ABOUT

This is a site about the books and other writing by James Rodgers, author of Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia From Lenin to Putin (new edition 2023; first published July 2020); Headlines from the Holy Land (2015 and 2017); No Road Home: Fighting for Land and Faith in Gaza (2013); Reporting Conflict (2012). My work looks at how stories of international affairs, especially armed conflict, are told to the world.

BIOGRAPHY

I am an author and journalist. During two decades of covering international news, I reported on the end of the Soviet Union; the wars in Chechnya; the coming to power of Vladimir Putin; 9/11; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the 2003 war in Iraq; Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008. I completed correspondent postings for the BBC in Moscow, Brussels, and Gaza. I now teach in the Journalism Department at City St George’s, University of London.

The author in Berlin, February 2023. Photo © Kevin Cummins

When Putin Passed The Ball to Trump: New Book Extract

Posted On April 13, 2026

The Volgograd Arena, one of the stadia used when Russia hosted the 2018 football World Cup. (Photo by the author, from March 2019.)

This latest post is an extract from The Return of Russia about how Vladimir Putin has used international sporting events to boost Russia’s international standing. It was originally posted on the Yale University Press London website, to coincide with my presenting the book at the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) conference on April 10, 2026.

My next live event is in Chiswick, west London on April 15, and this earlier post has details of all events planned in spring and summer 2026.

My sincere thanks to everyone who has bought the book so far.

AT THE HELSINKI news conference on16th July 2018, Putin had performed like a master tactician, one who understood performing on the global stage much better than his newly arrived opposite number. When a football team outwits and outplays another, sports reporters might say the losers were ‘taught a footballing lesson’. Putin did not miss a trick here, either. Russia had just finished hosting the World Cup, a tournament generally agreed to have been a great success both on and off the field. With the world’s media watching, Putin took the opportunity to remind them how well it had gone. Standing at the podium in the news conference, he was passed a football, which he then passed on to Trump, noting that the US was due to host the tournament in 2026.1 Putin’s gesture also implied a challenge for the US to stage as successful a World Cup as Russia had done.

Sporting success and the staging of international events had become a pillar of the propaganda of the Putin era. The hosting of the Champions League final in 2008 had been followed one month later by the Russian national team’s strong showing in the European Championships. Russia reached the semi-finals, the country’s greatest footballing achievement since the end of the USSR. The fact that on the way they beat the Netherlands, who had defeated the USSR in the 1988 final, was not lost on the Russian TV commentator. He recalled having been at the 1988 match, where there were only about twenty Soviet supporters.2 Now not only was Russia back in the elite of European football, but the fans from this newly wealthy and confident country could afford to travel abroad in far greater numbers to watch their team.

Ten years later it was Russia’s turn to play host. Since that 2008 European tournament, held in Austria and Switzerland, much had changed politically. Just weeks after Russia’s footballers claimed third place on the pitch, Russia’s soldiers were marching to the battlefield in South Ossetia. When Russia hosted the 2018 World Cup, the annexation of Crimea was already four years old. The decision to award the tournament to Russia had been taken before the seizure of the territory. The governing body of international football, FIFA, had very quickly made it clear that there was no prospect of the World Cup being taken away from Russia because of its conquest of Crimea. Just days after Putin signed the legislation formalising the annexation, the then president of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, said, ‘The World Cup has been given and voted to Russia and we are going forward with our work.’3 There were also persistent allegations of corruption having influenced the bidding process, but neither those allegations, nor the war in Ukraine, stopped Russia from playing host.4 Instead, Moscow and the other Russian cities whose stadia were used for the tournament were allowed to shine on world football’s biggest stage.

Those venues chosen reflected well on Russia: in soft power, if not in sporting terms. Neither Russia nor the USSR had ever won the trophy. Russia did enjoy some success on the pitch, eliminating Spain, before being knocked out themselves by Croatia in the quarter finals. Off the pitch, the success was more marked. While the Russian political elite would have liked nothing more than to see their team conquer the world, that was never seriously expected. Hosting the tournament was always more about projecting an image of Russia as one of the world’s leading countries, one to which visitors from all over the world would flock in admiration, and leave impressed. This is a long-established idea in the way Russia wants to be seen by the rest of the world. Alexander Pushkin, in his 1833 poem ‘The Bronze Horseman’, imagines Peter the Great’s thoughts as he prepares to build Saint Petersburg. ‘All flags will visit us,’ the tsar muses. Certainly, the Russian state had committed resources not only during the bidding process, but to pay for the tournament itself. Media reports from the time suggested that hosting the World Cup had cost Russia more than $14 billion.5 That made it at the time the most expensive World Cup ever, though that was soon surpassed by the next World Cup, held in Qatar in 2022. The rehearsals – with the relaxation of visa requirements and unusually polite police officers – for the UEFA Champions League final in Moscow a decade earlier paid off. Fans who came seemed largely to enjoy themselves, and Russian media were happy to celebrate the patriotic public relations success. One tweet from an England fan talking about what a great time he had had suggested that ‘the British media should be ashamed of themselves for their clear propaganda against the Russian people. Absolutely class country.’6 It was gleefully amplified by Kremlin-friendly news outlets.

