The game is about glory, a wise man once said. For many years it has been about money, too. Right now an updated version of Danny Blanchflower’s famous quote would point out something else: that the game is also about politics and placement, about soft power, about presenting a face to the world.
As the Champions League knockout stage kicks in, this element of Big Football is primed once again to take the main stage, the executive arm of a sport that has never looked so tangled.
Here’s an interesting circular equation. Manchester United are currently playing Paris Saint-Germain over two legs in the Champions League. Paris Saint-Germain are owned by Qatar. Qatar also sponsors Bayern Munich and Roma and has a “foundation” project with Real Madrid.
Real Madrid are sponsored by the Emirates airline of Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi owns Manchester City. Manchester City are taking on Schalke, who are sponsored by Gazprom, which is owned by Russia, which is in effect at war in Syria with Qatar, which is being blockaded by Dubai, which is a financial services partner of Manchester United, whose next opponents will be Paris Saint-Germain, who are owned by Qatar. Which is pretty much where we came in.
Confusing, isn’t it? If only there were a single figure who could stand above and wade through this confusion of interests. For example, Nasser al-Khelaifi, the newest member of Uefa’s executive committee.
Khelaifi is also chairman of BeIn sports, which pays Uefa for its Champions League TV rights. Uefa is investigating claims of financial fair play breaches by PSG. Where he is – do keep up – the club chairman.
Another circle of life, another wheel within football’s wheels. It should be pointed out this isn’t just a Gulf state thing. Uefa is also sponsored by Adidas, which owns a stake in Bayern Munich. Plus of course there is also a discrete PR mini-industry dedicated to discrediting Qatar, with the distant goal of trying to scotch the 2022 World Cup: an example of anti-sportswashing against which every drip of negative coverage should be tested.
This is nothing new in itself. Sport has been bought, sold, fluffed, preened, primped and generally co-opted by those in power ever since it first appeared as a public spectacle. Show me a morally pure professional sport; I’ll show you a professional sport that’s clearly not doing it right.
It took just four years for Fifa’s World Cup to experience its first mugging by the tyrannical classes. Italy’s 1934 tournament was fascism’s great global coming out party, designed and staged by Benito Mussolini’s chief spin doctor, Achille Starace, also credited as the inventor of the straight-arm salute.
Like it or not this has been the way of things to varying degrees ever since. Coercive interests are everywhere, from the barrage of commercial club football sponsors, to the GB-branded triumphalism of London 2012, to the wonderfully clean and orderly Russia 2018 World Cup, a masterly PR exercise for the Putin regime.
What is new is that this process that takes place in ever-more complex and invasive ways. The phrase “sportswashing” first cropped up in these pages in December last year in a quote from Amnesty International on the ownership of Manchester City
It is a useful coinage, capturing something deliberate and systemic, a macro-level manipulation of sport’s status as the great shared global spectacle. Sportswashing describes the way sport is used to launder a reputation, to gloss a human rights record, to wash a little blood away.
The phrase itself involves a value judgment. It stems from a belief in moral absolutes, the idea we can say with certainty a particular ideology or regime should not be “normalised” by close association with sport.
Some might argue otherwise. If an oil-rich state wants to buy instant access to the global leisure economy, then good luck to it. If the owner of Chelsea FC foresees the excellent reputational benefits of becoming a part of the west London celebrity furniture, then just take the cash. Let he who is without a lucrative Saudi arms deal cast the first stone.
Plus, ambitious carbon-powers aren’t the only problematic ownership model. No doubt some would also identify hedge funds as immoral, extreme speculative capitalism that produces nothing but its own wealth, which has no function beyond making the rich into the super-rich. US hedge funds have often used sport to present a softer face to the world: Liverpool and Roma are among the Champions League last 16 owned by friendly US capitalists.
It is a vantage point that tends to spin the moral compass around in circles. How can we object to Arsenal taking money from the oppressive regime of Rwanda and not object to Stan Kroenke donating $1m to the oppressive regime of Donald Trump? If it’s wrong for Manchester City to endorse the United Arab Emirates, how can it be fine to travel there on holiday, or go there to cover a cricket tour or drive in an F1 race?
