MOSCOW, July 30. /TASS/. The majority of Russians polled by the All-Russia Public Opinion Center (76%) applauded results of the national football team at the 2018 FIFA World Cup with some of them saying that the team exceeded expectations, according to the poll results released on Monday.
"On the whole, our citizens have positively assessed the results of the national football team at the world championship as 40% of the respondents said the team reached the maximum result considering their current shape <…>, while 36 more percent of respondents added that the team’s game exceeded their expectations," the pollster announced in its statement.
Over 70% of respondents said they closely followed all matches of the world championship with the involvement of the Russian national team, while 32% of respondents stated they watched live on air all five games of the national squad played at the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
The poll was held on July 12-16, 2018. The error margin does not exceed 2.5% with a 95% probability.
Led by 54-year-old Head Coach Stanislav Cherchesov, the Russian national football team managed to reach the knockout stage of the 2018 FIFA World Cup advancing with a win over the Spanish team in the round of Last 16 and then losing on a penalty shootout in the quarterfinals to Croatia, which eventually reached the final match of the world championship.
Cherchesov took the reins of the national football squad in the summer of 2016 signing a contract with the RFU to work as the head coach of the team until August 2018.
This summer Russia hosted its first-ever FIFA World Cup, 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 selected 11 host cities to be 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.
The national football team of hosts Russia managed to make it to the quarterfinals stage of this world championship, where Croatia edged them out in a 4-3 penalty shootout win on July 7 at the Fisht Arena in Sochi.
According to a statement from the world’s governing football body, FIFA, earlier in the week, Russia’s Head Coach Cherchesov had been included in the short-list of nominees for the FIFA Best Coach of the Year award.