Sport and the Construction of Political Legitimacy

Bread, Circuses, and the Business of Image

In ancient Rome, a satirical poet named Juvenal coined the phrase “bread and circuses” to mock a political strategy where the masses were pacified with food and grand spectacles. Gladiatorial games and festivals were not innocent entertainment. They were tools of distraction, designed to ensure the public forgot its hunger for justice, rights, or accountability. What mattered was the appearance of stability, strength, and generosity.

Two millennia later, that strategy persists. Only now, the arenas are global. The players are oil-rich monarchies, climate-damaging corporations, and major powers staging tournaments for the world to cheer. And the term we use for it is sportswashing.

Much has been written about authoritarian states using sports to launder their reputations, but what if the very concept of sportswashing is politically loaded? What if it reflects not just ethical concern, but a deeper struggle over who gets to define legitimacy and whose exercise of power is seen as manipulative or noble?

This article traces the double standards that underpin the popular usage of sportswashing. It looks at how sport has always been used as a vehicle for soft power, and questions why some actors are applauded for their outreach while others are ridiculed or condemned. More importantly, it asks whether the term itself has become a form of narrative control, used selectively by those who claim moral superiority while practising the same tactics themselves.

Sportswashing: A Brief History of a Loaded Term

Although the word “sportswashing” only entered mainstream discourse around 2015, the practice it describes is ancient. From Athenian chariot races staged mid-war to Roman gladiatorial games that followed mass executions, sports have long been used to distract, pacify, and project dominance.

Modern sportswashing has clearer roots in 20th-century authoritarianism. Italy’s 1934 FIFA World Cup under Mussolini was a tightly controlled spectacle meant to glorify fascism. Two years later, Nazi Germany hosted the 1936 Berlin Olympics with the explicit intention of whitewashing its militarism and antisemitism. Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, described the Games as an opportunity to portray Germany as cultured and peace-loving. Anti-Jewish signage was temporarily removed. Roma and Sinti families were rounded up and placed in camps. Meanwhile, foreign newspapers reported cheerful crowds and “picturesque” hospitality. Within three years, Germany invaded Poland and launched the most devastating war in human history.

These early examples are not marginal. They are foundational. The Berlin Olympics set the pattern that many governments would later follow: distract global audiences with coordinated visual storytelling, suppress internal dissent during the event window, and use the international press as unwitting amplifiers of the state’s narrative.

The term “sportswashing” itself emerged much later. Amnesty International popularised it in 2018 while criticising the decline of human rights in Russia during its hosting of the Sochi Winter Olympics and the 2018 FIFA World Cup. The term was then applied to Qatar’s 2022 World Cup, to Saudi Arabia’s massive investments in boxing, Formula 1, and golf, and to China’s hosting of the Winter Olympics. Its usage spiked from 51 media mentions in 2018 to over 6,000 in 2023, according to media tracking by The Conversation.

Yet this explosion in usage raises a central question: Why is sportswashing applied mostly to Gulf states, China, and Russia, while similar efforts by the United States, the United Kingdom, or major corporations are labelled cultural diplomacy or soft power?

The Bias of Soft Power

Joseph Nye famously defined soft power as the ability to influence others through attraction rather than coercion. When the US funds basketball leagues in Africa or hosts Olympic Games, it is often seen as fostering cross-cultural understanding. When the UK launches the Premier League as part of trade diplomacy, it is celebrated as creative foreign policy. Even military-funded spectacles, such as the NFL’s “Salute to Service” campaigns funded with over USD 50 million from the Pentagon, are framed as patriotic outreach.

But when Saudi Arabia invests in Newcastle United, launches the LIV Golf tour, or wins a bid to host the 2034 FIFA World Cup, the word used is sportswashing.
This discrepancy is not accidental. The distinction between soft power and sportswashing is one of perspective, not substance. The West, which has long defined the terms of legitimacy in global politics, is quick to delegitimise similar strategies when deployed by rising powers. Both the UK and the US have used sport to repair reputations after controversial wars, yet receive little criticism. By contrast, when Middle Eastern nations do the same, the result is international outcry, boycotts, and moral grandstanding.

It is not that criticisms of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia or China are invalid. They are crucial. But the question is why similar scrutiny is not applied to the sponsors of the NFL, the ownership of American franchises by fossil fuel corporations, or the treatment of migrant workers in US-hosted events.
In short, the problem is not the exposure of abuses. It is the selective attention to which abuses deserve exposure, and which are politely ignored.

When Power Stops Pretending

In 2023, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was asked about accusations of sportswashing. His response was characteristically blunt: “If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by 1 percent, then we’ll continue doing sportswashing.” It was a remarkable moment, not just of defiance, but of clarity.

This was not the performance of soft power. This was power owning the strategy. There was no attempt to hide behind reformist rhetoric or global dialogue. Saudi Arabia had become, as many commentators described it, the world’s leading sportswashing machine and it no longer cared who knew.

The brazenness of this admission may have shocked Western observers, but it revealed a truth that has long been obscured: that sportswashing is not about deception alone. It is also about permission. And when institutions like FIFA or the International Olympic Committee grant mega-events to countries with known human rights abuses, it is not simply those regimes that are engaging in reputation-laundering. The bodies that award these events and the sponsors that fund them are fully complicit.

