russia's world cup odyssey

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I remember the very first meeting in Moscow, in August 2009, to kick off the Russian bid for the 2018/2022

Fifa World Cup. The ‘bid committee’, which consisted of exactly four people at that time, had prepared a brief overview of their work and planning to date. The first slide of their presentation said, ‘In Helios We Trust’. It was a bit of levity to get everyone to relax, but over the next 15 months I never forgot the statement on that slide or what it really meant to both the bid and us.

Having worked extensively on the Sochi 2014 Olympic Games bid from its inception, I was hopeful that their faith in us was not misplaced – we had never worked on a Fifa World Cup bid. In spite of that, our scope

of work was significant: branding of the bid; graphic design of the bid materials with our long-time partners at North Design; the development and writing of the bid book with a team of experienced Russian and international stadium architects, such as Dmitry Bushuev, Tim Hupe and Ruben Reddy, and the overlay planning specialist from the company Nüssli (all coordinated by Implenia); the development of the key communications messages and speeches; and management of many presentations, including the final presentation to the Fifa Executive Committee in Zurich. In reality, it would be a combination of our efforts, other consultants and the bid committee itself that worked on all of these deliverables.

One of the first things we did to add football credibility to our team was to engage Daniel Rupf. Dany, as the former Fifa head of World Cup events and competitions division, is a football veteran and had many years of experience at virtually every level of the game – including as a player. Based in Zurich, Dany provided our team with a depth of football and – perhaps as importantly – political Fifa knowledge that we did not have. Dany also served as the Helios project director, and his insight and attention to detail were invaluable to the effort. Two other Fifa veterans – the superb Andreas Herren, former chief of the Fifa media department and acting Fifa director of communications, who created and managed what I think was one of the

Russia came from behind to be awarded the 2018 World Cup in December. Writing exclusively for SportsPro, Terrence Burns, president of Helios Partners, the lead agency behind the bid, tells the story of how Russia made its case and beat Spain/Portugal, Holland/Belgium, and England.

Russia’s WoRld Cup odyssey

By Terrence Burns

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best communications campaigns of the race, and the very experienced Markus Siegler, who worked tirelessly and effectively behind the scenes on the international relations programme – were brought on to round out the core consulting team. During the final months of the campaign we brought in Crystal CG to do the video stadium renderings and Rupert Wainwright to produce the three films for the final presentation in Zurich.

Agencies are only as good as their brief and how well they work with the client. We were very fortunate to have a stellar bid committee team, starting with the chief executive, Alexey Sorokin. Alexey and I have known each other for years, having worked together on the Moscow 2012 Olympic bid, the Moscow 2010 Youth Olympic Games bid and the Sochi 2014 bid. A trained diplomat, Alexey

speaks English better than most Americans – including me (!) – and possesses a particular charm that foreigners find easy to like and easy to trust. His deputy, Alexander Djordjadze, also a trained diplomat, was a very effective bid executive and proved to be a valuable part of the writing team. Julia Cooper, the bid’s director of communications, veteran of the Moscow and Sochi bids and a former Helios employee, did a superb job of keeping multiple projects on track, and Dmitry Mosin, also a veteran of the Moscow and Sochi Olympic bids, was crucial in our bid book preparations and the Fifa evaluation visit. Like the majority of bids we’ve worked on, most of us wore many hats, depending on the situation.

From the beginning of the bid we understood clearly, as we do with every bid, that we needed a ‘story’; we needed a narrative that highlighted our key differentiators from

our competitors but more importantly, also addressed the needs of Fifa and the world football community. It was a familiar feeling – quite similar to the Sochi 2014 bid in the sense that our competitors had existing world-class sport and non-sport infrastructure and we didn’t. Russia was, and still is, in a frenetic phase of building, upgrading, renovating and generally playing catch-up to the infrastructure that we take for granted in the west.

Bids are like new products – they require a new brand. Depending on the city (Olympic bids) or the country (Fifa World Cup bids), a bidding committee cannot help but be linked to the existing image of its municipal or national identity. Rio 2016’s bid for the Olympic Games, for example, was a beneficiary of the powerful fun and sun-loving image of that wonderful city; Moscow 2012’s Olympic bid (on which I worked) was linked with the image of a Russia that no longer existed. We broke that paradigm with Sochi, and we were determined to repeat it with the Russia 2018 World Cup bid.

