LIBERAL NATIONS OUGHT SIMPLY REFUSE TO SEND TEAMS TO SUCH EVENTS:

Sportswashing has received significant attention recently, particularly due to the rise of the Saudi Arabia sponsored LIV Golf and the imminent Men's football World Cup to be held in Qatar. The chief football writer at The Independent, Miguel Delaney, has conducted an admirable crusade raising awareness of sportswashing, and the Norwegian venue Josimar has published hard-hitting investigative reporting on the scope of the problem. Yet many people--even those interested in sport or politics--still haven't heard of sportswashing and even fewer people have a clear idea of exactly what sportswashing involves and why it is wrong. This is even true amongst sports researchers, as there is little scholarly work on the topic. Our aim here is to set out what sportswashing is and explore why it is wrong.

As we've argued, sportswashing is an attempt to distract from, minimize, or normalize wrongdoing through engagement in sport, not unlike whitewashing, although more specific in its methods, and also related to greenwashing, although not similarly restricted in its scope to environmental sins. This is importantly reputational: sportswashers want other people to care less about their wrongdoing without having to address that wrongdoing through reform and reparation. Whether this is because they want to be seen as desirable destinations for tourism or unproblematic partners for trade, the sportswasher wants to make sure that the bad things they are doing don't negatively affect them.

Thus the allegations against Qatar for hosting the World Cup and Saudi Arabia for setting up the LIV tour and buying Newcastle United. Qatar has an abysmal record on workers' rights. Though there is debate about the exact number, many workers have died directly as a result of constructing stadiums for the World Cup.This isn't just the occasional unfortunate accident, it is the result of awful working conditions. Workers are forced to work in the sweltering heat, and many are immigrants who have few social rights. Though there have been claims that the World Cup (and the attention around it) has in fact inspired reform, there are still serious allegations that working conditions are deeply exploitative. Saudi Arabia's most notable non-sporting news in recent years has been the assassination and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a longstanding critic of the Saudi regime. This was not a one-off event, though, but  part of a pattern of human rights abuses. 

So, the allegation that these states are engaged in sportswashing is that they are getting involved in sports to displace the negative reputation they have received because of these wrongs by creating more positive associations. 

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