Sportswashing secrets: Golf, FIFA and the Saudis
The LIV golf tour was considered highly controversial by many golfers, even though several big names took deals to play on the tour. Photo: Paul Childs/Action Images/Reuters.
Sportswashing, it’s a phenomenon wherein sport is used to improve an owner or government’s reputation. But it’s way more complicated than that – and far more relevant than you might think.
Occurrences go back many decades, to the 1936 Olympics, an innumerable amount of rugby union tours and a 1973 boxing match in apartheid South Africa; the most famous example, as of late, involves Saudi Arabia.
The Crown Prince, and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia is Mohammed bin Salman, he has a complex reputation. To focus on his women’s rights record specifically, his government removed the ban on female drivers in Saudi Arabia, but also arrested and tortured feminists advocating for the freedom to drive. The Prince has also been accused of domestic abuse himself.
He recently attempted to sponsor the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
It didn’t make any sense, to anyone, and the widespread controversy led the contract to be dropped. FIFA President Gianni Infantino, a friend of Mohammed bin Salman, said that there, “wouldn’t be anything bad in having sponsorships from Saudi Arabia,” dismissing the situation as a “storm in a teacup”.
Women and girls were banned from sports stadiums, as players and as spectators, until just five years ago. Many players competing at the FIFA World Cup are queer women. In Saudi Arabia, same-sex sexual activity is punishable by life imprisonment and flogging. So why was the Saudi government even interested in funding women’s sport?
Steve Jackson is a Professor and Associate Dean (Research) at the University of Otago, working within the School of Physical Education, Sport and Exercise Sciences. Much of his work focuses on the globalisation of sport, and the relationship between sport and national identity.
Steve says that sportswashing can be considered on, “a continuum from minor to extreme,” and acts as a way for nation-states to, “improve their international image […] and to mask or erase the negative things associated with how they’re viewed by the rest of the world…things like human rights and political violations.”
Petroleum was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938, now they’re the world’s largest oil exporter. Along with crude oil, Saudi Arabia are closely associated with an abysmal record for women’s rights, forced repatriation, allegations of torture, human trafficking, mass executions, violent discrimination against LGBTQ+ people and refusal to treat patients with HIV/AIDS.
In 2021, Saudi Arabia’s image-conscious Public Investment Fund (PIF) proposed a deal to purchase British football team Newcastle United. There was an enormously negative response calling on the Premier League to block the deal. The purchase was completed that October, after the Crown Prince allegedly threatened then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson with financial punishment for the UK if he didn’t intervene to offer his support.
Clearly, Saudi Arabia wanted to buy this team, very, very badly. Perhaps Mohammed bin Salman was just a big fan who happened to have an enormous amount of power and money. Probably not.
Saudi Arabia recently tried to sponsor the FIFA Women’s world cup, despite the countries opposition to homosexuality and womens rights. Photo: ITVX.
The most shocking and electrifying sportswashing story of recent months comes from the world of golf. The ninety-four-year-old PGA Tour has recently developed a complicated rivalry with the young-and-hungry organisation LIV Golf, founded in 2021 and backed by the Saudi PIF.
While the PGA can’t offer all their players sparkling piles of money, LIV are different. LIV have reportedly offered contracts in the hundreds of millions, while the top PGA earner only receives $4.5 million USD. Turning down an offer of that magnitude requires a lot of willpower.
But some PGA players indeed rejected the big bucks from LIV, such as golf superstars Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods. McIlroy was reportedly offered $500 million USD, with Woods offered more than $700 million, a lot of the big boys weren’t biting.
Some were, American golfer Phil Mickelson controversially signed with LIV. Journalist Alan Shipnuck then released statements from Mickelson where he acknowledged Saudi Arabia’s appalling human rights record. Mickelson even referred to Saudi Arabians as “scary motherfuckers”, regarding the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Nonetheless, Mickelson signed with the company, ignoring all the massive, un-ignorable ethical nightmares. He said that he did so because of an opportunity to rework the PGA Tour. After a few weeks of silence, he stated that, “the player experience here is incredible,” I’m sure it was.