So, as with every bid, we began with the basics: Who are we? What do we stand for? What does the world think of us? How do we embrace or how do we change that impression? We undertook a thorough brand assessment and positioning exercise for the bid, and what we discovered was not surprising. Foreigners tended to view Russia through one of a few prisms, and most of the prisms were not flattering. We also had a few other ‘brand challenges’:

• Sochi had just won the 2014 Olympic winter Games; we expected the same level of doubt that Brazil endured regarding its ability to host the world’s two largest events within two years of each other.

• Was there enough money to build all the Olympic and Fifa World Cup venues, update and/or build new airports, roads and railways, new hotels and all the necessary infrastructure for both events?

• Government support: then-president Putin was a vocal and visible advocate for Sochi 2014; would he, or President Medvedev – or both – be as supportive and influential for the Fifa World Cup bid?

• Russia, although passionate about

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Renderings by Crystal CG of how Spartak Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium (top) and the new home of Zenit Saint Petersburg (left) will look at the 2018 Fifa World Cup. Bid architect Terrence Burns presented a plan that will see the 2018 World Cup use 16 arenas, with three extensively renovated and 13 newly built

“The Fifa exCo members are a worldly, sophisticated group of people. Most of them had visited Russia at some point and in reality, most of them

saw Russia from the vantage point of the privileged few.”


football (it is the most popular sport in Russia), is not known as a ‘football nation’ as were some of our competitors – England, Spain, Holland, etc – and finally:

• Foreigners’ perspectives of Russia: dark, unfriendly, corrupt, backward, bad food, bad hotels and poor infrastructure. I remember one brand interviewee’s response to my question ‘What are the first five words that come into your mind when you hear the word Russia?’ – he said, ‘scary…’ and nothing else – interview over. Unfortunately, that about summed it up for most people who had not spent much time in Russia in recent years.

Obviously the most tempting thing to suggest was to ‘change the image of Russia to the world’. Frankly, that would be a challenging and worthwhile brand assignment, but in reality, that was not our mission. Our mission was to help win a Fifa World Cup bid and to do that, we argued that we had to understand the needs of Fifa and create a brand for the Russian bid that uniquely met those needs in a way that our competitors could not credibly claim, refute or compete against.

Being new to the Fifa world we had a lot of homework to do but it seemed obvious that Fifa, regardless of one’s impression of it, was an organisation that was not afraid to take risks. Just looking at Fifa’s choices for the 2010 and 2014 tournaments, South Africa and Brazil respectively, led us to believe that the Russian bid’s brand, if carefully constructed, could be another opportunity for Fifa to take the Word Cup to new markets, new minds and hearts and, in doing so, grow the sport of football beyond its ‘traditional markets’. Quite simply, we viewed Russia as a glass half-full and pitched it as an opportunity rather than a risk.

‘Sales is sales’ in any endeavour: sell customers what they need, not what you are selling. We viewed Fifa as a customer and as such, we took to heart the mission of Fifa, and we paid particular attention to its goals of utilising sport as a force for social change. Russia is ripe for positive, social change. Never has a country undergone such a shattering social and economic

transformation in such a short time as has Russia; and it did it relatively peacefully. So, we set about either to break down stereotypes, or to use them to our advantage.

But there is one rule we never forgot or broke: focus on the target audience. The larger audience was the Fifa family, but the core audience was Fifa’s Executive Committee. Unlike most people around the world, whose impressions of Russia were driven by stereotypes and mass media, the Fifa ExCo members are a worldly, sophisticated group of people. Most of them had visited Russia at some point and in reality, most of them saw Russia from the vantage point of the privileged few. But at least they saw that Russia was not the bleak, hopeless and, yes, ‘scary’ place that many in the world imagined it to be. So we felt comfortable that we could craft a credible and compelling story for this audience – and just this audience.

As the narrative for the bid took shape, we made sure that everything we did ‘ticked a box’ on our brand model; meaning, our story had to be reflected in every speech, every brochure, every presentation, every press release, the bid books, the website and of course, the final presentation in Zurich. It was not an easy task – it never is. There are always distractions, doubters and frankly honest mistakes that suck the energy, and success, out of a bid. The way through this maze is great leadership, and we had that with Alexey Sorokin. His skilful handling of a myriad of economic, political and personnel issues was crucial.

Essentially our brand narrative was based on four premises which we felt were very distinct from our competitors:

• Russia represents new frontiers for Fifa – the growth of football in new markets, the impact of Fifa’s social programmes on the world’s largest country (What Russia can do for Fifa);

• Russia is changing – the Fifa World Cup will help accelerate Russia’s progress in a positive way (What Fifa can do for Russia);

• Russia offers a no-risk opportunity to Fifa, (many people thought this counter-intuitive, but it proved to be a huge strength for the bid because we took a perceived negative and made it our ‘positive’) both politically and economically – total government commitment and iron-clad guarantees, including three additional guarantees addressing perceived weaknesses in the bid, including visa-free entry to Russia for ticket holders; and:

• Russia, the world’s largest country, had never hosted a Fifa World Cup (Historic opportunity for Fifa to continue its bold record of host country selection).

