Love at first tee off
Sportswashing of golf in Saudi Arabia
Welcome back sports fans to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia!
Here we have the LIV golf championships featuring world #3 Jon Rahm, who took a $500 million contract to play in this tournament.
What? Is that LGBT+ people being persecuted? Don't look at that!
Watch this football game between Premier League team Newcastle United, owned by us, versing Al-Nassar featuring Cristiano Ronaldo, also owned by us.
Huh? Are those bombs being dropped on Yemen? Look away!
Golf, boxing, motorsports, football, esports, tennis, chess, horse racing, snooker, mixed martial arts. These are the major sports that have seen huge investment from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a dictatorship fuelled by oil and human rights violations. Teams, players, entire leagues – you name it, they've bought it. To the tune of $6.3 billion USD, according to The Guardian.
Prime Minister and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, seems to have infinite influence over these sports – especially golf.
Bin Salman has a plan for the future of his country, called Vision 2030. The vision organisation aims to make Saudi Arabia into a world-renowned nation where “tradition, innovation, and sustainability go hand-in-hand". This looks to me like a massive PR campaign, with the capital Riyadh rapidly becoming a major sports capital, drawing fans from all over the world.
In an interview last year with Fox News, Bin Salman said he would continue sportswashing. “If sport washing is going to increase my GDP (gross domestic product) by way of 1%, then I will continue doing sport washing.” When asked specifically how he felt about the term, he said, “I don’t care … I’m aiming for another 1.5%. Call it whatever you want, we’re going to get that 1.5%.”
A heavy dose of PR would be needed to distract from the government’s human rights abuses, including the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the imprisonment of anti-government activists, and its anti-equality laws for women and LGBT+. But Bin Salman has endless money to make this happen. His oil company, Saudi Aramco, is the sixth largest company in the world, worth more than Meta, Tesla, and Walmart.
In 2021, LIV golf was created by Bin Salman as a rival to the formally dominant league, PGA tour. You may remember PGA as that one game on PlayStation that everyone has played at least once.
Newly formed league LIV lured away superstars like Phil Mickelson and Bubba Watson with unmatchable salaries, according to ABC News. LIV golf started to offer players signing bonuses of over $100 million to jump ship from PGA.
Now, I’m not exactly rooting for the PGA here, as they do exercise a huge monopoly over pro-golf competitions. Some players may be on the same page because in 2022, 11 golfers were suspended from PGA events after playing in LIV tournaments.
So, the players sued their own league. LIV became a plaintiff in the player’s suit, leading to most of the golfers dropping the case. But the fire under PGA had already been ignited. So, a month later PGA sued LIV for encouraging players to breach their contracts. In the suit they argued that the Saudi’s coming in flashing all this cash was “malicious interference”.
Just when it all seemed to be devolving into a messy legal battle, in June last year LIV golf and PGA announced they would be ‘merging’, to the complete shock of the entire golf world. The leagues later pulled back that announcement to an 'alliance', but all opposition to the Saudi takeover of golf vanishes.
But some players may see through the money, as esteemed golfer Tiger Woods reportedly turned down $800 million to join LIV golf. In 2022, before the merger was announced, Woods said, “As far as … the players who have chosen to go to LIV and to play there, I disagree with it.” Woods said, “I think that what they’ve done is they’ve turned their back on what has allowed them to get to this position.”
Woods is one of 6 player directors on the PGA Tour's policy board. At the PGA Championships this year he said there’s a "long way to go still" in the PGA Tour's ongoing negotiations with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, which finances the LIV Tour.
Another player on the PGA tour’s policy board, Jordan Spieth said, "If you're in the room, it's very obvious that players are not dictating the future of golf and the PGA Tour ... You have a lot of strategic investors that know a heck of a lot more than any of us players.”
It seems that the investors have a lot more say over this merger than the players. But the decision of which leagues and which competitions to join gives golfers some power. And fans aren’t oblivious to this.
Golfer Phil Mickelson received backlash after joining LIV in 2022, as the Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund had been called out for ties to the 9/11 attack. Mickelson responded to criticism from the 9/11 families during the 2022 U.S. Open, "We feel the deepest of sympathies for those who have lost loved ones, friends, in 9/11.” Mickelson later told Sky Sports Golf, "I don't condone human rights violations, I don't know how I can be any more clear.”
Criticism of players is where it starts. But criticising the Saudi Arabia government is where it ends. Fans get to decide which players to root for, which tickets they buy, which merch they purchase, and which sports channel they watch. Shiny golf clubs and firework displays can only distract so much from human right violations.