Looking Back on the Year of Sportswashing

With the Winter Olympics in Beijing, the World Cup in Qatar and the emergence of the Saudi-backed LIV Golf, 2022 was the year of reputation laundering through sports.

As 2022 wraps up, SI staffers Jon Wertheim and Chris Almeida will discuss some of the themes of the year in sports. First up: sportswashing.

Jon Wertheim: Sportswashing to me is interesting on a few levels. This whole idea is predicated on the fact that sports have become so big that they can be used to rehabilitate a country's reputation, supposedly. And then you also have the potential backlash from sportswashing attempts. Sure, we had a well-watched World Cup in Qatar, but everyone knows a little bit more about Qatar than they used to. And all of these complaints and concerns about human rights abuses and labor abuses, they seemed to dwindle once the game started, which was predictable, but I don't know … are people dying to go vacation in Qatar now?

Chris Almeida: This is the thing that I've been thinking about all year. This really revved up right at the beginning of the year with the emergence of LIV Golf. And I think that the conversation has evolved a lot over the course of the past few months. At the beginning of the year, most people were approaching this to say: Saudi Arabia is trying to launder its reputation by hosting sporting events. Then it became O.K., maybe they’re not trying to get the world to love them immediately and instead they’re just trying to diversify their investments. And then the Zach Helfand piece in The New Yorker came out, in that there were experts quoted saying: No, actually, this is basically just an ad for their golf courses and developments. And I buy that.

It makes sense that this was just a very expensive ad to become a golf destination for the hyper rich. My understanding is that going to Dubai or Doha or King Abdullah Economic City for fun would be sort of a strange thing to do if you’re an American, but it’s not quite as unusual if you’re a very wealthy European or Asian or Australian. So for that market, maybe LIV is an effective advertisement. But as we saw in The New York Times this week, it would take a lot for LIV to become profitable. And so the amount of money it would need to bring in through the tourism side door would need to be a lot.

But as far as laundering countries’ reputations goes … it does feel like either that's not what these host nations are doing at all or that they got a little too ambitious. This World Cup isn’t the first thing that Qatar has done to normalize itself as a business partner of the West. You look at all the advertisements in the commercial breaks during the World Cup and you see multiple American colleges … Northwestern and Cornell and even Georgetown, where I went to school, and they all have campuses in Qatar. So many institutions have been doing business there for decades. And that’s mostly happened under the radar. So when I look at that, I think: Why did you have to go for the World Cup? Why did you have to do something so big that people would actually notice your human rights abuses? So that’s when I wonder if I’m just not looking at this in the right way at all. Maybe whatever Qatar wants from the World Cup is just something that I’m not understanding.

JW: It varies from country to country. Saudi Arabia has 100 times the population of Qatar. We're using this blanket term, “sportswashing,” but I think this process works differently in different places. Part of this also has to do with ego and internal pandering. If you’re Saudi Arabia and you have a young population, maybe you care if the young people who live in the country think: How cool is it that Cristiano Ronaldo might come to play here? I think for Qatar, this is much more external. I don't think this was done for the 300,000 citizens. It was done to tell the world that they were open for business. And before we go any further, we’ve really glossed over the numbers. $220 …

CA: Billion.

JW: $220 billion to build the infrastructure for this World Cup. That’s basically buying every NFL and NBA team at once. I don’t think people have really processed what an absurd amount of money that is, at least in the sports economy. And maybe 50 years down the road when the world no longer has this dependency on oil this will pay dividends. I'm just not sure that people watching the World Cup are saying yes, this is a place I would like to go on my next vacation.

CA: Also we have to talk about how this is just nearly every major event now. Right? The Winter Olympics earlier this year were in Beijing. The last men’s World Cup was in Russia. The 2014 Winter Olympics were also in Russia.

JW: Well, the Winter Olympics is kind of its own thing. It’s just falling off a cliff. The Lillehammer Games in 1994 was one of the most-watched events in television history. The last Winter Olympics was getting outdrawn by Cincinnati football. But putting the Winter Olympics aside, when you look at other events: The next Summer Olympics are in Paris. After that they’re in Los Angeles. The next World Cup is here in the U.S. and Mexico and Canada. I do think it has been the sort of pendulum swinging between emerging markets and the stalwarts. So it’s interesting to see where this is all going. For 2030, it looks like it’s between a multi-country Latin American bid and a bid by the group of Greece, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. That, obviously, is a way to leverage Saudi money with a more geographically diverse bid. Greece doesn't have the capital to host alone. I think the expected revenue from this World Cup is $7 billion. Imagine going to your boss and saying: Hey, I think we can make $7 billion here. We just need to put up $220 billion.

CA: Yeah, it's a little bit like Avatar 2 needing to make $2 billion just to break even.

JW: It's sort of interesting. We've all used the term “sportswashing.” We've all thrown around this figure. But really this, for Qatar or Saudi Arabia, it’s kind of the ultimate sports bet. Never mind your parlay with the Denver Broncos. This is as big a bet as you can make. I think sportswashing is different things to different countries. Sportswashing for Qatar with a population of Syracuse is a lot different than sportswashing for Saudi Arabia with 35 million people.