The limits of sportswashing
The World Cup hasn't been the roaring success Qatar paid for. That failure is highlighting the limitations of sportswashing
In The Mallard’s May edition, I argued against the decision to exclude Russian and Belarusian players from playing in Wimbledon for fear of being used as a vehicle for sportswashing. That was wrong, I wrote, for two reasons;
First is that the AEC are burdening individuals with the sins of their nation, working under the premise that a win for a Russian is a win for Russia...But tennis players compete as individuals. They are backed by the state in the sense that I, as a citizen of the UK is backed by the state, but little more; especially in the case of Russia, where the tennis programme is so notoriously bad many promising players consider switching allegiances to Kazakstan in order to avoid it (including Daniil Medvedev).
The second reason was about an imbalance of outrage;
The second problem with the AEC decision is that every country that isn’t banned is implicitly condoned. In the case of Peng Shuai, and Li Na before her, for instance, the tennis world showed itself more than able to judge the separation of player and state.
Li Na became the first Chinese - indeed, Asian - Grand Slam singles champion when she won the 2011 French Open. That same year, the Chinese Government had it’s biggest crackdown on dissidents since the Tiananmen Square protests, arresting 54. Peng Shuai won her second WTA title in 2017, the same year that Chinese persecution of the Uyghurs was exponentially increased. They weren’t held responsible for these actions, largely because we knew they weren’t responsible.
Tennis isn’t very susceptible to sports washing; football, on the other hand, very much is. Firstly because football dominates the national and international sporting conversation. The sports washing projects middle eastern governments have targeted it because hosting a World Cup and buying two Premier League teams, as well as PSG, is far more high-profile than say, hosting a mid-rate ATP tournament.
But it’s also because football is far easier to buy into than other sports. Football is so popular amongst regimes because, although money doesn’t guarantee success, it is easier to stay up when you can throw £100m at a leaky back line. You can’t spend your way back from 6-2, 6-1. The fact that FIFA has held two successive World Cups in petrostates shows it’s perhaps the most biddable international organisation. Or perhaps, just the most corrupt.
The individual nature of tennis also means that you can’t buy fans - unlike in other sports. Football fans are so loyal to their clubs that buying a football club also buys goodwill. The takeover of Newcastle United, for instance, is a particularly brilliant bit of PR; not only will the ownership issue distract from discussions around actual Saudi abuses, but next time the regime murderers a dissident journalist there will likely be an army of Newcastle fans to defend them on the perfectly reasonable grounds they’ve bought a new Chilean striker for £30m and he’s banging in goals. Indeed, a survey collated in April 2020 by the Newcastle United Supporters' Trust found 96.7 per cent were in favour of the takeover. Qatari authorities were no doubt hoping for similar levels of approval from western visitors.
But the World Cup is now also showing the limits of sportswashing. Qatar’s bid was made on a bet; that the scrutiny the nation would come under would be outweighed by the positive perception the tournament would garner.
There was a solid footing to that bet. As Argyro Manoli, Associate Professor in Sports Marketing and Communications at Loughborough University, has written in The Conversation;
Our recent study, which looked at sports fans and the relationship they have with a team, suggests that allegations of being involved with sportswashing (or any other questionable behaviour from the team) do not really matter.
This is because fans who enjoy a strong connection with a team (and with their fellow fans) will usually choose to avoid criticising the team they support. It is a way of protecting the strong sense of identification that comes from being a loyal member of a fan base.
Qatari authorities were also, no doubt, highly encouraged by Russia's success in hosing the 2018 World Cup. Making the effort as good hosts, the country had largely positive press coverage and approval rates of nearly 75%.
Qatar has been unable to generate such levels of goodwill so far, with the spotlight unmoving from the repression of women and LGBTQ people and the punishing exploitation of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers. Although it will only be possible to tell the full extent of the damage until after the final game has been played, it has not been the roaring success the Qataris paid for.
It’s always a sign a campaign is failing when it pivots midway through. The Qatari messaging campaign has now pivoted to a more aggressive stance, framing criticism from the West as ‘a clash of civilizations.’
Qatar’s ruler, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, has alleged the host nation has been subject to an ‘unprecedented campaign that no host country has ever faced.’ Al Thani went on to say the criticism from European liberal democracies ‘sounds very arrogant, frankly, and very racist’.
Al-Thani's first comment is entirely true; Qatar has faced significantly more criticism than previous host nations, even Russia. As I’ve written before, sportswashing has always been a risky practice as ‘condemnation and outrage is not metered out equally’. But Qatar’s failure is about much more than an outrage imbalance. It’s failures are highlighting the limitations of sportswashing.
First is that no host country has ever had such a poor claim to become the host of football’s world tournament. What football history, culture or infrastructure existed in Qatar before the World Cup? Russia’s hosting of the World Cup worked as sportswashing because football is Russia’s principle sport. They have a competitive domestic league and teams like Zenit St Petersburg or one of the Moscow teams (CSKA, Lokmotiv or Spartak) regularly play in European competitions. They may not be a football powerhouse but there was extant history, culture and infrastructure before the World Cup arrived. People could see the World Cup being played in Russia regardless of the petrodollars it spent making sure. The project was believable; Qatar’s hosting, meanwhile, never passed the smell test. Sportswashing projects need a firm, believable base; you need to make a legitimate argument around expanding the [insert sport] culture or turning a profit in order to be successful.
Second is that public awareness around sportswashing is a lot higher than it used to be, particularly in football. 2022 may be sportswashing’s watershed year but after huge headlines around the Saudi takeover of Newcastle, the set up of a new golf circuit and the Beijing Winter Olympics (to name only the major events) there’s no guarantee it’ll be the practice’s most successful year. Russia didn’t come in for this kind of criticism because it hosted the World Cup four years ago. Sportswashing has been used by distasteful regimes since Musolini and Hitler in the 1930s, arguably even Ancient Greece. But the way it is used by petrostates is less sophisticated; it relies heavily on money doing enough talking. After being exposed to it for so long, people are more aware now of what the practice is, why it’s done and how to spot it.
Third is that the Qataris haven’t played their hand well. By insisting on a beer ban at an event famously synonymous with alcohol consumption they’ve shown fans who travelled to the middle east disdainful inflexibility rather than welcoming hospitality. Gianni Infantino’s utterly bizarre opening defence was the result of a man desperately trying to clear a fog of cognitive dissonance that must cloud his view like the thickest Chongqing pea-souper. If he weren’t so well known, he could conceivably be a Sacha Baron Cohen creation. Meanwhile the bought-and-paid for shilling has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous, with John Barnes now defending Qatar by saying Britain isn’t fit to host a major tournament on ethical grounds, either (Barnes’ massive pay packet from FIFA, presumably, had nothing to do with such an enlightened moral decision).
As a practice sportswashing has quickly found itself in a vicious cycle; the most public awareness increases, the less effective it becomes. The less effective it becomes, the bigger the projects have to become. The bigger the projects become, the more public awareness increases. This World Cup shouldn’t be in Qatar. The more people see it, the more people will realise it. Hopefully, enough will realise it that nothing this grubby and sordid will happen again.