Recently, Saudi Arabia launched one of its most ambitious sporting and cultural initiatives, the World Cricket Festival (WCF) 2025. In November, the Kingdom will host WCF in Jeddah to combine cricket spectacle (double-wicket tournament) with concerts, cultural events and family entertainment. Over the next 18 months following the festival, flagship leagues will be in play, including a T10 league, TX Arabia, and the Gulf Premier League soft-ball tournament.
The investment in cricket is part of its Vision 2030, with the aim to establish Saudi Arabia as a global sporting hub. Apart from this game, football, Formula 1, boxing and tennis will be a part of ongoing efforts to pitch the Kingdom as a non-oil-dependent nation. While many nations use sports as a cultural lynchpin to boost local economies, there is another edge to endeavours made by those in the Middle East and Asia. It is dubbed as sportwashing.
On November 20, 2022, a headline in Britain’s The Independent newspaper screamed, “Sportswashing and spectacle as Qatar’s World Cup of conflicts kicks off.” The article stated, “As Lionel Messi and the Argentine squad arrived in Qatar this week, driving through a £220 billion infrastructure project built on ‘modern slavery,’ there was unmistakable excitement.” Qatar marked the first staging of the football’s signature event in the Middle East. It drew over 1.5 million visitors, and generated $6 billion in revenues.
In 2024, when the international football association announced that Saudi Arabia would host the World Cup football in 2034, human rights groups repeated the allegation, “sportswash.” The New York-based Human Rights Watch said, “This means the world’s largest sporting event will be taking place in a country where the government imprisons scores of activists and dissidents for peaceful criticism, denies women fundamental civil and human rights, and cheats migrant workers out of their pay, after treating them brutally.”
“Sportswashing became a current media topic in the run-up to and during the Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup. However, there is no consensus on what the term means, and there is limited research on the effects of sportswashing,” according to an article published by the International Journal of Advertising in September 2023. However, the paper defined it as the “deliberate attempt by an entity (nations, corporations, and individuals) to exploit a sports property to counteract negative information.”
The Australian Human Rights Institute describes the word as the “use of sport to redirect public attention away from unethical conduct. The intended effect is to improve the reputation of the offending entity, by using the immense popularity of sport to ‘wash’ away poor publicity.” According to Minky Worden, Director of Global Initiatives at Human Rights Watch, the term first appeared in the reputed The Economist magazine.
Worden describes sportswashing as the practice of taking something that people love, popular sports, and hosting these events, using them to cover up or whitewash serious human rights abuses. Despite the media-driven links with Qatar and football, the word entered the mainstream lexicon years earlier. In fact, it became a part of the Oxford Dictionary in 2018. Some activists claim that modern-day sportswashing began with the 1936 Olympic Games. Adolf Hitler used it to invite “people from around the world to see the majesty of Nazi Germany.” The Olympic torch relay went through countries, it was alleged, through where Hitler intended to roll his tanks.
Though there are several instances of sportswashing in recent times, the Gulf states were particularly targeted. Perhaps because over the past decade, several Arab states embarked on massive campaigns to host world-class sporting spectacles. From innovative cricket contests and football’s grandest tournament to high-octane motor racing and glittering equestrian showcases, they underwrote events that eclipsed traditional sports powerhouses.
Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 explicitly identifies sports as a pillar for economic transformation. The goals include raising household participation in sports from 13 to 40 per cent. It intends to attract 50 million annual visitors through sports and entertainment by the same year. Among the other targets are the objectives to develop sports cities, and host two-dozen global events every year.
Similarly, the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) economic agenda seeks a 10 per cent GDP contribution from tourism and entertainment, explicitly leveraging sports as a key driver. Dubai, where global lifestyle married sports and entertainment, will add another base layer to them, economic growth and shift away from dependence on fossil fuel. These strategic plans underscore a concerted vision and plan to substitute hydrocarbon revenues, and pitch the nation as one where global souls can live and retire in peace, style and comfort.
The Australian Human Rights Institute points out, “This is not to say that only China and the Gulf States have drawn condemnation for engaging in sportswashing. Russia hosting the 2018 FIFA World Cup and Hungary hosting a Grand Prix and Euro 2020 football matches represent European examples.” The same can be said of the smaller examples in Africa and Latin America.
Players too have become complicit, either implicitly or explicitly. The renowned footballer, Cristiano Ronaldo, signed a lucrative contract to represent Saudi Arabia’s Al-Nassr in 2023. This caught world attention. The lure of big bucks attracted other top-ranked footballers, who willingly made Saudi Arabia desirable destinations. There is a view that though there may not be any legal obligations for athletes to decide on such issues, they may have a larger social and moral responsibility to speak out on human rights issues.