And so we reach a stalemate where no objection is free from whataboutery, where no judgment holds up to scrutiny. There is a reason global sport seems so baroque and impossibly complicated: because it’s baroque and impossibly complicated.
This is the real point here. It was the reaction to Amnesty’s sportswashing talk last December, at a time when Abu Dhabi was under scrutiny for its treatment of Matthew Hedges, a British academic convicted of spying, that highlighted how impossibly contorted this process has become.
In the melee of shouted argument that followed, Manchester City became an unlikely muster point for discussions of the Emirati justice system. Some fans took to the digital airwaves to “back their man”, to rubbish concern at this incident as evidence of football-based bias.
At first it seemed absurd, a mass willingness to follow the sportswashing tide. After a while it felt more like a case of being boxed in by other, larger absurdities. What is the correct response to all this anyway?
As ever, informed judgment is the key. As Kate Allen, Amnesty International UK’s director, told the Guardian: “We’re not saying who should and shouldn’t be buying into European football, but we want all clubs to understand that their overseas owners may be using the prestige of elite football to effectively ‘rebrand’ themselves.
“Instead of actually tackling abuse, many countries with atrocious human rights records have a habit of enlisting expensive PR firms – and football ownership can be another form of PR. ‘Sportswashing’ is likely to grow as the reach of global sport also grows, but at the same time fans and the wider public are beginning to look beyond the glamour of the star players and the bulging trophy cabinets.
“We would also call on clubs – the coaches, players, and backroom staff – to use their considerable influence to press for greater recognition of human rights.”
This does happen elsewhere. In Germany fans have protested against undue influences. Bayern have been censured by their supporters for cosying up to Qatar. Schalke fans have scrutinised the relationship with Gazprom. Ownership rules are enforced (for now) to prevent the majority buyout of what are still, on some level, community clubs.
Not so in England, one-stop launderette and fawning friend to the super-rich. Here the only protest against the ownership of any of the bigger clubs is probably the early anti-Glazer movement at Manchester United, or the rumblings against Kroenke at Arsenal, both of which were essentially protests against a lack of success on the pitch.
Plus of course it would be myopic to pretend the UK is above all this. It is an English vice in particular to see only the failings of others, to address the rest of the world from a position of bogus moral superiority. In reality the UK was the sixth-biggest arms dealer in the world in 2017 , and the second-largest exporter of arms to Saudi Arabia. It’s likely British weapons have been used to violate international law in combat missions in Yemen. British arms are also sold to other countries with dubious human rights records, including Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Venezuela and China. Immigration and deportation policies under the current government have been censured. There is more than enough dirt close to home.
All of which raises another point. How well are the media doing in reporting of this? How should they police themselves? Again, what is the morally correct response? We are of course all complicit here too. If sportswashing is taking place it is newspapers and websites and TV channels that propagate it, that dutifully reproduce the images and style the narrative.
In the media’s defence – and indeed in everyone’s defence – this is an entirely new thing, a process that has crept in from the fringes, and that at times seems to be playing us all like a concert orchestra of violins.
What is required in response is a new kind of critical eye. Or at the very least wider circulation of the basic information, the forensic tools with which to make a judgment.
With this in mind, the Guardian has tried to kickstart a little debate by looking at the Champions League last 16 through this lens, laying out on the same page for the first time the tangle of owners, sponsors and interests.
To give an overview, we enlisted the help of Amnesty International. We also asked our overseas contributors for their input to those clubs in their region.
These facts on ownership, partners and practices are presented simply as information. At the end of which two things leap out. First, the level of actual English interest in the world’s top club football is negligible. Not one of the four Premier League clubs involved is majority owned by a company or individual based the UK. There are no major UK sponsors. All England is really offering here is some staging, a little colour and heritage. The actual property is all located elsewhere
Beyond this the world’s favourite sport has never looked so complex, or so fretted with political interests. It is of course a personal choice where you draw a line on these issues. But it is still worth knowing who wants what in return for their own seat in the front row.