THE term ‘sportswashing’ first emerged in media in 2015 and wasn’t commonly utilized until 2018 when the German publication, Der Spiegel reported on leaked e-mails regarding the Abu Dhabi owned English football club, Manchester City’s breach of Financial Fair Play regulations, as stipulated by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA).
At the time, a representative of Amnesty International revealed that “the UAE’s enormous investment in Manchester City is one of football’s brazen attempts to ‘sportswash’ a country’s deeply tarnished image through the glamour of the game.”
The practice’s impulse harks back to the Ludi, the so-called ‘bread and circuses’ public games of Ancient Rome whose objective was superficial distraction and control – akin to Benito Mussolini’s evocation of Roman pageantry through his propagandizing of the 1934 FIFA World Cup. As applied by Gulf states, ‘sportswashing’ is the political use of sport to normalize autocratic states, for the purpose of perpetuating their authoritarian structures sans the need for reform.
States such as Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Qatar (described by a US ambassador as a family business with a seat at the UN), became only willing to invest their Gulf sovereign wealth funds in Western economies after those such as the British government resorted to their assistance in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash – as part of economic diversification programmes towards the maintenance of their dictatorships.
Regarded as autocracies, these states are depicted as harbouring zero transparency or accountability, intolerant of criticism and of a nature Amnesty International describes as ‘systemic human rights abuses’ where, there are limited women’s rights, homosexuality is illegal, power is enforced through torture, and there’s the absence of fair trial. Observers further point out to the callous issue of a migrant labour system described as ‘modern slavery’ – upon which Gulf autocracies are built. The system was set up by British colonial authorities who adopted the Islamic tradition of Kafala to ‘guard’ the vulnerable, warping it as a cost-effective way to control labour – and which the current rulers have taken to capitalistic extremes through the systemic exploitation of workers from poor countries.
Such a ‘cycle of abuse’ includes racial discrimination – a common complaint across Gulf autocracies – which Amnesty International accused the UAE of and for which Qatar was cited in a UN report, ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
States such as the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia which had built huge sovereign wealth funds from vast income accrued from fossil fuels (oil), sought to utilize the global capitalist system to maximize such funds for their future security – identifying football as an asset through which they could attain their grandiose objective. The sport held attraction for these states since association with something so popular brought influence and legitimacy for relatively small investment!
Back in 2007, the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum had described Gulf spending on sport as a multi-billion-dollar ‘charm offensive’ – with even a document named ‘Vision 2030’ outlining huge projects (which included investment in sport, with Gulf rulers deeming investment in football as ‘gifts’ to the populations) essential to creating sustainable patterns of growth and paying particular attention to image, having been formulated.
State takeovers represent a crucial evolution in football history. According to figures who have worked in the Gulf, initial suggestions to invest in European football clubs emanated from European consultants, with Dubai International Capital’s attempt to purchase Liverpool FC in 2006-07. When some Western executives in the state airline, Emirates, felt Dubai wasn’t advertising abroad enough, the entity was soon sponsoring, et al., AC Milan, Real Madrid and Arsenal and its stadium.
It all unfolded in 2008 when the state-linked Abu Dhabi United Group of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan – the younger brother of Abu Dhabi ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan – came to own a foreign football club, viz Manchester City, for the first time in the history of the game.
It is remarkable, notes Miguel Delaney, the author of this tome, that the UK government pushed for Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund takeover of Newcastle United in October 2021 – yet in the first few years of the millennium, there had been a reluctance from the West to embrace Gulf investment.
In the opening chapter titled, How Football was Ripe for Takeover, Delaney mentions two industrialists (Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian media tycoon and ex proprietor of AC Milan football club and Florentino Perez, Spanish businessman and president of football club, Real Madrid) who shaped the game of football in the late 20th century before states and capitalist funds in the early 21st century. Archetypes of each other, Berlusconi sparked football’s evolution by lobbying for a ‘television spectacular’ which ultimately led to the formation of the UEFA Champions League in 1992-93, and Perez would emerge to lead a concerted campaign for a ‘European Super League’.
The duo’s endeavours would become a precursor of influences which would transform the game such as Western hyper-capitalism (i.e. billionaires’ purchases of major European clubs to leverage their immense financial potential), geopolitics (i.e. regional rivalry which resulted in Saudi Arabia buying Newcastle United as a direct response to the purchases of Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain) and the facilitation of all this by football’s authorities.
When Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich purchased Chelsea Football Club – allegedly at the behest of the Kremlin, which had calculated that the way to gain acceptance in British society was through the country’s beloved sport – in 2003, it shifted the sport’s geography, harbingering an unprecedented international dimension to ownership of clubs. Later sanctioned by the UK government for his link to Russian President Vladimir Putin following on the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – it has become a matter of debate within football over whether Roman Abramovich’s takeover of the English club constituted ‘sportswashing’. Not that it mattered any to the government when Russian money (27 billion Pounds Sterling spent by a series of oligarchs) flooded into the UK, since Tony Blair’s Labour administration was inviting all foreign capital!
Abramovich’s 19-year association with the club appears to had been the cue for other countries’ and the Gulf’s moneymen to make their moves, ranging from new proprietors of nine different nationalities taking over ownership of English Premier League clubs from ten English owners – to Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group’s 2008 acquisition of Manchester City, Qatar Sports Investments’ 2011 purchase of Paris Saint-Germain and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund’s 2021 takeover of Newcastle United.
Curiously, Manchester City’s takeover by a state-related entity came on the back of its previous ownership by Thaksin Shinawatra, the erstwhile prime minister of Thailand, who at the time of purchasing the club in 2007, was a fugitive from justice cited by Human Rights Watch for atrocities committed under his leadership, but had been considered a “fit and proper person” by the Premier League’s powers-that-be!
England’s Football Association remained mum on such questionable ongoing and the Premier League hierarchy became only willing to pass the buck – with its then Executive Chairman uttering a suggestion to the effect that enquiries of such a nature belonged in the purview of the UK Government, statutory authorities and the European Union. Instead, with eleven out of thirty clubs which contested the English Premier League between Abramovich’s takeover in 2003 and Mansour’s in 2008 undergoing takeovers – all the then EPL Executive Chairman, Richard Scudamore could do would be to describe the prospect of more takeovers as ‘irresistible’.
With football’s authorities consciously continuing to kowtowing to the lure of money, it was business as usual for instance, when merely months after Newcastle United’s takeover, Saudi Arabia executed 81 people in a single day!
In fact, the Kingdom’s Saudi Pro League attracts football’s megastar players such as Neymar Jr. and Cristiano Ronaldo on insane wages – with FIFA granting the country the 2034 hosting right to its quadrennial showpiece, the World Cup. Post Qatar 2022, it is a case of football following the money and in the process, empowering such states!
That and much more is contained in this eye-opening investigation into the forces shaping the world’s most popular sport!
Miguel Delaney is the chief football writer at the Independent and is one of football’s leading journalists, and has covered fourteen consecutive Champions League finals, four World Cups, and five European Championships, among others.
A trade paperback, States of Play is published by Orion and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R440.
