Sportswashing. If cash-strapped culture can cut sponsorship ties, why does sport find it so hard to do the right thing?

Let’s talk about sportswashing. Like any kind of ‘washing’ it conceals something bad under the veneer of something good – and it used to be a regular thing in the cultural sector.

We say used to because organisations like the British Museum, Tate, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Shakespeare Company, Hay Festival, Royal Opera House, and the Science Museum have all cut ties with sponsors due to links with fossil fuels, arms and opioids. And this turning-down of millions of pounds’ worth of income will hurt: these are organisations dealing with decades’ worth of deep funding cuts, declining income and steeply rising costs.?

Yet over in the sports sector, doing the right thing appears much harder.

Let’s face it, sportswashing is highly attractive and highly lucrative; as former rugby international player Pierre Rabadan said of the Paris Olympics, “it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to create a moment everyone will remember.”

Even when it doesn’t work as planned, it continues. Qatar, for example, hoped that the 2022 World Cup would boost its image. While research by Dr. Vitaly Kazakov at University of Manchester found that, actually, the World Cup made more people aware of its appalling human rights record, Qatar has doubled-down in the years since, spending billions on activities from kit sponsorship with FC Barcelona and a buy-out of Paris Saint-Germain to acquiring the rights to broadcast Ligue-1 matches in France.

“Qatar has multiple avenues for reaching audiences in France: through commentary, by shaping the content they stream; through commerce, by partnering with the brands they buy; and through community, by running the clubs they back,” said the Journal of Democracy.

In other words, Qatar makes it almost impossible for French football fans to boycott them. How can you hold the (moral) line when a ‘bad’ brand is so intertwined with smaller, everyday enjoyments? Or with a club you might have supported since you were a kid?

In April, Saudi Arabia announced a new partnership with Fifa that gives state-owned oil company, Aramco, sponsorship rights for the men’s World Cup in 2026 and the Women’s World Cup in 2027. Greenpeace called it out as “blatant” sportswashing: “Aramco is using a sport loved by billions of people around the world to distract the public from the consequences of their climate-wrecking business.”

It also pointed out the difference between culture and sport. “No longer welcome as sponsors by many museums and cultural institutions, oil giants are now all over the world of sport looking for popular brands with which to greenwash their image.

“Fifa should have shown Aramco a red card instead of rolling out the red carpet." They should, but they didn’t.

What made the difference in culture? Pressure – from groups like Greenpeace, but also from artists, audiences and the public. Museums and galleries are perhaps closer to, and thus more aware of, what their audiences think, and they certainly can’t afford to be abandoned by them.

Yet neither can sports brands, clubs and organisations. While states like Qatar may enmesh themselves in the sports we love, fans, athletes and brands can still take a stand – and stick to it to create change. “We need to be figuring out how to channel the power of sport in productive ways,” said Dr. Vitaly Kazakov in Manchester. And we can start by agreeing that sportswashing really doesn’t have to wash.