Contrary to some of our defeated rivals’ claims in the media after Russia’s victory, the Russian bid was at times, like every bid, a very bumpy ride. And, like every bid, we were at times chronically short of funding, scrambling for new sponsors. In addition, political infighting is an art form in Russia, and Alexey and his team were not immune. But Alexey and his team fought for us, fought for the bid, and they never lost hope. I have seen good bids lose with poor leadership and marginal bids win with great leadership. I humbly believe that Russia 2018 had a great bid and great leadership. Frankly, we had to have both to win.

Bidding for events like the Olympic Games or the Fifa World Cup involves answering two questions: How will you do it if you win? Why do you want to do it? We already had proven with Sochi that if we had a credible answer to ‘how’, however hypothetical, we could win with a strong answer to ‘why?’ And after working on many bids for many years such as Beijing 2008, Vancouver 2010, Moscow 2012, Kazan Universiade 2013, golf ’s bid to return to the Olympic Games, Sochi 2014, Doha 2016 and Russia 2018 (you learn more from the ones that you lose than the ones that you win) we have learned that the key to victory lies not just in charts, tables, block plans, rendered stadia, numbers and data – every bid has those as a minimum requirement. The key

With opera star Anna Netrebko trapped in Milan by a snowstorm, pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva stepped in to deliver what was received as a stirring address to Fifa

Fifa president Sepp Blatter (left) and Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin discuss the bid. As with Sochi’s 2014 Olympic bid, Putin’s support was seen as critical

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Bid chief executive Alexey Sorokin (left), who Burns says led a “stellar” bid team, and Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko answer the world media’s many questions

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“like every bid, we were at times chronically short of funding, scrambling for

new sponsors.”


lies in understanding what is important to the people who are voting, and then creating a unique and differentiated offering that speaks to their hearts on an emotional as well as a rational level.

One of the biggest differences in Russia’s bid from our competitors’ bids was that Russia, or any country in eastern Europe for that matter, had never hosted a World Cup. In the beginning, the pressure on us to use this point as our key message was significant. But ultimately we felt that alone, it was not a compelling enough reason to award Russia – or indeed any country – the Fifa World Cup. We knew we had to earn it; we knew we had a lot of convincing to do, and we knew the only way to achieve that was to offer Fifa what it was looking for: growth, opportunity and the ability to positively impact a nation, a region and ultimately, the entire world. It’s hard to ignore something if it is offering an opportunity to move the world forward.

In the end, it came down to 30 minutes on a cold December day in Zurich. We were fortunate to have the final presentation slot of the two days of presentations, 1st December for the 2022 bid countries and 2nd December for the 2018 bid countries. We had the opportunity to watch all of the 2022 presentations the day prior and all of the 2018 presentations earlier on the day of our presentation. Frankly I was astonished at how many of the presentations seemed to say very little. Millions of dollars and months, if not years, of effort were lost in those last 30 minutes of mixed key messages, confused key messages and sometimes, no key messages at all.

Final presentations are not about facts and figures. They are not about trend lines and diagrams, movie stars or current or former politicians (unless they have something relevant to say). The voters in the room have already read the technical reports and evaluations and, believe me, they are not easily impressed with star power. At this point in the campaign, most voters already have made up their minds for which country they will vote; however, there is a minority percentage who have not yet decided, and a powerful, emotional and ultimately moving presentation can have an impact on their decisions.

The final presentation, be it Olympic or World Cup, is essentially about romance.

It’s about enchantment and telling a good story well.

We knew we had a good story. We knew we had well-written speeches that together, wove into a seamless, 30-minute, emotional tale that differentiated us from our competitors. We knew we had three solid films that supported each theme of the presentation’s messages. And we knew we had put in as much practice time as possible, given the varying schedules of the five speakers – Alexey Sorokin, sports minister Vitaly Mutko, Russian footballer Andrey Arshavin, opera legend Anna Netrebko and a politician yet to be named. But the last 24 hours of a bid campaign have a funny way of throwing detailed planning out of the window at the last moment. Russia’s Fifa World Cup bid was no different.

