If ‘Sportswashing’ Criticism is Going to Fly, It Needs a Retool.
Criticism of Saudi Arabian sportswashing has resurfaced amidst the merger between the PGA Tour and LIV Tour. Graphic courtesy of Finshots
Every June, the golf news cycle centers around the second major tournament of the year: the U.S. Open. This year, however, the sport experienced a consequential, unexpected change. On June 6, the PGA Tour — the primary professional golf tour provider in North America — and the Saudi Arabian breakaway tour, LIV Golf, shocked sports media, fans, and players alike when they announced their merger. That same day, Real Madrid legend Karim Benzema officially signed with Al-Ittihad, a Saudi soccer team. This news came just over two weeks after Saudi-backed Newcastle United F.C. secured a top four English Premier League finish and a spot in next year’s Champions League for the first time in 20 years.
Saudi Arabia has increasingly shown its willingness to invest in sports worldwide. And American sports media outlets, public officials, and fans are outraged. Scores of headlines brazenly accuse Saudi Arabia’s government of “sportswashing” — the use of sports events, teams, and players to cleanse a country’s global image. Harsher criticism calls out athletes for accepting “blood money.” Even LIV Golf member Phil Mickelson called the Saudi Arabians “scary m*****f*****s” in a since recanted admission.
The LIV Tour debuted in 2022 with its fair share of controversy. They successfully lured some of the big names in men’s professional golf — to name a few: Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, and Phil Mickelson — to the tour. The golfers stood to earn a significant pay raise from their earnings with the PGA. At the time, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan lambasted the breakaway tour, charging the Saudis with trying to “buy the sport.” Monahan also asked players, “have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?” But after a few months of clandestine meetings with former national oil company chairman and LIV Golf financier Ysair al-Rumayyan this year, Monahan said, “circumstances do change.”
On June 6, PGA and LIV leadership announced they, along with DP Global, intend to merge to create a global golf giant in what sports media members have since dubbed ‘sports-washing.’ Graphic courtesy of USA Today. Source for image: USA Today
Put literally, sportswashing is an investment. The funds that enable Saudi Arabia to engage in these sports investments is their sovereign wealth fund: the Public Investment Fund (PIF). Along with al-Rumayyan, the fund’s governor, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, chairman of the fund’s board, are responsible for the $650 billion fund. The sports investments are a part of Vision 2030, a Saudi Arabian economic growth plan to move away from the economy’s reliance on petroleum. The PIF backing sports teams, and now a golf tour monolith, is not the fund’s only investment. Its highly diversified portfolio includes shares of Uber, Blackstone, Facebook, Live Nation Entertainment, and Softbank.
The litany of criticisms surrounding Saudi Arabia centers on the country’s abysmal record on women’s and migrant’s rights, forced evictions, and freedom of expression. Indeed, U.S. intelligence found that bin Salman approved the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. A PGA Tour board member resigned over “serious concerns” with the deal, citing Khashoggi’s death. The country has a history, continuing in the present, of using the death penalty as a tool to impose control, executing 196 people last year. Additionally, the organization 9/11 Families United expressed opposition to the merger, though the Congress’ 9/11 Commission found no evidence the Saudi government materially funded al Qaeda, the group that carried out the terrorist attack.
Looking at the PIF’s sports financing through the lens of Saudi Arabia’s human rights history, it now seems that the investment of capital into sports is not only an investment for the sake of financial return. It is an investment in cleansing the country’s poor global image. Even though Saudi Arabia is facing a round of bad press, Washington Post columnist Candace Buckner says, “a deep cleansing of sins takes time.” Sportswashing is a long position in the reputation market.
Yet, the recent barrage of sportswashing criticism evokes familiar Western-centric bias by singling out Middle Eastern human rights atrocities, glossing over the human rights violations that America, Europe, and the global West have sponsored. There is a double standard for which atrocities are worth outspokenly denouncing and which are not. If us Americans are going to continue to condemn sportswashing, we ought to hold the West to the same level of scrutiny as the Middle East.
Unabashedly, journalists and politicians condemn Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights whenever the country takes on a new sports investment. Pacific University sports and government professor Jules Boykoff said sportswashing criticism is often “only applied in the authoritarian context” – that sportswashing occurs even in ostensibly democratic countries.
