MOSCOW, January 12 (R-Sport) – Around $34 million will be spent on training grounds for the 2018 football World Cup, Russia's Cabinet of Ministers announced Sunday.
The preparation program for the football extravaganza provides for the construction and renovation of 113 training facilities, 48 of which are listed as "pre-match training grounds" and the other 65 of which are "grounds at team base camps."
The overall cost of the 32-team World Cup is estimated at $20 billion, with most of that sum being spent on the 12 stadiums required and their immediate infrastructure in the 11 host cities.
With four and a half years to go, only two of the venues are ready, although both the Kazan Arena and Sochi Olympic Fisht Stadium are yet to stage their first official football matches. The next slated to open is Spartak Moscow's 45,000-seater arena, whose construction is set to finish in July ready for the 2014-15 season.
The other host cities are barely into the stadium design stage, including the planned rebuild of Moscow’s vast Luzhniki Stadium, which will host the first match, a semifinal and the final.
