Almost all Russian clubs are working to expand the audience of football matches. Some come up with all sorts of entertainment, like hosting competitions with prizes and performances by popular bands, in an attempt to please today’s sports fans. Others also think about tomorrow and work for the future. Dynamo’s amusing action, designed for the younger generation, made it possible to lure thousands of young fans to the stands. The children’s full house helped to almost completely fill the arena – many were not allowed to go unattended.

Parents now also know the paper.

Idol and favorite game

The final match of the autumn part of the season of the Russian championship, in which Dynamo beat CSKA with a score of 2: 1, gathered a good audience in the stands. According to official figures, 25,048 people attended the game. Almost a fifth of the total number of fans were children. This inspires restrained optimism about the future of our football – if the game is interesting to the younger generation today, then tomorrow this interest should not go anywhere.

Unbridled optimism, however, is not entirely appropriate here. There is a suspicion that not all several thousand children are sincerely fans of Igor Akinfeev, Fedor Smolov or Arsen Zakharyan. Some of them went to the stands largely because they were attracted by the opportunity to take a joint photo with an idol and get his autograph. And this idol turned out to be not a football player at all, but Paper.

Photo: © FC Dynamo

Vlad Bumaga, aka Vlad A4, is a well-known Belarusian blogger whose popularity amounts to tens of millions of subscribers on social networks. At 26, he is extremely in demand among the children’s audience, which means that Dynamo’s bold action was doomed to success. Parents were far from ready to send all the children to football without supervision, and therefore they also went to the stadium, contributing to the creation of a festive atmosphere in the stands.

By the way, Vlad not only sings and records humorous videos, but also has something to do with sports. Until the age of 16, he was a Dynamo forward. True, not football, but hockey, and besides, Minsk, not Moscow. But all these are already nuances – at a meeting with fans, he was dressed in the uniform of the very Dynamo that most sports fans supported at the VTB Arena.

By the way, the Dynamo team, working for the future, do not forget both the past and the present. Before the start of the meeting, the Olympic champion of Seoul-1988 Viktor Losev and the vice-champion of Pyeongchang-2018 Evgenia Medvedev were invited to strike the ball. And, of course, you should not write off full stands exclusively for status guests. All the same, most of the fans did not come for Paper or yesterday’s idols, but for their favorite game.

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