Why We Should Stop Using the Word "Sportwashing"
"Sportwashing" has become a popular word to describe Gulf state interests in global football, but it presents some issues: journalists may be careful using it.
In the football world few expressions have had the same diffusion as “sportwashing”, during these years. The World Cups in Russia and Qatar gave it great relevance, and the 2034 tournament in Saudi Arabia will fuel his fame again. But in the academic field this term has come under increasing scrutiny for being too vague and with ethnocentric connotations. Its fortune, however, is still great in the media context: journalists use sportwashing very often because it is clearly convenient and easily understandable.
It was invented in 2015 by the activist Rebecca Vincent for the campaign Sport for Rights. Vincent was protesting against the political use of sport by the Azerbaijani regime of Ilham Aliyev during the first edition of the European Games, held in Baku. Sportwashing in Azerbaijan is well known to football fans: Aliyev's government built a 70,000-seat stadium for the Games that later hosted the 2016 European Under-17 Championship, the 2019 Europa League final, three matches of EURO 2020, and that is also the home stadium of Qarabağ, a team accused of being a tool of the regime to claim Nagorno-Karabakh.
So, what was sportwashing for Rebecca Vincent? An instrument of an authoritarian power to wash its face using a sport event, gaining a good reputation in front of the world. The fortune of this term is linked to the global changes in recent years sport business: dictatorial governments can leverage their economic power to increase their influence in sports, and thus increase their political influence too. This is the situation of Russia, Turkey, China, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, just to give some examples. Sportwashing is also an endearing and intuitive word, because it is easy to connect it with a galaxy of similar terms: greenwashing, pinkwashing, rainbow-washing. All of them clearly state the same message: the use of something (green, pro-women or pro-LGBTQ+ policies) to cover and “whitewash" a more controversial behavior. Yet there is something wrong with its use.
Sportwashing is not new
Althought this word is no more than 9-years-old, the concept behind it is much older. The 1978 World Cup in Argentina or the 1938 Olympic Games in Berlin are its ancestors, but the historian Paul Christensen, professor of ancient Greek history at Dartmouth (USA), said to Sports Illustrated that we can trace back sportwashing to the Ancient Olimpic Games. In 416 BC, Alcibiades spent a great amount of money to compete in the chariot races with seven different four-horse chariots, winning a first, a second and a fourth place. Alcibiades was an Athenian politician, and at that time Athens was losing the Peloponnesian War against Sparta: he used his money to give an image of a still prosperous and healthy Athens; “It was a straight-up geopolitical maneuver” said Christensen.
Sportwashing is also considered a new way to say soft-power, what Joseph Nye defined in 2004 “getting others to want the outcomes that you want”. But Jules Boykoff stated that this two concepts are quite different. In his foundamental analysis of sportwashing phenomenon, Boykoff explains that soft-power approach overlooks the role of domestic audience: the dynamics in the homeland are “central to understanding sportswashing and its knock-on effects”. He adds also that it “can certainly pave a path for military intervention or its intensification”, while soft-power does not depend on hard-power.
An ethnocentric perspective
A key point in stop using sportwashing is the fact that it always refers to non-Western countries: Saudi Arabia is doing sportwashing, and so Qatar, Russia, China, Azerbaijan, etc. But 2012 London Olympics made a large use of sport politics, and we saw something similar during EURO 2020 final in England. Sports was a crucial factor for the US during the Cold War as it was for the USSR; the friendship with Kylian Mbappé was used as a propaganda tool by Emmanuel Macron during the 2022 French presidential election. It is “an expression that is used with a clear political intent, that is: to blame the exploitation of sport by a country whose moral conduct is not appreciated” said Nicola Sbetti, professor of Sport and International Politics at Bologna University, on The Sport Light.
In the use of the media, the difference between soft-power and sportwashing is essentially driven by political reasons: the first concerns liberal democracies (generally the countries of the Western world), and the latter the authoritarian regimes. On one side, we have the good use of sport politics; on the other, the bad use: it is not as connected to human rights as we think. In 2022 many protested against the World Cup in Qatar, and many others are doing the same with the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia, but what about the 2026 edition in the Trump’s United States? Many match will be play in Texas stadiums of Dallas and Houston, in a state where abortion is illegal since 2022. In recent years, laws have been passed in Texas and Florida against LGBTQ+ rights, and Florida too will host some match of the World Cup in Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium. It is difficult to imagine the same protests seen in Qatar two years ago.
Sportwashing is no more about “washing”
In 2015, the term was born to describe a specific use of sports by authoritarian regimes, focused on making good impression on the outside. But now sportwashing is used in connection to new different strategies, as Boykoff pointed out: “New forms of sportswashing are in emergence, with controversial authoritarian regimes funding teams, leagues, and events in democratic states”. Stanis Elsborg wrote that this concept “simplifies and fails to encapsulate the very sophisticated and nuanced sports policies of many authoritarian regimes”.
Vladimir Putin used sporting events - like 2014 Winter Games in Sochi and 2018 football World Cup - to influence and consolidate new Russian national identity, not just to sell a good self-image to the outside. Qatar and Saudi Arabia sport strategies are part or a wider project of nation building and international diplomacy: of course they want to legitimize themself in the eyes of the global community, but there is much more at stake. With the plan Vision 2030, the Riyadh government aims to diversify its economy, promote tourism, attracting new investors, and modernizing the country, both infrastructurally and socially (in particular addressing the young generations: 63% of Saudis are under-30). Sports entertainment is a key factor in this project, and football is the most popular sport among the Saudi youth.
What can we use instead of sportwashing?
Understood that the word is controversial and simplistic, what is the best alternative? As we saw with Boykoff, soft-power is not a good substitute, because the two terms are too different and the recent evolution of the sportwashing concept complicates further their connection. Sport politics - used in this post - or sport diplomacy can be valid solutions, but it is difficult they can reach the same popularity of sportwashing, because they are more “soft”: they lack of the implicit moral condemnation of the original word. It may not be necessarily a bad thing, if we are talking about the academic discourse, but for the human rights activists and NGO sportwashing has an irreplaceable intrinsic value: it does not simply states that we are talking about a political use of sports, but that we are not ok with it.
A possible solution, then, is to keep using sportwashing but widening its reference to all the countries that exploit sports for propaganda. We have to recognize that if sportwashing really exists it is not a prerogative of autocratic regimes. This is expecially true in an age when Western values are constantly put at risk and questioned by Western countries themselves: the economic ties with dictatorships around the world, the fail in addressing the ongoing massacre in Gaza, the brutal policies against migrants in Europe and North America, the rising far-right parties that aim to restrict civil rights. That moral superiority no longer exists today, if it ever did.
We, as journalists, have to take a clear stance: if we want to keep using sportwashing we have to know all of its controversies and accept that Western democracies are often not so different from authoritarian regimes. The 2030 World Cup will put together Spain and Portugal, but also the absolute monarchy of Morocco; the 2032 European championship will be a collaboration between Italy and Erdoğan’s Turkey: a conscious sport-telling cannot be naïve on this. Otherwise, it is better to use different words.