Golf’s New World Order, Part 3: A potted history of sportswashing
Part 3 of a 6-part series of essays on what’s going on right now, specifically in pro golf, but generally too, in the wider world all of us are living in.
Welcome to Part 3 of this series of essays on what’s going on right now, specifically in pro golf, but generally too, in the wider world all of us are living in. In this essay, I try to investigate the realm of “sportswashing”: what exactly it might be, who stands to gain from it and how—as well as who might stand to gain from the status game of casting sportswashing accusations at others.
Wealth games and status games
Status is a strange beast.
Naval Ravikant, the tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist turned philosopher, speaks compellingly about what he calls “the status game”, and his words apply whether you’re trying to put billions of dollars into bringing the football World Cup to Qatar or you’re aiming for the captaincy of your local golf club.
As Ravikant says [emphasis mine], “
[Wealth and status are the] two huge games in life that people play.
Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Everybody in the world can have a house. Because you have a house doesn’t take away from my ability to have a house. If anything, the more houses that are built, the easier it becomes to build houses, the more we know about building houses, and the more people that can have houses. Wealth is a very positive sum game.
…
Status, on the other hand, is a zero-sum game. It’s a very old game. We’ve been playing it since monkey tribes. It’s hierarchical. Who’s number one? Who’s number two? Who’s number three? And for number three to move to number two, number two has to move out of that slot. So, status is a zero-sum game. Politics is an example of a status game. Even sports is an example of a status game. To be the winner, there must be a loser.
On an evolutionary basis, if you go back thousands of years, status is a much better predictor of survival than wealth is. You couldn’t have wealth before the farming age because you couldn’t store things. Hunter-gatherers carried everything on their backs. So, hunter-gatherers lived in entirely status-based societies. Farmers started going to wealth-based societies. And the modern industrial economies are much more heavily wealth-based societies.
As it adds golf to Formula 1 deals and boxing world title fights and buying Premier League soccer clubs, which game is being played by Saudi Arabia—whose $600+ billion dollar Public Investment Fund is backing the breakaway LIV Golf tour?
You could argue either way.
On the one hand, you could argue that they have the wealth, courtesy of two things:
The deep reserves of oil that despite the Paris Accord and other promises to cut carbon by 2030, 2050, 2070, the rest of the world is desperate to buy, and
A political system that ensures the bulk of those profits can get routed into government rather than corporate coffers
On the other hand, it seems obvious too that the Saudis are showing grand geopolitical survival instincts by using wealth to seek status. This, in essence, is what something like sportswashing amounts to.
If, as Ravikant says, status games are a millennia-old predictor of survival, then not just individuals but nations too would engage in status games to ensure their future survival, relevance and prosperity.
Indeed, a key cornerstone of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s official Vision 2030 strategy is to position themselves at the centre of trade in Europe and Asia, which looks awfully like a status game on a global scale.
We might oppose this trenchantly, and feel good about doing so from a solid sense of our own values of personal freedom and the rule of law and democratic openness in the face of a Saudi system that seems obviously to operate from a different, even opposing, set of values.
But even as we oppose it, we must open ourselves to the possibility that “our side”—whether that’s specifically the United States or the UK or more generally the whole cultural “West”—might also have engaged in the same status games in the past.
Are not colonialism, conquest, militarism, the mining of resources and evangelist religious missionaries a similar form of global status game?
Is it okay that they come from “our” side?
Are we comfortable with the complexity of that at best, the ugly hypocrisy of it at worst?
Morally, the reality of what happens to dissenting voices in Saudi Arabia is repugnant. We are judging that reality through our own Western lens, and we might do so with absolute conviction that we are on the right side of history.
Many Saudis and other non-Westerners—China, India, the Emirates—seem happy to cherrypick the Western ideas and norms from which they can glean the most benefit: money, and the corporate structures that generate it by the billions of dollars.
Three quotes about evil
Looking at Saudi Arabia from afar—a country that lies near the bottom of the Human Freedom Index, with a human rights record that draws attention from all human rights organisations—it’s easy to point and declare it evil.
So let’s consider evil for a moment.
Evil #1
Maybe the most famous line about evil also relates to money. It’s a little truism that all of us have heard, maybe so often that we grew up to believe it without question.
Money is the root of all evil
(It is, actually, an incomplete quote; the Bible verse it comes from is “For the love of money is the root of all evil,” which is a different thing entirely.)
There are many who would argue that the misquote is actually true: that money itself is the root of evil.
But could it be true that money is just the prism through which evil most obviously shows itself to the world?
Maybe the idea of sportswashing—a form of propaganda which uses the welcome entertainment of sports to influence the narrative in the direction you’d like it to go—is just an inevitability in the modern world, whenever men with massive power and deep reserves of money come together to think about the future they’d like to construct.
Evil #2
There’s another quote that regularly does the rounds on Philosophy Twitter and Morality Instagram:
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
While we can’t be fully sure who said the words—economist Edmund Burke of the 18th century and philosopher John Stuart Mill of the 19th are most often mentioned—it does ring true. For evil to prosper, some degree of complicity from others is required. For evil to prosper, we must choose to ignore the truth of what we see, or look away entirely.
There are many who would argue that gaining that complicity is the ultimate goal of “sportswashing”.
