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FOREWORD
RYAN GIGGS

THE FIRST THING ANY OF US AT MANCHESTER UNITED noticed about our new signing, Andrei Kanchelskis, back in 1991 was that he was so quick. There are some players whom we like to describe as deceptively quick. Perhaps they have a slower acceleration, a more languid running style, a longer stride. But there was nothing deceptive about Andrei’s pace. He was quick-quick. He was bloody-hell quick.

The second thing we noticed, which might not have been so apparent outside of United, was that Andrei had an astonishingly powerful right-foot shot. I don’t think that I had ever seen anyone hit the ball as hard as Andrei could. He was built perfectly for a footballer: lean on top with massive legs that generated all that power. He looked like a winger should look, leaning over the ball as he went forward, arms out for balance, favouring the long-sleeved version of those classic Adidas and Umbro strips we wore in the last days of the old First Division, and then the dawn of the Premier League.

When Andrei joined the club, I had made my debut earlier that month as a 17-year-old winger and while I was determined to tie down my own place in the team I also knew that the competition was going to be tough. We had Lee Sharpe, who was brilliant in the run to the 1991 European Cup-Winners’ Cup final, and then there was Andrei, doing what all great wingers do: drawing the full-back in, putting the ball past him and hitting the accelerator.

It is safe to say that the first time I ever heard of a club called Shakhtar Donetsk was when I read about our new signing from the Soviet Union. Those were very different times when there was not the access to footage, statistics and informed opinion in English about the leagues around Europe and the wider world. Signing what we referred to then as a Russian footballer – although I know that Andrei was born in the Ukraine – was something new and exotic. Football is simple once the ball comes out and although conversation with Andrei was limited in those early days he was quickly one of the lads.

When I think of Andrei, I immediately think of his interpreter George. George Scanlan, I have later learned, was a professor of modern languages at what is now Liverpool John Moores University, who was also a non-league football manager himself. All I can say is that Sir Alex Ferguson must have trusted George completely because he was invited right into the inner sanctum of United. He was there in the team talks and he was also permitted to sit on the bench so he could give Andrei the instructions Sir Alex needed to pass on. Very few outsiders over the years were afforded that privilege.

Despite the language barrier, Andrei threw himself into life at United. He would come with us on nights out and although the conversation in those early days largely involved him listening and nodding, he always wanted to be part of the group. I did not give it much thought then but looking back it must have been difficult for Andrei to assimilate, coming from a country so different to Britain, which had been so isolated, but that never stopped him from being a good team-mate.

In those days the club did not have the infrastructure to look after foreign signings that it does now. Andrei had to get himself into training from his home in Cheshire and I recall a few times when he did get lost on the way. There might also have been a couple of occasions when Greater Manchester Police had to enlighten him as to the speed limit but he settled down quickly.

I am sure Andrei will not mind me saying that, in the loud and demanding dressing room we had at United in those days, his dress sense came under scrutiny from his team-mates. Andrei was obsessed with Versace. Versace shoes, Versace jeans, Versace shirt. Was he aware, we would often inquire, that other labels were available?

Andrei was a favourite with the United fans. A hat-trick at home against Manchester City in November 1994 guaranteed that. I remember his goal that year against Oldham in the FA Cup semi-final replay at Maine Road. In April 1993 we both scored in a 3-1 win at Carrow Road over a Norwich City team who were then credible title contenders. The pace and power of United on the counter-attack that day was something else.

I won’t forget another he scored against Leeds at Old Trafford in a 2-0 win in September 1992 when I crossed from the right side with outside of my left foot and Andrei got his head on it at the back post. That goal was unusual because he was on the left and I was on the right. We would occasionally take it upon ourselves to switch sides if we felt that we were not having the effect on the game that we wanted.

Looking back at the footage of those years reminds me what great times they were when United attacked teams with pace and confidence. A whole generation of United fans remember that era with such fondness. I know because I live in Manchester and people love to talk about those days.

Andrei left in that summer of 1995, and although with hindsight his departure and the exit of Paul Ince and Mark Hughes opened the door for Paul Scholes, David Beckham and Nicky Butt, it does get forgotten what a big call that was from Sir Alex. Andrei, Incey and Sparky were at the top of their game, or at least very close to it. They were major players in a team that had won two Premier League titles, including the double in 1994, and very few clubs would have been able to replace them.

