Russian national football team to play friendly match with Turkey on June 5 in Moscow

MOSCOW, January 10. /TASS/. The Russian national football team will play a friendly football match with Turkey in Moscow on June 5, less than two weeks before the kick-off of the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, the press service of the Russian Football Union (RFU) announced on Wednesday. The Russian footballers are also scheduled to play a friendly match against the Austrian squad on May 30 in Innsbruck. The stadiums for both matches will be announced later. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Mutko said earlier that the friendly match against Turkey in early June could be played at the Dinamo stadium in Moscow, which is scheduled to be commissioned this spring. The football stadium, which is being constructed in the Russian capital within the frames of the VTB Arena Park project, will be home for the Dinamo Moscow football club and bear the name of world’s legendary goalkeeper Lev Yashin. The football facility will have an approximately 26,000-seat capacity. Russia played an away friendly game with Turkey in August 2016 and the match ended with the scoreless draw. Besides the fixtures with Austria and Turkey, the Russian team is also scheduled to play two more friendlies this year ahead of the global football championship. Team Russia will meet with Brazil at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow on March 23 and then on March 27 it will play a friendly match in St. Petersburg against France. Russia as the hosting country of the 2018 FIFA World Cup skipped the qualifying campaign for the championship and was placed in Group A alongside with national football squads from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Uruguay. After successfully hosting the FIFA Confederations Cup matches this past summer in four Russian cities, namely Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan and Sochi, the country is now in full-swing preparations to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup. The country selected 11 host cities to be the venues for the matches of the 2018 World Cup and they are Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi, Kazan, Saransk, Kaliningrad, Volgograd, Rostov-on-Don, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg and Samara. The matches of the 2018 World Cup will be held between June 14 and July 15 at 12 stadiums located in the 11 aforementioned cities across Russia. Two of the stadiums are located in the Russian capital. Read more