MOSCOW, December 4. /TASS/. Head coaches of national football teams still highly assess Russia’s organization of the 2018 FIFA World Cup and cherish details of the world championship last year, Stanislav Cherchesov, the head coach of the Russian national football team, said on Wednesday.
Cherchesov told journalists in Moscow that the issue of Russia’s hosting the global quadrennial football championship in 2018 emerged during the Final Draw procedure last week for the anniversary 60th edition of the European football championship in 2020.
The Final Draw for the 2020 UEFA Euro Cup was held on November 30 in the Romanian capital of Bucharest. Twenty-four national football teams, which have cleared the qualifications round, were divided into six groups with four teams in each. Russia was placed in Group B, and will play against Belgium (in St. Petersburg on June 13), Finland (in St. Petersburg on June 17) and Denmark (in Copenhagen on June 22).
"We have been recently attending the European championship’s Final Draw," Cherchesov said. "It’s been a long time already since the world championship but, as if having agreed in advance, many of my colleagues, who were at the [2018] World Cup, approached me and expressed their gratitude."
"They are still sharing their memories about Russia and they are speaking not about the venues, where the matches were played, but about people in Russia and how they were received and treated warmly. They [coaches] see for themselves how Russia is developing."
"We are moving in the right direction and since very respected experts in football are still recalling this event [2018 World Cup in Russia] it means that we have managed to touch the strings of their hearts. They recall the World Cup’s organization with a tinge of jealousy."
The country hosted its first-ever FIFA World Cup in 2018, which kicked off in Moscow with a remarkable opening show at Luzhniki Stadium on the evening of June 14 and ended with a spectacular final match, played also at the Luzhniki Stadium, where France confidently defeated Croatia 4-2 to win the much-coveted World Cup Trophy.
Russia provided 11 host cities across the country as the venues for the matches of the 2018 World Cup and they were Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi, Kazan, Saransk, Kaliningrad, Volgograd, Rostov-on-Don, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg and Samara.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino said after the world championship that Russia staged "the best World Cup ever." According to the Russian Federal Agency for Tourism, some 2.9 million foreign visitors arrived in Russia for the FIFA World Cup.
In late December 2018, FIFA announced in its statement that the World Cup in Russia set a new record of audience in the history of world football championships as over half of the world’s population watched matches on TV at home, out of home or on digital platforms.