Ever since Chelsea and Manchester United secured their places in the Champions League final in Moscow, fans’ minds have been filled with questions about strategy and tactics.
Plane or train? Hotel room 100 miles from the stadium, or sleeping bags? Stay one night or two?
The logistics of staging Europe’s biggest club game of the season, and getting there, would tax any host city and supporters. But Wednesday night’s showdown, between two English clubs whose fan bases are among the biggest and most passionate in the world, provides unique challenges.
United fan Jane Taylor-Medhurst and her party will take two planes, a train and the best part of a day to get to Moscow. She is not relishing staying in a mixed-sex dormitory and is forking out £700 for the trip. She is also packing a protective body belt. “We’re looking forward to it – but with some trepidation,” she admits.
Moscow suffers from a chronic shortage of hotel rooms, after demolishing or closing for refurbishment most of its mid-range and budget hotels. With only 70,000 rooms, prices are among the world’s highest.
Hotels.com, which publishes a global price index, ranks it the most expensive city in the world, with rooms averaging £194 ($377, €244) a night.
Danny Talbot of Thomas Cook Sports, Chelsea’s official travel operator, says it has had to battle to keep prices as low as possible. “The pressures have been on aircraft availability and expensive bed stock. When you’ve got both it’s quite challenging,” he says.
But city officials have blamed tour companies that block-booked rooms months in advance for pushing prices higher.
One company, Select Travel, has arranged for three cruise ships to be moored on the Moscow River. Rooms were quickly snapped up, even at a reported €420 for two nights in a single-berth room.
Officials say many of the 42,000 fans will not require hotel rooms. “We would like to emphasise that the majority of fans are going to arrive on charter flights during the day of the game,” said Valery Gribakin, a Russian interior ministry official, this week.
Some 700 buses and minibuses will take fans from airports to the 69,500-seat Luzhniki stadium. They will then be placed in holding areas on opposite sides of the pitch.
The buses will have a police escort and will travel along specially designated lanes to avoid Moscow’s notorious traffic jams, said Vitaly Mutko, the Russian sports minister.
He added that many fans would return directly from the stadium to airports after the match.
“Fans who will leave immediately after the end of the match will take buses, and we have agreed with tour agencies that people will not have to wait for their particular plane to come, but as these are charter planes we will ensure that people will get to a plane as soon as they get to the airport,” Mr Mutko said.
Russia eased some of the burden on fans last week by waiving visa requirements. But Ms Taylor-Medhurst says that by then, a lot of fans had sent their passports to the Russian National Tourist Office in London, complete with £100 visa fees.
The visa waiver reflected top-level concern in Moscow that the Champions League final should be seen to be a success – and that Russia should demonstrate its ability to host big sports events.
The stakes have risen since Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi was last year awarded the 2014 Winter Olympics in spite of having virtually no facilities or even basic infrastructure in place.
Some 6,000 police and interior ministry troops will provide security around the Luzhniki stadium – 15-20 per cent more than is usual for big Moscow sports events.
While the arrival of the English clubs has seen Moscow’s British expat community scrambling to obtain tickets, many ordinary Russians and the domestic media were more excited by their own team Zenit St Petersburg’s visit to the UK for the Uefa Cup final. The reaction was ecstatic when Zenit beat Glasgow Rangers 2-0 on Wednesday night.
That victory was another coup for Russia’s second city, hometown of new president Dmitry Medvedev, his predecessor and now prime minister Vladimir Putin, and much of the government.
However, the importance of the Champions League game has not been wholly lost on Russia’s political and business elite – many of them friends of the Chelsea owner, Roman Abramovich. As one former senior official joked this week, Chelsea were often known as “our boys” in government circles.