The awarding of the 2034 FIFA World Cup to Saudi Arabia is a case in point. In May 2025, a coalition of international lawyers filed a complaint arguing that FIFA had breached its own human rights rules by greenlighting the bid without any public plan to address civil liberties, women’s rights, or judicial independence in the kingdom. One of the signatories was Mark Pieth, FIFA’s former anti-corruption advisor. Yet despite these legal concerns, FIFA President Gianni Infantino called the decision “a positive step.”

This wasn’t a naive misstep. It was a calculated move that reinforced the principle that sports diplomacy is judged not by universal standards, but by global hierarchies of political and economic usefulness.

The Gold Cup and the Geography of Power

In the summer of 2025, another sportswashing controversy surfaced, not in Saudi Arabia or China, but in the United States.

Saudi Arabia had been invited to participate in the CONCACAF Gold Cup, a tournament traditionally reserved for North and Central American teams. The invitation made little competitive sense. Saudi Arabia had not even qualified for the Asian Cup. Yet it appeared in a tournament halfway around the world, wearing the badge of legitimacy.

Behind this invitation lay a complex web of sponsorship deals. Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant, had recently become CONCACAF’s official energy partner. Riyadh Air signed on as its airline sponsor. The kingdom’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) was already heavily invested in football, with ties to Atlético Madrid and the Premier League.

This was not about football. It was about influence acquisition. By embedding itself in regional sports ecosystems, Saudi Arabia was exporting its brand, not only in the symbolic sense, but through physical infrastructure, logistics, and finance. What looked like soft power on the surface was, in fact, strategic capture.

Even the U.S. Senate took notice. Senator Richard Blumenthal launched a probe into PIF’s influence operations in the United States, including its role in the controversial merger between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour. While Saudi entities resisted subpoenas, the episode revealed the limitations of Western regulatory frameworks. Foreign soft power could operate freely in domestic markets, but media narratives would still frame the Saudis as invaders rather than participants in a shared game.

When Corporations Play the Same Game

The critique of sportswashing often targets authoritarian governments. But what about corporations? If the test is whether powerful entities use sport to sanitize harmful activities, then fossil fuel companies, gambling firms, and even national militaries are deeply guilty.

According to a 2024 Guardian investigation, fossil fuel companies have spent over USD 5.6 billion on global sports sponsorships. Aramco led the list, followed by Ineos, Shell, and TotalEnergies. Their logos adorn Formula 1 cars, football jerseys, golf tournaments, and snowboarding events. Shell has been a sponsor of Ferrari in F1 since 1929. Aramco backs Aston Martin’s racing team. Ineos co-owns Manchester United.

What do these companies have in common? They are among the top global emitters of carbon. They have been accused of obstructing climate policy, funding denialist campaigns, and downplaying the health consequences of their operations. Yet their presence in sport presents them as champions of innovation, resilience, and high performance.

The parallels with tobacco advertising in the 1990s are not accidental. As climate think tanks like the New Weather Institute have argued, this is healthwashing at a planetary scale. By associating their products with elite sport, oil companies seek not only visibility, but emotional alignment with vitality and celebration.
And yet, we rarely call this sportswashing. When a monarchy invests in football, it is manipulative. When a carbon major funds Formula 1, it is just business.
This double standard reveals a deeper problem. It is not just that some forms of soft power are overlooked. It is that the very tools used to critique soft power are themselves selectively deployed a kind of epistemic sportswashing, where criticism becomes a shield for power rather than a mirror to it.

The Behavioural Economy of Belief

To understand why sportswashing works, we need to step away from geopolitics and consider how sport operates on the human psyche.

Sport is immersive. It is one of the last truly live forms of entertainment, with built-in drama, symbolism, and emotional payoff. Unlike a film or a campaign ad, a football final or a title race cannot be replayed, edited, or paused. It commands undivided attention. That attention—when directed en masse—is what makes sport one of the most valuable marketing platforms in the world.

As David O’Connor, a media executive and sports investor, put it: “Sport is the single greatest aggregation of audiences. It’s consumed live, therefore it becomes the single most valuable marketing platform in the world.”

This insight is critical. Sportswashing is not effective because it hides the truth. It works because it offers a more compelling alternative to the truth—one wrapped in the universal language of emotion, loyalty, and triumph.

When fans cheer for Lionel Messi in a Paris Saint-Germain jersey, sponsored by Qatar Airways, they are not consciously thinking about labour rights in Doha. When millions tuned in for LIV Golf, few were reflecting on the Yemeni blockade. This is not indifference. It is cognitive dissonance management. The psychological theory suggests that people resolve uncomfortable contradictions by rationalising their passions—telling themselves that sport is “just sport,” or that politics should be kept out of entertainment.

Behavioural economics offers additional tools to explain this. The halo effect—where admiration in one domain spills over into others—means that athletic excellence can shield corporate or state sponsors from scrutiny. The moral licensing effect means that small gestures of goodwill (like public donations or gender equity statements) can obscure deeper structural harm.

