So last night the Chelski Mafiosi beat Liverpool to get to the final of the Champion’s League (not for champions, not a league) where they’ll play another English team, Merchandising United – sorry, Manchester United – on the 21st May. And where’s the final going to be held? Yep, Moscow. So tens of thousands of fans whose two club grounds are perhaps 100 miles apart will be flying over 1500 miles to Russia. It’s difficult to get your head around quite how barmy this is. The sheer cost to the fans is staggering, though these days to follow the aristocracy of the Premier League you need serious money just to go to league matches so there’ll be plenty of prawn sandwich eaters prepared to shell out thousands to go to the final (bit of a shame about the less affluent fans, but they don’t buy high-margin merchandise so who gives a toss?). Then there’s the travel time – to watch a 90-minute match, perhaps 2 hours if extra time kicks in, fans will be spending at least three days travelling. And of course, in these days of climate change awareness, the ‘carbon footprint’ of the final will be fearful to contemplate – if 10,000 fans from each team travel (maybe the seat allocation is more, maybe less, but that’s a decent estimate) then that’s 20,000 bums on plane seats, so at an average of 200 seats/plane that’s 100 flights of 3000 miles. How much aviation fuel is going to be burnt in them?
Of course, the final venue would have been stitched up well before the ‘league’ kicked off and the stadium owners wll be contractually due a big payday, but you’d think that, when the final teams are barely 2 hours apart by train or 4 by car, some alternative arrangement could come into play. The Russian stadium owners could be paid the profits they’d reasonably expect to make on the day, and the match re-sited to a neutral ground in England, Villa Park being the most obvious venue. Still, as Harry Hill might say, what are the chances of that happening, eh, eh? The whole thing’s more bananas than Fyffes.
Fans face struggle for Moscow visa (Guardian, 1/5/2008)
