The term is thrown around regularly these days but what is it? A type of money laundering?
In: Economics
It is a term coined for the process by which companies and organisations try to gain goodwill through associations with athletics.
This can take many forms from simply sponsoring your local town soccer club so the name of your used car dealership appears on their shirts to buying an entire league.
Governments rewarding athletes to compete at the Olympics and even pushing them to use doping.
Large corporations putting their name on stadiums to appear legitimate are a thing.
In the US the military has over the past few decades pushed hard to gain goodwill at sporting events. This is how you get overflights and other extreme demonstrations that conflate patriotism, military worship and nationalism in the minds of fans.
However all that aside, the thing most people think of when they talk about sportswashing is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has large amounts of money from selling oil in dollars and a bad reputation when it comes to things like human rights, women’s rights, religious fundamentalism, slavery, support of terrorism, bombing school busses full of children and bonesawing US journalists to death in their embassies.
This is a problem for the current crown prince’s goal of turning his country into something that can survive the end of an oil export based economy. He needs foreigners to buy into his plans and that is hard when people associate you with a brutal dictatorship akin to North Korea.
Sports is how they want to solve the problem.
They buy Golf, and get the WWE to wrestle in their country for big events and buy out e-sports leagues. They get big events and small events and tournaments to come to them.
The hope is that if they do it enough people will transfer some of the good feelings they have for athletes and sports to them and that if they do it enough the first thing that will come to mind when people hear about Saudi Arabia will not be tales of journalists getting sawed up or when having no rights or the Bin Laden family or the hundreds of thousands civillians who died in Yemen or the fact that it is a dictatorship, but instead that it is the place associated with that sport event you liked.
A country sponsors big sporting events for the prestige, and hopes the prestige and money of holding such events makes people overlook their terrible history of human rights.
They can’t be bad! They’re hosting the World Cup! They definitely don’t have a history of slaves and genocide. If they did, the World Cup wouldn’t agree to be held there!
It doesn’t have anything to do with money laundering, no.
Countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, China are usually associated with negative thoughts internationally.
Let’s take Qatar as an example. Most people don’t even know anything about Qatar, not even where it is. But there‘s a lot of negative news, like slave labour political tensions, suppressions of women and LGBTQ etc. But they bought the Football World Championship, so many people‘s first association with Qatar is „oh yeah, the worldchampionship was there, and I cheered for my team“. So the first association is positive.
That’s sportswashing.
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