Sportswashing and Global Football’s Immense Power

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its intersection with the sport on multiple levels has once again brought to the surface some uncomfortable, yet stark, truths.

Last Saturday, as Burnley staged a minute’s applause for Ukraine, Chelsea fans chanted the name of their departing Russian owner, Roman Abramovich. For the previous 10 days, the news and social media had been flooded with images of the most horrendous suffering from Ukraine, of shattered apartment blocks, bloodied bodies and trains of refugees. But that was not enough: Their own identity mattered more than offering even a minute of empathy to a stricken nation.

This is not a complicated war. There is a clear aggressor. And yet some base instinct kicked in. The owner of Chelsea, the man who has bought them two Champions League titles, five Premier League trophies, five FA Cups and three League Cups, is a Russian oligarch. Russia is fighting Ukraine. Abramovich, at that point, was being forced to sell the club because of the threat of possible sanctions. And so Chelsea fans chanted his name over the applause.

Chelsea coach Thomas Tuchel was clearly appalled. “We take the knee together; if a person from our club dies we show respect,” he said. “It’s not a moment to give other messages. We also do this because of what we are as a club. We show respect, and we need our fans to commit to this minute of applause in the moment. We do it for the people of Ukraine, and there is no second opinion about the situation. They have our thoughts and our support and we should stand together as a club.”

It happened again Thursday. As Chelsea, mere hours after the U.K. government dropped those anticipated sanctions on Abramovich that froze his British assets and significantly altered the club’s present and future, took to the pitch against Norwich City, the traveling supporters at Carrow Road again chanted Abramovich’s name. 

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But that is what sportswashing does—or rather, part of what it does. It provides the owners of clubs with a willing army of advocates who will go into battle in stadiums and on social media on their behalf. It is entirely possible, of course, for Chelsea fans both to feel grateful to Abramovich and to respect the right of others to express their sympathy with Ukraine, but what transpired last weekend was not that. To chant, in that moment, the name of a prominent Russian—one who still denies close links to Vladimir Putin and insists he bought the club purely because of his love of football—was to take sides in the information war.

And that, of course, is why those who have followed Abramovich, whatever his motivation, have bought clubs. Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi and the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia have bought Manchester City and Newcastle United, respectively, partly to gain a foothold in the U.K. but also to massage the reputations of their states. That includes taking on a section of their fans as willing propaganda foot soldiers. You might think that fans would be outraged at their clubs being used in that way, venerable institutions become weapons in a tawdry game, but if an owner can provide the funds to sign the players who might bring success, anything goes.

Of course, fans are placed in an invidious position. Newcastle fans went through long years of frustration under Mike Ashley. If they are excited by the prospect of better players and better football, by a club playing with optimism rather than simply continuing to exist in the Premier League, they can hardly be blamed. Yet in the rush to lionize fans over the past two decades, in the widespread celebration of their “faith” and “suffering,” something has become addled—not least the fact that not winning the league for a few years, even getting relegated repeatedly, is not actually suffering. It is now as though, among some fans, there is an entitlement to success, or at least excitement. And that leads some, a small but vocal minority, to attack journalists who point to human rights abuses in the states that now run clubs, who ask what their motives may be, who feel uncomfortable at the use of an English football club to deflect from atrocity; and, worse, to attack Hanan Elatr, the widow of Jamal Khashoggi, for daring to protest that the Saudi state had murdered her husband.

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It is a very strange mindset. They point out that these states invest in other companies, many of which are widely used. They point out that the British government supplies weapons to Saudi Arabia and ask why they should be held to a higher standard. They point out that a lot of the hedge funds that own clubs aren’t exactly saints. And all these things are true. But the point is that we should be protesting about them as well. Just because some things are bad doesn’t mean we should wave through all bad things.

If, as we are constantly told and as is surely true, a football club is not a normal business, if the bond between a fan and its club is sacred, why would you want to hand it over to distant owners whose record of treating people with dignity and respect is so questionable, who do not love it as you do? And who might suddenly decide to stop funding the club—or worse, be forced to stop funding it? But once the lie has been swallowed, human nature seems to be not to admit it, but to keep making excuses, to keep engaging in whataboutery, to keep attacking critics, to keep trying to justify it rather than accept the truth.

Complicating the issue is the nature of much modern media. When journalists are judged on clicks, and when the social media outcry against those perceived to have somehow stepped out of line can be so vociferous, some inevitably fall to the temptation to tell their immediate audience what they want to hear and pander to tribalism.

