More than 5,000 football fans both from France and Belgium are expected at the St. Petersburg Arena, where their national squads are set to clash on Tuesday night in a semifinal match of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, senior diplomats from both countries said.
French Consul General in St. Petersburg Hughes de Chavagnac told journalists earlier in the day that “it would be hard to estimate the number of football fans as many of them are purchasing tickets at the very last moment.”
“I believe there will be about 3,000 (French) football fans in attendance, but this figure may be higher,” the French diplomat said.
De Chavagnac’s Belgian colleague in St. Petersburg Hans Timbremont said that “about 2,000 football fans from Belgium” may be present at the semifinal match of the world football championship in Russia’s second largest city of Saint Petersburg.
The semifinal match between the teams of France and Belgium is scheduled to kick off at the over 68,000-seat capacity St. Petersburg Arena at 9:00 p.m. local time (18:00 GMT).
In another semifinal match of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, the Croatian football squad is set to take on Team England on Wednesday, July 11, at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium. The match is scheduled to start also at 9:00 p.m. local time (18:00 GMT).
Russia is staging its first-ever FIFA World Cup, which kicked off in Moscow with a remarkable opening show at Luzhniki Stadium on the evening of June 14.
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 national football team of hosts Russia managed to make it to the quarterfinals stage of this world championship, where Croatia edged them out in a 4-2 penalty shootout on July 7 at the Fisht Arena in Sochi.