I saw Andrei in Moscow before the 2008 Champions League final and it was great to catch up. It is the nature of old team-mates that our careers and our lives take us in different directions. One thing will never change, however, and that is the games we played together, the goals we scored and the trophies we won. If you were a United player in the 1990s then you were part of a golden era.

It is a pleasure for me to introduce Andrei’s autobiography and I hope that reading it will stir United fans’ memories of a time when it felt that our club was awakening, with a boldness that would see us conquer England and then Europe all over again. Andrei was a big part of it and at Old Trafford that will never be forgotten. I wish my old team-mate, and a fine United footballer, the very best.

Ryan Giggs, Manchester, May 2017

THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD

WHEN WE GATHERED ROUND THE TELEVISION, OUR nation When we gathered round the television, our nation felt like the centre of the world. It was the summer of 1980. I was eleven years old living in Kirovograd, a provincial city in what is now Ukraine. Far away in Moscow, they were staging the Olympic Games.

It is remembered for the duel between Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett and for the boycott by the United States. Some of us can still remember the mascot, Misha, the bear. The athletics events were staged in what was then called the Lenin Stadium and is now the Luzhniki, where Manchester United won the Champions League and where the World Cup final will be held, 38 years after the Olympics.

I was growing up in the Soviet Union, one of the two superpowers that held the world in balance. It was at the height of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan and Ronald Reagan was about to become president of the United States. Mikhail Gorbachev, who would change everything with his policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction), had just been elected to the politburo but nobody really knew who he was. The president was Leonid Brezhnev, an old, hard-line Communist, who said nothing memorable, ever.

When I joined Manchester United in May 1991, the Soviet Union was on the point of collapse but there was still ignorance and suspicion about us. When I went to Manchester, people thought bears walked the streets of Moscow. ‘Yeah,’ I would reply. ‘We shake their hands and say hello.’

In the summer of 2018, Russia will once more feel like the centre of the world. The Soviet Union has long gone and it has taken the old Communist order with it but there is still plenty of suspicion about Russia. Vladimir Putin is analysed and mistrusted in the same way as Brezhnev and Gorbachev were.

Putin is not a big football fan; his sport is ice hockey. However, he knows the value of putting on a show as he proved with the Winter Olympics in Sochi. They cost more than £5 billion and they practically built a new town there.

The World Cup will bring new stadia, new airports and, with them, jobs. St Petersburg will have what will be, until the World Cup comes to Qatar, the most expensive football stadium on the planet.

The story of the Krestovsky Stadium is almost the story of the last decade of Russian football. It was supposed to have opened in 2008, the year that Zenit St Petersburg beat Glasgow Rangers in Manchester to win the UEFA Cup.

But then came the financial crash. The main sponsor, Gazprom, pulled out. The architect, Kisho Kurokawa, died. Then came sanctions imposed because of the invasion of Crimea. It finally opened in April 2017 at a cost of more than £1 billion.

Those Manchester United fans who made the long journey to Rostov the month before the Krestovsky opened saw their team play in a little open bowl of a ground on a pitch that was unfit for football, where the ball spat, squatted and moved in all kinds of directions.

On the south bank of the River Don, a new stadium was nearing completion. It will seat 45,000 and a new hub of the city will be built around it. If Manchester United play Rostov again, their fans will find the ball bounces rather better and the view is rather more comfortable.

Moscow’s new stadium, the Otkrytie, which is due to stage the first match of the World Cup, tells another story. It belongs to Spartak Moscow, the most famous and best-supported club in Russian football.

Spartak have been playing since they were founded by Nikolai Starostin in 1934 but this is the first time they have had their own ground. Before, they would play at the Luzhniki and, earlier still, they would share Lokomotiv’s ground.

Unlike the other Moscow clubs, Dynamo, Torpedo and CSKA, what made Spartak so popular was that they had no direct connection with the state. Clubs called Dynamo were part-funded by the security services and Lavrenty Beria, who was Stalin’s head of the secret police, supported Dynamo Moscow. Starostin was sent to the gulag. If you go to the Otkrytie, you will see a statue of Starostin and his brothers.

