Jordan Henderson has been captain of Liverpool FC for eight years. He is a senior member of the England squad. He has been one of the most a vocal champion of LGBT rights within football. “I do believe when you see something that is clearly wrong and makes another human being feel excluded you should stand shoulder to shoulder with them,” he wrote two years ago in a Liverpool matchday programme about his support for gay rights.
Yet, to the dismay of many of his admirers, Henderson is on the verge of a move to Al-Ettifaq, a club in Saudi Arabia, a country in which homosexuality is banned, and in which gay men have been beheaded. His decision has no doubt been made easier by a reported weekly wage of £700,000. But it has led to condemnation from LGBT organisations and to denunciations of his “hypocrisy”.
The Henderson controversy shows how the wealth of the Gulf states, and of Saudi Arabia in particular, is reshaping the sporting landscape and raising new questions about the relationship between sport and politics. Over the past decade, Riyadh has set out consciously to use sport and culture as a means of asserting its soft power, to break out of its “pariah” status and gain recognition on the world stage. This strategy is a central part of “Vision 2030”, a grand programme set out by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) to diversify the economy away from its reliance on oil and gas, and to modernise the nation.
MBS’s liberalising social policies have won praise from western commentators, with the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman rhapsodising about Saudi Arabia’s “own Arab spring”. Taking off the MBS-crafted designer blinkers, though, what we can see in Saudi Arabia is minor social reform undergirded by continuing political despotism and the crushing of any dissent. The intolerance of criticism was exposed most gruesomely by the torture and murder in Istanbul of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a murder the CIA suggests was “approved” by MBS. And, as the almost decade-long war in Yemen reveals, Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy is as brutal as its domestic programme.
All this makes “sportswashing” a necessity for Riyadh. Sport provides a global language and, in today’s sporting world, it is a language in which money talks, and very loudly. From boxing to football to motor racing to golf, Saudi riches have allowed the nation to insinuate itself into new global arenas.
There is a long history of authoritarian states and liberal democracies using sport as a means of asserting power and shaping political debate. Saudi Arabia’s sportswashing is, however, unprecedented. Riyadh is not using a particular event, as its neighbour Qatar did with its 2022 World Cup, in an attempt to burnish its image. It is seeking to become the centre of the global sports industry, and thereby shape global sports.
What gives it licence to do so is that sport has already transformed itself into a global commodity. Take football. In 1985, a Sunday Times editorial in the wake of the Bradford City stadium tragedy described the sport as “a slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people”. A quarter of a century later, Richard Scudamore, the then CEO of the Premier League, told MPs that football was “an optimistic, upwardly mobile, aspirational business”.
When the Premier League launched in 1992, revenue in its first season was £170m; last year, it was £5.5bn. The richest club, Manchester City (owned by Sheikh Mansour, a member of the Emirati royal family), generated by itself over three times more revenue than had the whole Premier League in 1992.
While the English Premier League may be the richest, the revenues of other leagues are not shabby: Spain’s La Liga raked in €3.3bn (£2.9bn), while France’s Ligue 1, considered to be the poor cousins of the leading European leagues, had revenues of €2bn.
Football is now a sport in which the nous of the money men bedazzles as much as the skills of a Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappé. While this trend has gone furthest in football, many other sports, from golf to cricket, have followed, becoming increasingly commercialised and arranging everything from organisational structure to the sporting calendar to meet the needs of the sponsors and powerbrokers, rather than of the players and the fans.
It is a world in which, as the Saudis have recognised, the market cares little for morality. “We know they killed Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights,” the US golfer Phil Mickelson said of joining the Saudi-funded LIV tour. “They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity….”
A brutally cynical sentiment, certainly. But however much we may deplore it, it is a cynicism that originates not from Mickelson or golf or sport but from a system in which morality takes second place to commerce and realpolitik. A system in which politicians and policymakers and business leaders talk loudly about “human rights” and then quietly cuddle up to the likes of MBS when they find it more profitable.
Last year, £17.3bn worth of trade took place between the UK and Saudi Arabia. According to the Campaign Against Arms Trade, since the start of the Saudi attack on Yemen, there has been almost £27bn worth of arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Between 2015 and 2019, it was the world’s largest importer of arms, almost three-quarters of which came from the US. In 2021, Joe Biden banned the sales of offensive weapons to Riyadh but nevertheless approved the sale last year of $3bn (£2.3bn) worth of Patriot missiles.
Compared with the eagerness of London and Washington and Paris and Berlin to do business with Riyadh, and to profit from the weapons causing carnage in Yemen, the hypocrisy of Jordan Henderson or the cynicism of Phil Mickelson appear slight. I detest the way that Saudi money is buying sports and sportspeople. But they are playing a game long established. And we should not expect the Hendersons and Mickelsons of this world to carry the moral weight of opposing Saudi tyranny. As the great CLR James might have said, “What do they know of sportswashing who only of sportswashing know?”
This article was amended on 26 July 2023. An earlier version referred to a 1985 Sunday Times editorial written “in the wake of the Heysel stadium tragedy”. That should have said the Bradford City stadium fire. And the quote from the editorial has been corrected.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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