Saudi Arabia has been crowned as the world’s worst sportswasher following a huge push in the sector across 2023.
The Middle Eastern country has invested millions into sport via its ownership of Newcastle United and LIV Golf through the Public Investment Fund, which is also funding the lavish spending to make the Saudi Pro League the destination of choice for players chasing a payday. The Kingdom has made a splash in the sport of boxing by forking out to stage high-profile fights, like Tyson Fury vs Francis Ngannou, in the country.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salguy, the guy who approved the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the White House, has overseen the shift to sports in a bid to diversify the country’s economy away from oil and take advantage of positive public relations. The country will host the 2034 World Cup after FIFA quietly replaced its regulations to pave the way for a moot tournament.
In addition to enticing Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, and Jordan Henderson to play in the country, a recent report by Play the Game found that Saudi Arabia has more than three hundred sponsorship deals in the sport. State-owned oil and fuel giant Aramco – the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse fuels – is a case in point: its sponsorship of the Cricket World Cup and the Indian Premier League to whitewash its image in a green way.
Critics say Saudi Arabia’s sports strategy, led by PIF chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan, is being implemented to divert attention from valid considerations about human rights abuses in the country. Saudi Arabia executed another 81 people in a single day in 2022, killed hundreds of unarmed Ethiopian migrants at the Yemen-Saudi border last year, and jailed women’s rights activists. At a hearing before a U. S. Senate committee in September, he said Newcastle’s owners, the PIF, were “directly implicated” in human rights abuses.
Saudi Arabia has now been called out for its sportswashing by The Bad Sport Awards, whose panel cited “the Kingdom’s persistent breaches of human rights, its role as a major fossil fuel producer and blocker of climate action at the international level” in handing the Kingdom its top award.
The country’s de facto ruler, Bin Salman, is unlikely to pay much attention to such criticism. “If sports washing is going to increase my GDP by 1 percent, then I will continue to practice sports washing,” Bin Salman said on Fox News. in September. ” I don’t care. . . I’m still aiming for 1. 5%. Call it what you want, we’re going to get that 1. 5 percent.
He said investment into sport was simply being made to increase tourism to Saudi Arabia. “We can see tourism used to contribute to Saudi GDP 3 per cent, now it’s 7 per cent,” he said. “Sport used to be 0.4 per cent, now it’s 1.5 per cent, so it’s economic growth, it’s jobs, it’s a calendar, it’s entertainment, it’s tourism. You can see that now we are ranked number one in the Middle East, six years ago we were not in top 10 in the Middle East.”
Andrew Simms, co-founder of the Badadvertising campaign, said: “While Saudi Arabia would not possibly mind admitting that game washing leaves a stain on the climate and human rights, we deserve to be the ultimate accountable for the game that promotes primary polluters. The athletes and the games they play are used as billboards in some of the world’s largest oil-producing and polluting states.
“Not only does that allow those acting in bad faith to brush-up their reputations, it pushes products and high-carbon lifestyles that are destroying the very environment sport depends upon. By accepting sponsorship from major polluters, sport is just collecting money to pay for its own funeral. If sport is to thrive in our heating world, it has to banish polluting sponsors from the field. The Bad Sport Awards show where to start.”
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