Sochi Olympics were awarded to Russia.
This was the year which marked a transformation of Putin,
whoever he was at the time, into a sports hero.
As a strong person, as a strong leader,
who is capable of leading Russia to victories, different sorts of victories.
No wonder Putin was interested in hosting major sporting events.
The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi were his first personal mega-project.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia could show
that they were back in the game, as a global power.
And it was Putin's crown jewel.
Putin's approval rates before the Olympics were just 54 percent,
and by the end of the year, if I'm not mistaken, they were around 80 percent.
Only days after the Olympic flame was put out,
Putin sent his troops to Ukraine for the first time – to annex Crimea.
Russian president Vladimir Putin casts his shadow across the boundary of Europe and Russia.
Tonight his troops are holding firm in a corner of Ukraine known as Crimea.
I think the Russian leadership was much more interested
in legitimizing Putin and his leadership domestically,
and they actually succeeded quite a lot in doing that during the Sochi Olympics and the World Cup.
The 2018 FIFA World Cup, ladies and gentlemen, will be organized in Russia.
After Sochi, Putin landed the greatest show on earth.
The Football World Cup.
I was born in Leningrad.
And as you know during WWII, Leningrad went through 900 days of blockade.
But football matches were held even at that tragic time.
It helped people to stand tall, and survive.
Together let us make sure that football promotes fair play, tolerance, honor.
Putin is not interested in football, but he's very interested in power.
And as a consequence, you know, football has played
a really significant role over his 22 years in power.
Football has actually been a very important instrument of the politics of the regime.
When Russia was awarded the World Cup back in 2010,
Sepp Blatter was still in charge at FIFA.
But Putin quickly formed a strong bond
with Blatter's successor Gianni Infantino.
Russia has this myth of never having been conquered, right?
Well, as of tomorrow, Russia will be conquered.
Russia will be conquered by football.
You are joking me!
It's completely obvious that Russia has conquered football for its purposes.
So, I think there was hybris and naivety.
And I think, the key moment, you know, if anyone had been looking,
was at the FIFA congress held in Moscow.
Like in the middle of the business Putin just walks in like he kind of owns the place,
makes one of the most boring and self-serving, hypocritical speeches I’ve heard in a long time
about how sports and politics don’t mix - and then departed.
And it was like: ‘FIFA, you will stop your business for me.’
This is about showing, you know: You guys, let me just show you who is in charge.
The FIFA president, of all people, became Putin's close ally.
In 2019, Infantino even received the Russian Order of friendship.
A gift for a loyal friend.
There were several issues surrounding the World Cup in Russia.
From reports of bribery in the bidding process
to corruption and the abuse of migrant workers from North Korea.
But FIFA and Infantino looked away
because they shared one goal with Putin,
to make the World Cup a success.
And that’s what they did.
When the first whistle blew, it was one big party all over Russia.
Everyone was excited about the football,
amazed by the hospitality in the host country.
And smartphones and social media beamed everything around the globe.
We must admit that Russia was a good host indeed,
and it actually helped to further deceive the world about its true intentions.
Some people might label what happened in 2018 as manipulation.
Some people would alternatively call it soft-power.
By fans going to Russia and thinking,
'You know what? This is really nice here, I like this country.
What’s the the problem with Russia, I see no issues’.
That is the essence of soft power.
But the World Cup just scratched the surface.
Putin's influence went beyond FIFA.
He infiltrated other parts of football, too.
What might we mean by "putinization" of football?
The ownership of football clubs and the running of the football association
is completely dominated by close allies of Putin.
All of the big football clubs in Russia are either owned or controlled
by major state institutions or state companies all of which are bound to the regime.
Take Gazprom for example,
a private natural gas company,
but the majority is owned by the Russian government.
Gazprom took over Zenit St. Petersburg in 2005
and made the club a major force in Russian football.
With Gazprom's backing Zenit won their first-ever league title in the Russian Premier Liga.
They could now make big-money transfers
and lure international stars from the top leagues to Russia.
Gazprom also had long sponsorship deals with Red Star Belgrade from Serbia
and since 2006 with Schalke, one of the most popular clubs in Germany
with a working-class mining background.
The Russian government and Gazprom in particular used that,
I think they used it in one sense to build legitimacy, to build credibility.
It was a form of energy politics or energy diplomacy
that really deployed football as a means to cover
or to distract from what they were really doing.
Which at that particular part was obviously
to try create a gas dependency in Germany upon Russian sources.
By sponsoring Schalke, Putin and Gazprom were able to whitewash their image.
While popular figures like former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder
lobbied for the company too, opening the door for huge profits from oil and gas.
Germany has traditionally been Gazprom’s largest customer
using gas for electricity and heating.