In 2017, Spartak Moscow won the Russian Premier League for the first time in sixteen years, managed by Massimo Carrera, who used to be Antonio Conte’s assistant with Italy and at Juventus. In London and Moscow, Conte and Carrera won the title in the same week 1,500 miles apart, but perhaps Carrera’s achievement was a bigger one.

How the world will see Russia depends on how the World Cup tournament is managed. There are a lot of nerves, plenty of excitement and a lot of pride. This is the first time a World Cup has ever been staged in eastern Europe.

Predicting football can be a foolish business. The bombing of the St Petersburg metro that killed fourteen in April 2017 is a warning of what can happen but the World Cup in Russia, just like those in South Africa and Brazil, should be safe. Or as safe as any state can make it.

The European Championships in France had very high levels of security and were very well organised but they could not prevent the rioting in Marseilles that disfigured England’s opening game against Russia or the atrocity that followed the final on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, where a truck was driven into a crowd.

I have been involved in meetings with the World Cup organisers to discuss how incidents like that can be stopped. My advice is that you must take every precaution but you cannot guarantee nothing will happen.

In the run-up to great sporting events, a lot of things are said to cover the backs of the people organising them. So the Athens Olympics would never be ready, everyone coming to South Africa 2010 would be shot, everyone coming to Brazil four years later would be robbed.

Information makes you stronger. Going to places is always better than watching from afar on television. The Russian World Cup will be the third in succession where people will hesitate before going. Before the tournaments in South Africa and Brazil, we were told that you risked being shot or at the very least mugged the moment you set foot outside your hotel.

I was thinking of going to the 2014 tournament but even the Brazilian footballers in Russia told me that it would probably be too dangerous. When you speak to those who did go to Rio de Janeiro, Fortaleza or Salvador, they will tell you only what a fabulous experience it was.

In Russia at least there is less suspicion of the West than there used to be. The Soviet Union was a closed society. People in the big cities, in Moscow and St Petersburg, have more of an idea of what is going on around them than my parents’ generation would have done.

In 1989 I went with Dynamo Kiev to London to play in a preseason tournament at Wembley. It was also about that time that I began travelling abroad with the Soviet Union’s Under-21 sides.

We were told to be careful. People in the West might try to provoke or entrap us. We were told to be very wary of going shopping because we might, at any time, be accused of shoplifting. We were told to watch what we said and, if someone gave us a present, it would be best not to accept it. On no account were we to leave the hotel on our own.

Although there are many, many people who have never left Russia, that is one way in which the change has been for the better. People do travel, they do know much more about what lies beyond the borders. If you go to Russia, you will find people friendly, happy to talk football, especially about the Premier League, which attracts more viewers than Russian domestic football.

English is more widely understood than it was when I was growing up, when nobody saw the need to learn a foreign language. Why would we? Most people would never leave the Soviet Union, there would be no need to speak anything but Russian.

When Manchester United came to play Rostov, which has a very passionate fan-base, the Rostov supporters gave them blankets as a gift because even in southern Russia it can grow very cold on a March night. The Manchester United team hotel was besieged by fans hoping for a glimpse of the players. Rostov is famous for its fish market and its caviar but it is also one of the places that deserves a World Cup.

I always think it is a good idea to see things with your own eyes and then talk. Too many people, especially in this age of the internet, talk and write about things they have little knowledge of.

That applies to football more than almost anything else. Sometimes, I will find myself in a hotel foyer or at an airport departure lounge talking to a stranger and he will tell me he is good friends with Sir Alex Ferguson. I will stop the conversation, hand them my phone and say, ‘Why don’t you call him, I am sure he would love to hear from you.’

I was surprised that Russia won the race to stage the World Cup if only because football there was a sport that seemed to be on the wane. The fear is that the team that represents Russia will not do the tournament justice. When the Soviet Union fell apart, so, too, did other things, and football was among them.

The Russian team is in such a sorry state that, if we were not hosting the tournament, we probably would not have qualified for it. Stanislav Cherchesov, the national manager, had been roundly condemned even before the opening of the Confederations Cup, the now-traditional dry run for the World Cup. Friendlies have been lost to Costa Rica, Ivory Coast and Qatar.

