"New Cold War” Could Limit Number Of US Visitors Traveling To Russia For World Cup 2018

The mounting distrust between the West and Russia may have finally impinged on the world of sports, as a senior White House official has warned US fans to “think twice” about traveling to Russia for the 2018 edition of the World Cup.

That’s what more than a year of insinuations and allegations against Russia on every topic from “meddling” in the US presidential election to assisting the Syrian government execute forbidden chemical weapon attacks against its own civilians to staging assassination attempts on foreign soil will do, apparently.

Just how many US soccer fans will actually be interested in attending or have already made arrangements to attend the 2018 FWC is unknown, but what is known is that Team USA failed to qualify for this edition of the tournament. That will make 2018 the first time since 1986 that the American soccer organization has not been able to send a team to the World Cup.

The recent announcement comes right on the heels of a seemingly coordinated mass expulsion of more than 60 Russian diplomats from the United States to the United Kingdom following the failed attempt on the life of former Russian army Colonel Sergei Skripal in England a little more than a month ago. Russian officials have suggested the assassination plot against Skripal, who was convicted in Russian courts of spying for Great Britain, was in fact a so called “false flag” operation carried out by the UK itself, but American and British leaders weren’t buying it and roundly condemned Moscow over the incident.

Officials at the Kremlin expelled US diplomats in response, turning the proverbial thermostat ever lower on what pundits are calling a “new Cold War.” Now Western officials are telling their nations’ soccer fans to skip out on one of the biggest tournaments in international sports because they can’t guarantee their safety. While that isn’t quite as egregious as saying Russian President Vladimir Putin himself personally ordered elite hackers to post dank memes to help get Donald Trump elected back in 2016 or helped Syrian President Bashar al-Assad use chemical weapons on women and children for no good reason, it still smells a little fishy.

Boris Johnson, the British Foreign Secretary, took things a big step further, telling reporters in late March that it was highly likely that Putin would try to use the occasion of the prestigious international soccer tournament as PR exercise to gloss over [Russia’s] brutal, corrupt regime.” As often happens any time a politician practically anywhere wants to make sure nobody takes their words credibly, Johnson – who has himself been called a “fascist” by left leading British news publications for his role in the Brexit Campaign by which the UK voted to leave the European Union – summoned up the ghost of Adolf Hitler to make his point. Johnson said it is probably the Putin was eyeing the 2018 World Cup his country will be hosting come June as an opportunity akin to the one seized by the National Socialist government of Germany when that country hosted the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

To its credit, the White House has not said anything on that level. What White House officials are saying is that, outside of having increased difficulties to “protect [US] citizens” visiting Russia for the 21st edition of the FIFA World Cup, even dealing with normal affairs like getting sick people out of the country will be more difficult due to the “lack of consular support.” For what it’s worth, British news outlet The Guardian is reporting that the UK Foreign Office had its own consular support staff on duty “around the clock” to assist the 20,000 some odd British nationals that visited Brazil for the 2014 edition of the World Cup. That level of support will “be more difficult in Russia in the present climate,” according to the Trump administration’s official release on the travel advisory.

“If you get into any kind of difficulty there, we just won’t have the wherewithal,” the official said. “People have accidents. They get ill, they need to be medevacked out. We’re not suggesting that there are going to be some major sets of incidents, but it’s just those larger concerns.”

Among those “larger concerns” are evidently increased chances of a terrorist attack, though the White House officials did say they were “trying to work with the Russian on counter-terrorism as well.” No word on how those efforts are progressing, but the threat of terrorism could indeed prove credible – Russian military action in the long running Syrian Civil War is, after all, the primary reason the Islamic State is all but destroyed today – so the possibility of reprisals do exist. It is being reported that the White House officials have couched their argument by saying “any large sporting event, no matter what country now, is a target. However, now, due to the reciprocal expulsions of UK and US consular officials and workers carried out by the Kremlin after their own consular people were kicked out of America and England, broader coordination on counter-terrorism preparedness will be much more difficult to carry out, the reasoning goes.

Though the prospect of visiting Russia for the World Cup’s 21st edition may be somewhat dimmed for Western soccer fans, it is important to recognize that the current World Cup betting odds have not really seen as much of a hit at all. This is true for practically every time except Russia, of course, as the host of the event went from having moneyline odds to win the tournament outright roughly equivalent to those of the Colombian national team a couple months ago to current odds of +4000, despite no real action taking place in the soccer world between then and now. Things still don’t look bad for the Motherland at the group level though: Russia has +125 odds to be the winner of an admittedly pretty decent Group A in the first stage of the competition, just behind historical World Cup standout Uruguay, and has quite favorable odds of -350 to advance to the knockout stage.

Now, don’t get us wrong – we are not saying that legal offshore sportsbooks and brick and mortar betting shops are in collusion with the West in order to hack the odds against Mother Russia, but the coincidence was worth pointing out anyway. Every team in the tournament could theoretically have its odds revised between now and the start of the tournament in about two months’ time, and we’ll do our best to keep our readers apprised of any changes on the betting boards.

BettingOddsWorldCup.com knows even if relations between Russia and the West don’t entirely thaw in time for the FIFA World Cup’s 2018 edition, the hope is certainly that diplomatic relations between two of the world’s nuclear superpowers will normalize sooner rather than later. If the situation does not improve…well, let’s just say that having some devoted American soccer fans missing the big tournament will be the least of our international concerns. Maybe everything will start to look better after what White House press secretary said will be a “not-too-distant future” meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin, when, hopefully, they’ll hash out what is going on.