Russian President Vladimir Putin has insisted that one of the stadia scheduled to host games during the country’s staging of football’s 2018 Fifa World Cup will be ready by next year.
St Petersburg’s 69,000-capacity stadium has been hit by a host of problems since construction work got underway in 2007. Issues surrounding design and constructors’ contracts have hampered progress at the facility, which is also due to stage games during the 2017 Confederations Cup.
The Confederations Cup will take place next summer and there have been concerns over whether the St Petersburg stadium will be ready.
“It’s a very lamentable story,” Putin told Fifa president Gianni Infantino on Friday, according to the Associated Press news agency. Putin added that “the construction workers promise to fix everything by the end of this year”.
The Confederations Cup final is due to be staged in St Petersburg on July 2. The under-construction venue has also been pencilled in to stage a World Cup semi-final.
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