But as long as people are talking about the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi as the owners of football clubs—and even if we accept the fig leaf, as the Premier League has, that Newcastle is 80% owned not by the Saudi state but by its public investment fund, whose chair is the leader of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman—they are not talking about human rights abuses or the bombing of Yemen. They are creating an alternative narrative. That is sportswashing.

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Football has always been about more than playing the game. When mine owner Samuel Tyzack and shipbuilder Robert Turnbull invested in Sunderland, luring Scottish professionals south to make their club between 1892 and ’95 the best side in the world, they weren’t just doing it because they loved the game. It gave them status in their community, created the image of them giving something back to their workforce and the people who sustained that workforce.

That leads to a fundamental question: Who should be running football clubs? Is it inherently worse for owners to be more concerned with improving their own image than with making money? The ideal of a wealthy fan investing to improve the club it has always supported—like Jack Walker at Blackburn in the 1990s—is extremely rare. And even then, Blackburn faced accusations that it had bought the league in ’94-95, and problems began when Walker died and the tap was slowly turned off.

Something similar to Germany’s 50+1 rule at least gives fans a voice, although as the case of RB Leipzig shows, the spirit of that legislation is relatively easy to circumvent. And there is no guarantee that fans, given a vote, would not accept investment and de facto control from dubious sources. 

Sure, he may have done X, Y and Z, but he might buy Kylian Mbappé. 

Democracy, certainly, is no guarantee that a club will be well run, as the case of Barcelona shows; rather the example of the Spanish model suggests that electing a president tends to promote short-term populism.

And it’s not just about ownership. Political leaders have always sought to exploit football. In Argentina in the 1920s, the fact that support of the national football team was one of the few things that drew a disparate society together was openly discussed, and the way the team played became regarded as an expression of national character. Mussolini celebrated Italy’s World Cup victories in 1934 and ’38 as examples of the thrusting, muscular Italy he was creating. Juan Perón was so terrified of what might happen when Argentina lost matches that it went into isolationism, competing at neither the ’50 nor ’54 World Cups. The Russian state-doping program is just the latest iteration of that. Our athletes win because we are strong; celebrate our enduring excellence.

Since the Berlin Olympics of 1936, staging major sporting events has been a way of projecting your country onto a wider stage. That’s why Gabon and Equatorial Guinea have each both co-hosted and hosted an Africa Cup of Nations in the past decade, why China has hosted a Summer Olympics and a Winter Olympics and why Hungary has been hosting pretty much any sporting event it can in the past few years, from wrestling to judo to aquatics to stepping in as an alternative venue for major Champions League games when COVID-19 regulations made travel to certain other countries impossible.

And, of course, it’s why Russia hosted the World Cup in 2018 and why St. Petersburg was slated to host the Champions League final this year. It’s why Qatar will host the World Cup later this year and why Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia have bought football clubs. This is not necessarily about success, frustrated though Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City clearly are at their ongoing failure to win the Champions League. It’s more about belonging, about positioning Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia in the global mind not as suddenly enriched emirates and kingdoms where women’s rights and gay rights are severely restricted, where torture is commonplace and dissent routinely suppressed, but as people who, just like the rest of us, enjoy a game of football. So that it’s not, Saudi Arabia, where people are publicly beheaded, but Saudi Arabia, which spent the money to keep Newcastle in the Premier League and put on grands prix and the Anthony Joshua–Andy Ruiz Jr. fight.

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This is only football. Who cares, really, where the money came from? Just relish the players. Just enjoy the goals. Just admire the stadiums. Complacency is easy; engagement is hard. And that’s what makes sportswashing so insidious. You come home from a hard day or a boring day or a tiring day at the office or the factory or school and you just want to relax, to put the TV on and watch a game. After a grueling week, you want to go to the pub, have a couple of pints and wander along to the stadium with your mates. That’s normal, it’s natural, it’s reasonable. You don’t want to be lectured about human rights or complex financial shenanigans. You have a right to switch off.

