This paper investigates the preparations for the 2018 Men’s Football World Cup in Russia through the lens of neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism. Unlike many other mega-events, this World Cup was orchestrated by the central state, though using neoliberal rhetoric to legitimize a wide-ranging urban development program aimed at modernizing peripheral host cities. Grounded in an exploration of urban development in the host city of Volgograd, this paper demonstrates that the intersection of state-led development impulses, neoliberal rhetoric, and local needs resulted in a mega-event that emphasized a narrow form of development over more substantial interventions that could have benefited the host population more efficiently. To make sense of these developments, the paper proposes the concept of Potemkin Neoliberalism, exploring the various dimensions of superficiality inherent in this state-led mega-event.