The world football championship matches will be played in twelve Russian cities, with Yekaterinburg as a reserve place, head of Russian Football Union’s press service Andrei Malosolov told United Russia’s official web portal.
‘The cities which are to host the championship in 2018 have already been selected. The so-called clusters, namely, one in the North-West, one in the Volga Region, the Central one, and the one in the South, have already been determined. The clusters comprise twelve city plus Yekaterinburg as a reserve. These cities are Kaliningrad, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Yaroslavl, Nizhniy Novgorod, Samara, Kazan, Saransk, Volgograd, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, and Sochi. In fact, the applications committee, with some help from the Russian Football Union, decided upon all these cities from the start. No other cities are likely to be selected in the future unless some emergency pops up. I hope things won’t come to that. So, the cities have been determined, along with the stadium projects, the places to train, the players’ camps, and so on. All the infrastructure details were thought over a long time ago,’ the official said.