The evening before our final presentation, Mr Igor Shuvalov, first deputy prime minister of the Russian Federation arrived with his entourage. We had written speeches for more than one Russian politician to close the presentation, and although we’d worked with the bid committee team on a speech for Mr Shuvalov, I had never met him.

Late in the evening we convened in his hotel for a run-through of the programme. We also had asked the presenters to read their speeches to the group. There were many people in the small room whom I never had met, many of whom had played no part in the bid preparations to date. A great and frenzied debate began on everything from who speaks when to who says what. It was tense; with just hours to go, it was a delicate situation.

The bid’s VIP guests were also in attendance, including Roman Abramovich and other luminaries such as the legendary Russian footballer Alexey Smertin (all of whom were thoughtful and quiet in the ongoing, animated discussion). Finally, Alexey Sorokin and Mr Shuvalov calmed everyone down, and the show flow was agreed upon with no changes other than moving a couple of presenters’ positions around in the programme.

But to make things a little more challenging one of our speakers, Anna Netrebko, was stuck in a snowstorm in Milan. By 22:00 that evening, it was clear that she would not make the presentation in time. So, we needed another speaker, and a

new speech, with just 14 hours to go.The great Russian Olympian, 27-time

world record holder and two-time Olympic champion Yelena Isinbayeva was one of our VIPs in attendance for the presentation, and she, too, was in the room. Within minutes she was drafted as our new speaker and she and I started working on her speech in the hotel restaurant downstairs. Imagine travelling to Zurich to be an audience member for a World Cup bid’s presentation to Fifa, then, just hours prior to the event, being asked to participate by giving a speech in front of the first deputy prime minister of one’s home country, the Fifa Executive Committee and the entire world. Yelena didn’t hesitate – I guess that is why she has two Olympic gold medals and 27 world records.

Listening to Fifa president Sepp Blatter welcome the US bid delegation the day before, I was struck by his obvious delight at seeing a female athlete in their delegation, and he made a remark about the importance of women’s sport and Fifa’s support of it. So, knowing that Fifa, and Mr Blatter in particular, had put a lot of effort into the promotion and growth of women’s football, I took this as a cue for the content of Yelena’s speech. She would speak as a female athlete and praise Fifa’s efforts in promoting women’s sport, and she also would say something unusual in a bid presentation – “thank you” for not forgetting women’s role in sport.

Late that evening, Yelena proceeded with her first practice session in front of the assembled group – no one seemed to like the speech; they liked her, just not the speech. It was suggested that she speak more about her Olympic experiences, but we didn’t think that was the correct message

for this audience. The premise regarding Fifa’s support of women’s sport was there, and we weren’t going to change it. So after a few more debates and edits we crafted something in which everyone felt they had a hand. The truth is, the next morning Yelena asked me if she could put back in some of the text that the group insisted we remove – including a very seductively whispered, “Let me tell you a secret…I love football!” I said, “Yes, say what you want, it’s your speech and when you are up there no one can stop you.” So she did. Everyone on our team thought her performance was brilliant – and it was brilliant. And we won. And everyone, including me, went home happy.

The point is that it takes a lot to win a bid. It takes a great story. It takes great leadership. It takes a technical plan that is either excellent, or at least plausible with the appropriate assurances. It takes strong government support, or even the illusion of it at the right time. It takes a great media and communications plan that is unwavering in its message. It takes a great international relations plan. It takes powerful, well-crafted words and images through speeches, brochures, books and film. But most of all, it takes a team of people who trust and depend on each other, a team in which no one cares who gets the credit – or the blame. A team that is much like a family – often frustrating, never boring but always grounded in a curious sense of ‘isolated’ togetherness. It is hard to explain, but in our business we have the honour of becoming a part of this family, a part of a hopeful nation of dreamers, if only for a short while. The bid may last only a year or two, but that feeling of belonging and accomplishment never is forgotten.

Helios was very fortunate to be a part of the Russia 2018 Fifa World Cup team, and the bonds we made will last a lifetime – perhaps even long enough to see the legacy of the 2018 Fifa World Cup become a reality for Russia, and her charming and enigmatic people. Go Russia. Well done. Do well.

Terrence Burns is the president of Helios Partners LLC, the lead agency behind the successful Russian bid for the 2018 Fifa World Cup.

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“imagine travelling to Zurich to be an audience

member for a World Cup bid’s presentation to Fifa then,

just hours prior to the event, being asked to participate.”

Igor Shuvalov, first deputy prime minister of the Russian Federation, played a vital role in managing a late panic when Anna Netrebko was unable to reach Zurich

russia's world cup odyssey

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