Sportswashing is not a new word. What it means politically, captivated media headlines during FIFA’s 2022 football (or soccer) world cup hosted by Qatar, a hydrocarbon extractive economy under the rule of family dynasties. Add to this Saudi Arabia’s bid for the 2034 FIFA world cup; a bid which dovetails with the so-called ‘modernising ambitions’ of its notorious Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). Saudi Arabia, one columnist recently quipped, aspires “to become the centre of the global sports industry, and thereby shape global sports.” Indeed, oil-rich countries in the Middle East Gulf region that pour billions of dollars into mega sporting events, buying clubs and star athletes, reveal but a tiny fraction of the high stakes involved in sportswashing.
The lineage of sportswashing can be traced to the better-known word ‘whitewash’. According to the Webster dictionary (online edition), whitewash means ‘to gloss over or cover up (something, such as a record of criminal behaviour)’. This online dictionary also says that it can mean ‘to exonerate (someone) by means of a perfunctory investigation or through biased presentation of data’. In other words, despite the evidence of a crime, whitewashing entails a calculated effort to misrepresent information or cover up the crime. Blame needs to be channelled away or deflected from the perpetrator at any cost. Invariably, whitewashers downplay or ignore wrongdoing through all sorts of trickery. An intimate inseparability therefore exists between a crime, the criminal, the whitewasher and how the latter deliberately hides everything.
In 2010, FIFA leaders announced Qatar as the host country for the 2022 football world cup. The spectacular pomp and ceremony surrounding this announcement, wrestled to hide FIFA’s corruption scandals and exposures of Qatar’s human rights violations. Placing the corruption scandals enveloping FIFA in historical context, one journalist aptly queried: “With [Sepp] Blatter (the disgraced ex-FIFA president) there was evidence of simple human vanity, the dreams of a Nobel Prize and so on. The question of what [Gianni] Infantino wants is less clear.” (The Guardian, 28/11/2022; See also The Economist, 4 June 2011). Contrary to Infantino’s rhetoric, the dodgy operations of FIFA persist. If and when the promised tightening of the ethics codes of this global footballing bureaucracy takes place, it seems unlikely that adherence to more stringent anti-corruption rules will go beyond lip service among footballing bureaucrats.
Profits before People
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, for example, closely track and investigate the relentless crackdown of Qatar’s monarchy on freedom of expression, a fundamental human right. Free speech advocates, such as progressive journalists and activists, have been victims of the monarchy’s iron-fist that Amnesty International documented in a 2016 report titled ‘World Cup of Shame’. Furthermore, the coverup-and-blame-deflection industry dismally failed to cast a veil over Qatar’s repression of women and LGBTQI communities as well as the monarchy’s support for Islamic fundamentalist factions.
Without a doubt, after FIFA handed the hosting rights to Qatar, it helped fuel Qatar’s construction boom over the decade ahead. Lucrative dividends for the host and its Gulf neighbours beyond 2022 have also been projected – its profit accumulation legacy. But how much did this construction revolution cost society? The social costs of this construction revolution have been underestimated and exceed the profits that privileged elites are set to pocket for their own luxury.
To paraphrase the question in a Bertolt Brecht poem: “Who build Qatar’s 2022 World Cup Infrastructure?”. Building the soccer stadiums, hotels, airports and roads rested predominantly on the labour of migrant workers from Asia and Africa. The hardships that migrants building Qatar’s world cup stadiums and hotels suffered, also worsened the plight of their families in the countries of origin as highlighted in The Guardian: “But despite the billions spent, Qatar’s World Cup infrastructure has been built on the cheap. Hundreds of thousands of workers have been forced to pay for their own recruitment and labour for years earning poverty wages. In villages and towns across South Asia and parts of Africa, young men desperate for work sign up with recruitment agents who, often in collusion with companies or brokers in Qatar, illegally extract huge sums from them in return for a job.” (The Guardian, 1 April 2022, www.theguardian.com/) This exposure registers but a fraction of the costs and hardships imposed on migrants trapped in this intricate web of 21st century wage slavery.
According to The Lancet, a global health journal, “More than 1000 workers fell to their deaths at construction sites in 2012.” (The Lancet. 2014. Vol 383 (May 17): p1709). As the years passed, migrant deaths related to world cup infrastructure construction soared to 6,500, a death count which Qatar’s monarchy claims to be in excess of its own records.
Qatar’s historical dependency on migrant labour is well known. Migrant workers make up between 90%-95% of the country’s workforce. But this is not just a question of the size or weight of migrant labour propelling this fossil fuel dependent economy. The despotic monarchy has enforced the regimentation of migrant labour, little different from what slaves must endure. This model of regimented labour, with the endorsement of imperialism and FIFA, was extended into a template that would underpin the football world cup building schemes. European and American agencies that profit from this trade in migrant workers are leading guardians of the draconian anti-worker institutions in Qatar and neighbouring Gulf states. The Gulf monarchies are enclaves of labour exploitation under despots with longstanding ties to imperialist governments and transnational sporting conglomerates.
Sports bodies and media corporations have glorified the commercialisation of sport and all forms of cultural enrichment to heights not seen before. Commodifying sport, however, cannot happen without the worsening contradictions and crimes of this barbaric system. As is evident from a demystified examination of the 2022 world cup in Qatar, commodified sport does not only debase sport but does so at the expense of human labour. Anti-capitalist solidarity with working people in the Middle East and migrant workers who have paid dearly for this sporting spectacle is a key task of progressive forces.