The former Krasnodar, Dynamo Moscow and Russian national team striker, Fiódor Smolov, revealed that the situation of missing a penalty in the quarter-finals of the 2018 World Cup against Croatia made him a better person. "This situation made me better as a human being. In fact, I mistreated people at school. There were certainly a certain number of people who didn't like me from the beginning. It seems to me that this negative, the insults, are just an amplified and hypertrophied return of what I was before and what I brought to people", said Smolov in an interview with Vlad Aganov. In 2018, during the World Cup quarter-final game, Fyodor Smolov failed to convert a penalty, which resulted in the Russian team being eliminated from the fight for the World Cup trophy at home, leading the player to be the target of criticism from sports fans. Smolov later confessed that he faced depression after this defeat.