Then some Game of Thrones shit went down. In June, the PGA announced that they had agreed to a merger with LIV, meaning all PGA and LIV players were now funded by Saudi Arabia. ESPN called it, “the most unlikely union in professional golf history,” somehow that’s an understatement.
Even more baffling, the deal was negotiated by Jimmy Dunne, PGA board member and a founder of an investment bank previously located in the World Trade Center. He was hailed as an American hero for his life-saving actions during the 9/11 attacks in 2001, becoming known as the “man with the red bandana”.
He’s been asked many times for his thoughts regarding Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks. His response, “I am quite certain, and I have had conversations with a lot of very knowledgeable people, that the people I’m dealing with had nothing to do with it… and if someone can find someone that unequivocally was involved with it, I’ll kill them myself.”
Some truly insane words for a fittingly insane situation. What is most shocking is the continual acknowledgement from power players that human rights calamities are rife in Saudi Arabia; followed by between-the-lines acknowledgements that people with power like to attain even more of it.
Those who had turned down hundreds of millions from LIV in favour of remaining with the PGA, only for their organisation to get Saudi funding anyway, were rightfully pissed off. McIlroy said he felt like a “sacrificial lamb”, adding this haunting statement, “whether you like it or not, the PIF are going to keep spending money in golf… would you rather have them as a partner or an enemy?”
Steve says that ‘sportswashing’ often overlaps with ‘greenwashing’. Greenwashing is a similar concept wherein the environmental impact of a product or operation is covered up or falsely presented. “We can see it with INEOS, for example – which is rebranded from British Petroleum – a chemical company.”
We know ‘petroleum’, boo, bad news. INEOS is spacey and unusual, it sounds a bit like ‘Theranos’, weird start-up vibes, but it doesn’t sound like an enormous fossil fuel succubus eating away at the natural world. However it indeed is. INEOS are major investors in various sports, from rugby to Formula One. Steve says, “they’re definitely greenwashing and sportswashing at the same time.”
Sport couldn’t be a better candidate for an image revival. Sport is so global and massively popular, that it breaks language barriers. There’s plenty of it; if football doesn’t work, try golf, or rugby, or ice skating. It’s competitive, often stereotypically masculine, and unlikely to be automated soon and it’s based in a never-ending circular battle that easily keeps players, coaches and owners in a temporarily high-stakes, permanently low-stakes news cycle.
“We have these events where nations who might have different kinds of political or geopolitical conflicts will participate together. So, it’s back to the sort of ancient, Greek and Roman days of setting aside warfare for a certain period while you can collaborate and play sport,” Steve says.
Stripped to its most basic definition, sport is a game. Steve adds that sport is an industry which “many would consider trivial.” For some people and nations known for some fucked-up shit, ‘trivial’ is incredibly desirable.
Pretty much any sports team owner, whether an individual or a business or a country, is attempting a kind of image improvement. Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney own Wrexham FC; their documentary series Welcome to Wrexham is sweet, funny and satisfying, it’s good PR.
Those reasons for nation-states to choose sport still apply for Reynolds and McElhenney, who benefit from the trivial competition of televised celebrity team ownership. But as far as I know, neither Reynolds nor McElhenney have threatened any world leaders or violated the Geneva Convention, fingers crossed.
And that’s where the Saudi purchases differ. The PGA-LIV merger, the attempted sponsorship of the FIFA Women’s World Cup and the purchase of Newcastle United are ‘just sports’, yes, but they are massively influential on the geopolitical reputation of Saudi Arabia.
Sportswashing is terribly effective in another insidious way: the coverage of Saudi team ownership, rejections, acceptances and threats within sport, dominate exposure of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia itself.
We acknowledge that Saudi Arabia is using sport to occlude some true horrors, but they’re using it so effectively that we don’t know what many of those horrors are. Maybe we never will.
Steve says that sportswashing can show us more than we might think, “we’re talking about very, very serious geopolitical things that are beyond sport, that are beyond golf.”
“You have the Saudis signing deals now with Russia and China… there’s a major global struggle for power going on.”
“Parts of the West are so dependent on Saudi oil and Chinese trade that it’s coming for a reckoning, I would suggest.”