In January 2022 alone, Germany paid Russia 2.6 billion Euros for oil and gas.
And not only Germany, the whole of Europe
has become dependent on natural gas imports over the years,
with 40% coming from Russia in 2021.
All this helped indirectly finance the Russian army - and Putin’s war.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine
Schalke ended the sponsorship deal under intense public pressure.
But Gazprom didn’t only target clubs.
They also went for the big one, the UEFA Champions League.
The most prestigious club competition in football – orchestrated by Gazprom.
We light up the football. Gazprom, official partner of the UEFA Champions League.
It’s reported that Gazprom has paid UEFA at least €40m every season since 2012.
The deal included multiple partnerships with the governing body.
It took a war to question and then terminate them.
But the damage had already been done.
Gazprom became THE BRAND in European football.
Most people never questioned that.
It was just, Gazprom was part of a Champions League night.
There was not only Crimea and various other episodes,
there was also the ongoing conflict in the east of Ukraine.
Yet UEFA still signed a new deal.
Rather than asking questions, they just took the money.
And I think that Putin and the Kremlin and others knew,
it's very easy to buy your way into the heart of European football
and for that matter world football – and that’s what they did.
And he was the man at the center of the strategy.
Alexander Dyukov, pulling the strings
from behind the scenes.
He holds powerful positions.
And most notably he is still a member of the UEFA Executive Committee
the power base of European football where major decisions are made.
On that fateful day when UEFA took its decision to,
number one, remove the Champions League final from St. Petersburg,
but number two, they took the decision to terminate the Gazprom sponsorship deal,
Alexander Dyukov presumably was in the meeting.
So it does illustrate the magnitude of the influence
that people like Djukov and others have had.
Djukov is just the tip of the iceberg.
When it comes to money, influence and power,
no one beats the Oligarchs in Russia.
The rich businessmen not only fund Russian football
they also heavily invest in the European game.
Some of them have close ties to Vladimir Putin.
Yet there was one man who changed the modern game forever,
by buying Chelsea in 2003.
It normalizes you. I think that was very much a part of Abramovich's strategy.
Who has obviously made his money in the fairiest ways over the previous decade.
And he appears like a normal football fan
in an easy shirt and his jacket and his little smile, ‘I’m just here for the football’...
I mean, here in Britain, Russians have acquired in the last 20 years
the most extraordinary presence, particularly in London but also in the wider Southeast,
in media circles, in banking circles, in social circles, increasingly in political circles
through their relationship with the Conservative Party.
And buying a football club is one of the many ways to open those channels up,
to normalize your presence, it gives you something to talk about,
to connects you to all sorts of people.
Some people talked about sportwashing, others have pointed to money-laundering.
Whether any of those things are true or not,
what Abramovich I think enabled himself to do
but I think also enabled Russia and whoever he represents within Russia to do,
is just to be legitimized.
But Russia, the Oligarchs and Putin are not alone in this.
Others have infiltrated football for decades.
We've seen it all before, 1978 in Argentina.
When the military dictatorship used the World Cup to whitewash its dirty war.
Politics is, and always will be, part of football.
The question is: What kind of politics do we want?
We're actually talking nation states.
I mean Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE's investments,
these are not mere Oligarchs or independent business people.
These are purchases and policies that are absolutely central
to a nation-state's foreign policy.
If you look at Hungary for example or Turkey
where state corporations and state-allied business people have come
to dominate the ownership of football clubs,
have come to dominate the running of the football association,
where stadium-building programs using state money
has been a way of funneling money to ply oligarchs.
And where fan groups are often shaped and infiltrated by the regime and mobilized
in support for example in Hungary on anti-migrant or xenophobic kind of protests.
So I would say the sort of the techniques that Putin regime has used
to control and use football have definitely been replicated elsewhere.
The time to act is now.
Our stadiums will be empty in the future if we overlook the urgency of the current moment.
FIFA, all of us, must lead,
to have sustainable values govern every decision,
truly implement transparency,
zero tolerance towards corruption.
The beautiful game is at a crossroads.
Russia’s war forced football into action.
But what will the future look like?
Will football continue to look away or will it listen to its conscience?
As long as Putin is in power, I’m sure they will not get the chance
to host any international events in the future.
The United States and Great Britain invaded Iraq in 2003,
and that was not sanctioned by the United Nations.
In essence that was an illegal invasion.
So are we really saying that if Iraq was to happen again,
that Premier League teams should be banned from the Champions League?
Are we really saying that?
Russia has done us a favor, has done European football a favor,
because it’s now asking some very, very difficult questions.
We could envisage a program of reform that would massively restrict
the power of governments and political agencies to own and run football.
Because if you don't, this is what you get. You get World Cup 2018,
which was great entertainment, but political poison.