Corrupt Oil Money & Football (Soccer)
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Football (aka soccer) is the most popular sport in the world, and it’s not even close. There are about ~2.5 billion fans of cricket worldwide, whereas there are about ~3.5 billion to 4 billion fans of football. (There are ~2.2 billion fans of basketball and ~1 billion fans of tennis.) Across all demographics, there are people who love football. They may not be the first people we think about when we think about the fanbase, but the fan community does include billionaires and heads of state. So, if a billionaire wants a new play thing, a football club is sometimes top of the list. Similarly, if a corrupt or scandalous or simply unpopular dictator/monarch/supreme ruler wants to brighten up his or his country’s image, sportswashing is often a card on the table, and what better sport to use for sportswashing than the most popular sport in the world? The heads of Russia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have used it to “clean” their images in various ways.
Perhaps there’s something else you’ve noticed about those countries? Yes, they are all rich with oil. They all have reputations for undemocratic control and governance, and they all get a huge portion of their money and power from oil and gas. In general, many people aren’t in love with the oil & gas industry, and it’s also not that popular these days to be an undemocratic ruler. So, hey, throw a lot of money at football and become more popular, or at least more acceptable, in the eyes of the common man.
Though, there are also cases where the corruption runs too deep, or the figurative dirt is too thick, and attempts at sportswashing end up backfiring and tarnishing a country’s image. Perhaps it wasn’t at the top of my list for model nations, but I learned much more about human rights issues in the country of Qatar when the World Cup was held there.
More recently, we have the 115 charges against Manchester City, 114 of which have apparently stuck and been deemed genuine wrongdoings. It’s a scandal like no others in the Premier League or football more broadly, in part because the case and the beginning of the claims date back almost a decade. The rule braking is so vast, so deep, and so unprecedented that no one really knows what punishments will fit the crime.
One punishment that doesn’t have to be determined and delivered yet, though, is the reverse sportswashing that is now happening. Many people absolutely hate what the Manchester City ownership’s oil money has done to help dominate and now completely scramble nearly a decade of results in the league. Rather than make Abu Dhabi or the UAE look better, the effect today is that they look more corrupt and worse. Given how much they have thrown things out of whack, people are going to despise the people and the government behind Manchester City FC.
This story made me think about a much broader issue. That issue is the widespread, blatant corruption in the oil & gas industry. The people who are rich and powerful from oil and gas have gotten their wealth and power because of how centralized the resource is, how centralized the industry is, and the way in which certain people capture portions of the industry. These people often use that wealth in corrupt ways to gain and to keep political power. They become accustomed to breaking and bending rules in order to get their way. And it seems that spread into football. “We cannot be wrong, because we have money and power and can do whatever we want. We can always just hire lawyers — hundreds of them, the best of them — to win our cases no matter what we do.” This has long been the strategy and the mindset of the oil industry. Of course, this week, that tactic doesn’t seem to be working at the epicenter of the football industry, and the backlash to that arrogant corruption has been huge. The repercussions are also expected to be huge. Can we use it as a symbolic turning point, as another symbol of old paradigms of the oil industry failing and the world changing? Well, one can dream, but at the very least, it now seems that oil-funded sportswashing has gone horribly wrong.
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