If England’s defeat to Iceland provided the most embarrassing exit from Euro 2016, then at least they qualified for the knockout stages. Russia finished last in England’s group; their sole point came from the draw with England in Marseilles that will be remembered only for the crowd violence.

In 2008, Zenit St Petersburg won the UEFA Cup and Guus Hiddink took Russia to the semi-finals of the European Championship. In the decade that followed, Russian football has collapsed.

Part of the problem is the Russian Football Federation has so few members who have played the game or managed a football team. Sometimes, when you speak to them, they seem to be talking a forgotten language.

For Russia, as for England, Euro 2016 was an embarrassment. They had both employed Fabio Capello when their fortunes had reached rock bottom. Capello qualified each country for a World Cup and then, in South Africa and Brazil, watched as those two nations disappeared without trace. In Brazil, Capello’s Russia did not win a game, finishing third in their group behind Algeria.

The fact remains that, since the end of the Soviet Union, Russia has qualified for three World Cups, been knocked out in the group stages each time and won two matches from nine – against Cameroon and Tunisia.

Every football nation goes through a time of decline and it was Capello’s misfortune to manage Russia at a time when football there was at such a low ebb. What kept being mentioned – and what people didn’t forget – was that Capello was being paid £6m a year. That was double what Joachim Low earned for winning the World Cup with Germany.

A few months after Capello’s team returned from Brazil, the Russian Football Federation said they could no longer afford to pay him. Leonid Slutsky, who was manager of CSKA Moscow, took the team to France on the basis that he would not draw a salary. Like Capello in Brazil, he did not collect a win bonus.

They took that single point against England in Marseilles. It would not have mattered who was in charge – Capello or Slutsky – the results in Euro 2016 would have been the same.

When Slutsky qualified Russia for France by finishing above Sweden in qualification, there was a brief wave of euphoria about what we could achieve but, once the tournament began, the results were coldly, grimly predictable.

Cherchesov’s target is to reach the World Cup semi-finals. Russia is a big country with a big population but there are very few who believe he is capable of anything approaching that. Whenever we are told that Russian football is progressing, the word ‘progressing’ always appears in quotation marks.

The one thing the last two World Cups had in common was that the hosts exited the competition embarrassingly. South Africa became the first host nation to be eliminated in the group stage. Brazil did make the semi-finals but were thrashed 7–1 by Germany. The fear is that Russia may build great stadia but the national team will be unworthy of them.

One thing the World Cup will do – and one thing that Russia desperately needs – is that it will encourage young people to get out of their bedrooms, put away their PlayStations and their phones and play football.

At least it is being held where a World Cup should be held, in a large country where fans can experience the differences of a nation. The tournament will be played out on a vast landscape. There will be games in Kaliningrad, an isolated city on the Baltic (which, before the Second World War, used to be Konigsberg in Germany). They will play in St Petersburg, in Samara, in Volgograd, in Rostov, Nizhny Novgorod and elsewhere.

If you come to follow your team you will see the ‘white nights’ of St Petersburg, where it truly never grows dark over the palaces and golden domes of the city. If you are in Rostov you can cruise on a boat down the River Don, once the great artery of the Cossack nation, and picnic on an island.

You can go to Volgograd and see where in 1943, when it was called Stalingrad, the tide of history changed. You will discover Russian beer is very cheap and not very good – you’re better off buying imported German lager rather than Baltika, the biggest brand of Russian beer, brewed in St Petersburg.

The games will attract crowds, although I wouldn’t put too much store by statements that a stadium is sold out. When Moscow staged the 2008 Champions League final between Chelsea and Manchester United, everyone was told there was no chance of getting a ticket. But when you actually got inside the Luzhniki Stadium on that rainswept night in May, you saw swathes of empty seats.

It will be the empty seats when the World Cup is done that might be the real problem for Russia. When I began playing for Dynamo Kiev in the late 1980s, the game against Spartak Moscow would attract 100,000 fans. There are nothing like those kinds of attendances in the Russian Premier League.

Spartak, the best-supported club in the country, get about 30,000. Zenit St Petersburg attract about 20,000. How will Zenit fill the world’s most expensive football stadium? And how many empty seats will there be in the stadia at Ekaterinburg, Volgograd and Kaliningrad once the tournament has packed up and gone away and Russia no longer finds itself the centre of the world?