Russian President, and de facto ruler of the United States according to late night talk show punchlines Vladimir Putin is trying to encourage his struggling national team. Heading into Saturday’s Confederations Cup opener against New Zealand in St. Petersburg, the Russian football/soccer team have won just three of their last 15 games.
Mother Russia is hosting this tournament, as well as next summer’s World Cup.
Vladimir Putin warns (a lot of what this man says in public sounds like a warning) that “fans and those who love Russian football expect better results from our national team.”
Putin also added: “We’ll hope that the guys play with full commitment, like real warriors and athletes, to at least please the fans with their effort to win.”
While the man who rules the world’s largest nation (from a land mass perspective) with an iron fist is only trying to support and pump up his national side, it still sounds a bit threatening. That’s because it’s Putin who’s saying it, a man with such a deplorable reputation for brutality that a lot of what he says sounds threatening.
Even if you don’t read a threat in between the lines of those comments, certainly you can see the blatant condescension. The dictator nicknamed “Vlad the Impaler” definitely rips into his national team in the way that he’s expressing his hopes for a positive result.
Putin is basically saying well, at least I hope you guys try hard.
Poor youth coaching and too many foreign players in the Russian league hold the team back, Putin suggests (according to the Associated Press report), but recent games show “there is potential.”
It’s worth noting that one of Putin’s closest confidants, Russian oligarch and billionaire Roman Abramovich, is the owner of London powerhouse Chelsea football club. Abramovich, by the way, is very close friends with U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner.
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