Saudi Arabia neither invented sportswashing nor are they the only perpetrators. In 1936, Germany, under the control of the Nazi regime, hosted the Olympics. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda under Adolf Hitler, temporarily took down the anti-Jewish signage around Berlin, using sport to create a sanitized image of the country. Heads of state, instead of using this moment in sports to hold Germany accountable, bought into its laundered image and saluted Hitler.
Sportswashing, as a term, was coined in 2015 — a portmanteau of “sports” and “whitewashing” — in response to Azerbaijan hosting the European Games amidst its own troubling human rights record. Azerbaijan’s government had been detaining political prisoners for protesting and arresting LGBTQ+ people.
There is a growing trend of environmental accountability towards companies trying to “greenwash” their reputation, laundering their image to seem more environmentally friendly. For instance, greenwashing criticism recently surfaced around BP, the oil company, financially backing the British Museum. Greenwashing and sportswashing can even coincide. Last year, British Cycling and Shell struck a sponsorship deal which left cycling commentators saying the organization was “shaking hands with the devil.” In 2012, London hosted the Olympics. Dutch sports philosophy professor Alfred Archer emphasized this was “a plausible case of sportswashing” after England’s involvement in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars caused its international reputation to decline. All of these instances occurred in England and received considerably less coverage in the U.S.
In 2022, China hosted the Winter Olympics. Concerns over its track record with Taiwan, the Uighurs, and tennis star Peng Shuai’s disappearance erupted, and accusations of sportswashing abounded. The same year, Qatar hosted the World Cup. While Qatar was the first Muslim country to host soccer’s biggest event, its abuse of Nepalese migrant workers in the construction of the stadium came under the microscope. Along with Saudi Arabia, these two countries have been labeled as sportswashers.
Much more overt anti-Muslim bias in the Western media came into full display during the World Cup, with BBC refusing to air the opening ceremony and opting to replace it with a segment on Qatar’s human rights record. They aired the Chinese opening ceremony. A French magazine portrayed the Qatari soccer team as terrorists in a cartoon. In a meta-analysis of British media, 66% of articles about Qatar were negative coverage. A similar trend appears in America. The Western media criticized Qatar migrant workers’ treatment, but remained silent on Western companies, such as Nike and Coca Cola, who achieve their exorbitant profits on the backs of similar working conditions. Once the games began, human rights coverage slowed down, eventually dying out. The temporary hyperfixation on one Middle Eastern country’s abuses, while ignoring Western human rights concerns, shows the problem with the pillorying against sportswashing. It has the stench of imperialism with notes of window dressing.
As MSNBC journalist Ahman Mohyeldin puts it, “what has played out over the past several years and intensified in the final few months before the World Cup’s Sunday premiere, reveals the depths of Western prejudice, performative moral outrage and, perhaps most significantly, gross double standards.” The coverage and policy surrounding the LIV-PGA merger is no different.
Targeting only Middle Eastern countries for their transgressions resembles the same postcolonial sentiment that inspired 52% of Americans to say that Western societies do not respect Muslim countries. Islamophobia has run rampant in the United States since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In a survey, 48% of Muslim Americans reported experiencing religious discrimination, a larger proportion than any other religious group. This sentiment culminated in 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order, pejoratively styled as the “Muslim Ban,” that prohibited people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from visiting the U.S. for ninety days. With added context of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States, the double standard in sportswashing coverage is unsurprising.
The PGA-LIV merger is currently under Senate and Department of Justice investigations for potential antitrust law violations. Based on the considerable anti-Arab biases present in America, the probes are likely to be mired with underlying bias as well.
Sports are a powerful target for authoritarian regimes and polluting companies because of their popularity. In the age of accountability, it is important to keep holding sports to a high standard. After all, sports can have a tremendous positive impact on the world. On an individual level, participating in team sports helps teens gain empathy and build relationships. Around the world, the nonprofit PeacePlayers seeks to bridge children from warring countries together through basketball. Thus, sports are still a valuable part of society, even if they can be tainted by political subversion.
Recognizing where sports are flawed is a crucial part of morally reckoning with the institutions around us. But if we want to keep talking about sportswashing and not merely be performative, it would be far more accurate to represent it as a global phenomenon, and not merely a Saudi, Chinese, or Qatari one. So, keep calling out sportswashing, but be mindful of stereotypes and hypocrisy when you do. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”When we zero in on Saudi Arabia’s sports investments, we buy into stereotypes of the Middle East and lose sight of the bigger picture: sportswashing is harmful wherever it occurs.