In short, the public is not deceived so much as it is emotionally co-opted. Sportswashing works not by lying, but by reshaping the stage on which morality itself is judged.

Resistance, Fractures, and Fan Pushback

Despite this, resistance has grown. Fans are not passive consumers. In Newcastle, some supporters formed the group NUFC Against Sportswashing, openly protesting Saudi ownership of their football club. Bayern Munich fans unfurled banners decrying their club’s relationship with Qatar. Human rights groups have launched campaigns targeting sponsors, venues, and sports federations.

But even here, the politics of protest are uneven. Fan groups in the West are often lauded as ethical watchdogs, while protests in the Global South are framed as instability or cultural discord. Activism against sportswashing is necessary—but to be effective, it must also be self-reflective. It must ask whose moral instincts are centred, whose suffering is spotlighted, and whose complicity remains invisible.

The most promising avenue for disruption is transparency. If sportswashing depends on emotional opacity, then data, disclosures, and investigative journalism can force public reappraisal. Reports tracing fossil fuel sponsorships, legal challenges to FIFA’s bid process, and Senate investigations into sovereign wealth influence are all signs that the curtain is beginning to slip.

But awareness alone is not enough. As Charles argues in his SSRN paper, most global audiences already know what sportswashing is. The challenge is not knowledge, but incentive. Until sport federations, sponsors, and consumers face reputational or financial risk, the game will go on.

Reversals and Ironies

Here is the ultimate irony: the term “sportswashing” has become so overused, so selectively applied, that it is beginning to backfire—not just for regimes, but for the media critics themselves. If every event is sportswashing, then none are. If only certain actors are called out while others escape scrutiny, then the critique begins to look like geopolitics dressed up as ethics.

Some Gulf officials have already begun to flip the term on its head. They embrace it as a symbol of strategic success. Mohammed bin Salman’s comment was not only bold; it was a kind of discursive judo—deflecting criticism by acknowledging its economic logic.

This reflects a broader shift. The age of plausible deniability is over. Power no longer pretends. It no longer asks for moral validation. It only asks to be seen, and to be recognised as legitimate through participation.

The real question now is not whether sportswashing is happening, but who gets to name it, and who gets to escape it. And more dangerously, whether the critique itself has become a tool of soft power—selectively applied to delegitimise others, while protecting those who profit from the same playbook.

Rethinking Power in the Age of the Spectacle

If sport was once a neutral terrain, an arena for pure competition, community, and shared humanity, that innocence is long gone. In today’s global economy, sport is infrastructure. It is narrative. It is capital, diplomacy, soft power, and emotional control.

And it is power. Not just the visible kind wielded by regimes or executives, but the quieter, more insidious kind that Steven Lukes would call the “third dimension” of power. This is the power to shape what is seen as legitimate, what counts as politics, and whose image is allowed to be rehabilitated.

The term “sportswashing” has become a weapon in this arena. For some, it is a way to call out hypocrisy and injustice. For others, it is a moral label applied selectively, one that obscures how deeply the Global North has used sport to manage its own crises, wars, and inequities.

What’s missing from much of the current discourse is this understanding of asymmetry. Not all regimes play on equal footing. Not all actors have the same access to forgiveness or forgetfulness. And not all critiques are born from altruism. The West, too, has used sport to launder its reputation. The United States created a Sports Diplomacy Division in 2002 to project soft power through cultural exchange. The United Kingdom used the 2012 Olympics to reposition itself after years of military intervention abroad. Even multinational corporations, from Shell to Coca-Cola, have used sports to distract from labour abuses, climate damage, and market monopolies.

The Moral Politics of Attention

So how do we make sense of sportswashing without becoming trapped in its contradictions?

One approach is to examine not just what is being said, but who is saying it and why. When Western media outlets call out sportswashing, are they truly defending human rights? Or are they defending a monopoly on image-making? When fans protest foreign ownership but ignore domestic exploitation, is that moral clarity or selective outrage?

To be clear, none of this means sportswashing is a fiction. The abuses in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, China, and elsewhere are real, documented, and worthy of scrutiny. But to engage in that scrutiny meaningfully, we must also interrogate the frameworks we use, lest they become tools of erasure themselves. A truly global conversation on sport and power must be non-hypocritical, non-exceptionalist, and historically conscious. It must ask why the suffering of some workers is more visible than others. It must look at who profits from global tournaments, who gets silenced in the name of commercial partnerships, and who benefits when ethical critique becomes performative theatre.

Whose Game Are We Playing?

In the end, the problem is not sport. Sport is joy, aspiration, and unity. The problem is how easily it can be captured and turned into a stage for denial, distraction, and domination.

Sportswashing is real, but so is narrative laundering. The task before us is not to silence critique, but to sharpen it. To ensure that it doesn’t become another commodity sold back to us in the form of clickbait headlines or selective outrage. We must look not only at the regimes that play the game, but also at the referees, the rule-makers, and the fans in the stands. We must ask who gets to own the spectacle, and who is forever seen as suspect for trying.

Because in the world of sportswashing, the real question is not who’s playing. It’s who’s allowed to win.