But future generations will probably look back at the Russian World Cup of 2018 with the sort of distaste we now feel for the Olympics of 1936. I was there. I enjoyed it. The football was great. As an experience, as a spectacle, it was the best World Cup I’ve covered. I first went to Russia in 1992 and have visited fairly regularly since. I have friends there. If I thought politically at all in 2018, it was only to realize why there was so little opposition to Putin. There were vibrant restaurants and cafés. Life was obviously better for Russia’s middle classes than it probably ever had been before. But what do you do? Russians were friendly and hospitable and the narrative of the competition drags you along. Germany’s collapse, the whole Neymar psychodrama, Harry Kane scoring penalties … you write what you experience. Nobody thought Putin was about to invade Ukraine. Qatar this year will present similar challenges.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino has been widely criticized for his apparent chumminess with Putin. But what was he going to do? The executive committee, that spectacularly corrupt body (10 of 22 currently convicted of and/or serving bans for corruption, with credible accusations against four others) had voted for it in 2010, long before Infantino ascended to his current role. Going back the following year to receive a state medal perhaps was a step too far, and his current dalliance with bin Salman, almost certainly because he wants Saudi financial backing in FIFA’s ongoing power struggle with UEFA, is alarming. But why would anybody look to this buffoonish man who used to conduct the Champions League draws for moral leadership?

Catherine Belton’s book Putin’s People outlines the extent to which London is entangled in Russian money. Maybe oligarchs did just like the schools, the restaurants, the regattas at Henley. But they have also compromised swaths of the British establishment. A recent estimate places the value of Russian assets held in the U.K. at 11% of U.K. GDP; draw your own conclusions as to why the U.K. has been so slow to impose sanctions. This is not just a football problem. But it is a football problem.

Football finds itself in a bizarre position. As David Goldblatt’s book The Age of Football makes clear, it has a power and a reach far in excess of, well, anything. Football is the most popular cultural mode there has ever been, watched everywhere, from the most expensive corporate facilities at the Etihad and the Emirates (and those naming rights deals tell a story in themselves) to video halls in mountain villages in Ethiopia. And that makes it attractive to those wishing to propagate a message and susceptible to manipulation.

It crosses so many cultures and jurisdictions to be all but ungovernable. The arrests of FIFA executives in Zurich in 2014 were possible only because they’d been foolish enough to conduct their corruption in U.S. dollars and so could be targeted by the FBI. Even now, the Russian Football Union has lodged an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport against Russia’s expulsion from the World Cup. Quite what happens if it wins and a raft of countries refuse to play against Russia is anybody’s guess.

But the game has also chased money with abandon. Regulations and safeguards could have been put in place. Public demonstrations could have prevented the takeover of Premier League clubs. Just because something is difficult doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been done. Football has been complicit is allowing itself to be used.

The picture is bleak. But there is some consolation. Soft power is not an easy tool to wield. Despite spending billions of pounds, PSG and City have yet to achieve the ultimate validation of winning the Champions League. Chelsea’s plight serves as a warning of how precarious reliance on external funding can be.

And football has also been meaningful in the past decade to Ukraine. I was also in Donetsk for the Euros in 2012. I stayed in an apartment belonging to the grandmother of a friend near the Donbas Arena. It has almost certainly been destroyed; I don’t know, because my friend fled Donetsk with his family after the invasion of 2014. I was in Kyiv for the final of Euro 2012 and of the Champions League in 2018, and so were thousands of others. Before the war and the emergence of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the most famous Ukrainians were Andriy Shevchenko and Wladimir Klitschko. Anybody who has followed the Champions League knows of Dynamo and Shakhtar. Football has given Ukraine the clear global identity that Putin is trying to deny it.

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There are many reasons why the plight of Ukraine has gripped football in a way that the plight of Yemen has not, but one of them is familiarity. Major clubs do not have Yemeni players; the wider world will not notice the absence of Yemeni clubs from the Asian Champions League. Their war is no less horrific than Ukraine’s, but Ukraine occupies a part of football’s collective consciousness in a way that Yemen simply does not.

For now, football is reduced to gestures of solidarity. They are not without complexity. The scenes before Everton’s Premier League game with Manchester City, as Vitaliy Mykolenko hugged Oleksandr Zinchenko to general applause, were hugely moving. Yet in the background were advertisements for USM and MegaFon, Everton club sponsors owned by the oligarch Alisher Usmanov, who last week was sanctioned by the U.K. government, having already been sanctioned by the European Union. Man City’s players, meanwhile, were wearing tracksuits bearing branding by the UAE, which earlier in the day had refused to back a U.S. resolution against Russia at the United Nations. Such ironies and contradictions abound: Football, as much as being a tool of soft power, is a stage on which its machinations are enacted.

The gestures often feel futile. As thermobaric bombs are deployed and maternity hospitals destroyed, what does it matter if 40,000 people in Liverpool applaud? But slight as those demonstrations may be, they do matter. If those under bombardment see them or hear of them, it is at least a reminder they are not alone. Every blue and yellow flag at a game is a mark of Putin’s failure to erase Ukraine as a separate entity.

Football has a power. The problem is, it has never seemed so ill-equipped to use it.