For this was really the point of hosting the tournament. As relations had soured the previous spring in the wake of the poisoning of the Skripals, the foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, had accused the West of ‘trying to take the World Cup out of Russia’.7 Her remarks followed the announcement from the British prime minister, Theresa May, that no British officials or members of the royal family would travel to Russia for the World Cup. Prince William, the grandson of Queen Elizabeth, and at that time second in line to the throne, held the post of president of the English football association. As the association’s president, he would normally have been expected to go to the tournament. Theresa May had been speaking in March when she announced the expulsion of Russian diplomats after the attack on the Skripals.8 A suggestion from the then British foreign secretary, later prime minister, Boris Johnson that attending the World Cup bore comparison with attending the 1936 Berlin Olympics prompted particular outrage and even a trip to the Moscow archives. At a briefing on 29 March, Zakharova claimed to be holding a brochure published in Berlin in 1936 that listed the names of British dignitaries who had attended the now infamous games. ‘What were all those respectable British sporting functionaries and lords doing as Hitler’s guests? Tell your countrymen about this,’ Zakharova demanded.9 Her comments reflected fury that Russia’s hosting of the tournament might in any way be tarnished – and also drew on a longstanding Russian public diplomacy technique of ‘whataboutism’, where Russian officials deflect criticism of their country not by denial but by comparison with something equally bad, or even worse.

  1. ‘Putin gives Trump a World Cup soccer ball, tells him “now the ball is in your court”’, Fox News, 16 July 2018. Available at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/putin-gives-trump-a-world-cup-soccer-ball-tells-him-now-the-ball-is-in-your-court
    ?msockid=36bf362024bb65ec111e399c258364a4. Accessed 1 November 2024. ↩︎
  2. ‘Russia’s new faith . . . in itself’, BBC News, 28 June 2008. Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7477352.stm. Accessed 1 November 2024. ↩︎
  3. ‘Sepp Blatter: Russia will host 2018 World Cup despite Crimea’, BBC Sport, 21 March 2014. Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/26691561. Accessed 1 November 2024. ↩︎
  4. James Riach, ‘FBI investigating Fifa’s awarding of 2018 and 2022 World Cups –
    report’, Guardian, 3 June 2015. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/
    football/2015/jun/03/fbi-investigating-fifa-2018-2022-world-cup. Accessed 1 November 2024. ↩︎
  5. ‘Непредвиденные расходы: как менялась смета ЧМ-2018’, РБК, 8 June 2014. Available at https://www.rbc.ru/society/08/06/2018/5b02f8039a7947289e44a869.Accessed 2 November 2024; Holly Ellyatt, ‘Russia World Cup will give economy
    a boost’, CNBC, 14 June 2014. Available at https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/14/russia-world-cup-will-give-economy-a-boost.html. Accessed 2 November 2024. ↩︎
  6. I referred to this in some of my own journalism from the time: ‘World Cup 2018: Wins For Russia On And Off The Field’, Forbes, 2 July 2018. Available at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesrodgerseurope/2018/07/02/world-cup-2018-wins-for-russia-on-and-off-the-field. Accessed 2 November 2024. In the autumn of 2024, the tweet itself was no longer available. ↩︎
  7. ‘Moscow official says West is trying to deny Russia World Cup’, BBC News, 1 April 2018. Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-43609505. Accessed 2 November 2024. ↩︎
  8. Samuel Osborne, ‘Theresa May’s Russia statement in full as she expels 23
    spies over nerve agent attack’, The Independent, 14 March 2018. Available at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-russia-statement-in-full-spies-expel-nerve-agent-salisbury-poisoning-a8255661.html. Accessed 2 November 2024. ↩︎
  9. ‘Briefing by Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova, Moscow, March 29, 2018’, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, 29 March 2018. Available at https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1567230. Accessed 2
    November 2024. ↩︎
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