Effective sportswashing either distracts us from the ugly truths lurking underneath, or makes us feel so contradicted that we choose not to stand up and ask awkward questions when something seems off.
Evil #3
But while we’re here, what exactly is evil?
Do we all clearly recognise evil when we see it? Are certain behaviours or attitudes clearly and undisputedly evil, no matter where in the world we are, no matter what our values might be?
This feels like shaky ground.
There’s a third quote about evil, from the 20th century Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent years in Soviet concentration camps and therefore gained as much direct knowledge as anyone in the past hundred years of what evil actually looked like.
In The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn wrote:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Evil is a complex thing, and we should be careful when we’re dispensing with the judgment.
Sportswashing and PR
Or, leaving this shaky ground behind, could it be that sportswashing is just another form of public relations?
How different, really, is sportswashing to a century of PR built on the work of Edward Bernays, referenced at length in Part 2?
How different is it to the “hearts and minds” quest of the US military in Vietnam half a century later? Or to the carefully engineered fake news and bot accounts that seep into our minds via our social media feeds today?
If, as many have argued, there is little about the world we live in which could genuinely be described as objective reality, then propaganda, public relations, agreed messaging and sportswashing are always going to be present, in all their forms.
Marketing is a core function of almost every business; it, too, is a careful attempt to craft a new position, to develop a new influence, to change someone’s perception of their reality.
None of this is meant to be a dilution of evil or a defence of sportswashing.
Instead, it merely tries to point out that sportswashing is at some level a grand-scale PR exercise, and that it is wholly unavoidable in a global society where (1) armchair sports is the preferred distraction of hundreds of millions of people, and (2) status still plays a central role in the survival and prosperity of nations and civilizations.
Qatar will host the football World Cup later this year, the culmination of a decade of politicking and corruption. Is that sportswashing? Of course it is.
In 1980 the United States boycotted the Moscow Olympics. Four years later, in Los Angeles, the Soviet Union reciprocated. Were those decisions—political manoeuvres for one-upmanship in the midst of the Cold War—a form of sportswashing too? Who could deny it?
Is Saudi Arabia, through golf and F1 and boxing and football, engaged in sportswashing now? Undoubtedly so.
Vision 2030
In the Saudis’ defence—and those words are not chosen lightly—they have at least been quite open about their plans for anyone who wants to check. The Vision 2030 strategy is absolutely clear on what the Saudi government wants to happen over the rest of this decade.
At the top of the homepage of its website, there are 11 panels beside the heading “Vision Realization Programs”, which include everything from Financial Sector Development to Health Sector Transformation to Human Capability Development. One is the Public Investment Fund Program, and its four cornerstones are:
launching promising local sectors;
developing local real-estate projects;
increasing and diversifying the fund’s global assets;
and launching and supporting major projects.
It’s there in black and white, and the manifestations of those stated aims are clear to see.
In the stock market as of last December, the total value of the Saudi public fund investment in US stocks stood at more than $56 billion, their portfolio including the likes of Uber, Disney, Facebook and Walmart. In the sports world, it has agreed a $650m ten-year deal with Formula One, and the first Saudi Arabian GP took place in 2021; it has purchased Premier League club Newcastle United for more than $400m; in August 2022 Jeddah will host the big heavyweight boxing title rematch between Anthony Joshua and Oleksandr Usyk.
All of this has been decried as sportswashing, a splurge on sport aimed at normalising the presence of Saudi Arabia in the international lens and encouraging all of us to look away from its indiscretions.
By taking part—by watching the F1 cars zoom around the Corniche Circuit in Jeddah, by hoping Newcastle United can sign some of the world’s best players, by streaming LIV Golf on YouTube—we are complicit.
We are free to condemn. Whoever is without sin, please cast the first stone.
Sportswashing and the sports media
What about all those who accuse others of sportswashing?
Members of the mainstream media, both established international media giants like the New York Times and the Guardian and specialist golf outlets like Golf Digest and The Golf Channel, have been the ones beating the sportswashing drum.
As outlined above, nobody could realistically say they’re inaccurate to do so, but perhaps they are a little biased and a little selective.
And their agendas also warrant some consideration. When media pundits and journalists blast the renegade defectors and crusade against the “blood money tour”, are they solely motivated by the stoutness of their ethics?
Maybe.
Or maybe they’re fighting against the direction of the tide, knowing that their careers—and their relevance—might be threatened by a shift of golf’s power base away from the USA.
Could it be that accusations of sportswashing are, like sportswashing itself, just another form of PR? Could it be another version of the old status game, where those on one side try to cut their enemy down a peg or two?
This is not to say that activism does not have a place. It has, of course, an essential role to play in making our world a better place. But do the accusers of sportswashing look and act like activists? Or are they just playing their own game, fighting for their own survival and relevance and prosperity into the future?
International trade beats moral issues
Let us drift away from the specifics of sports for a moment, and consider the wider world too: the world of international trade that helps all economies to grow.
(Aside: I won’t start into the rights or wrongs of economic growth, or this essay could lose itself in all sorts of directions. Instead, maybe we can agree that most of us, most of the time, behave as if we like the idea of economic growth.)
While all these sports news items are getting some headlines and ardent editorialising on the back pages, the many-tendrilled and often sordid world of international business continues apace, money zinging its way endlessly and infinitely through the ether from east to west and back again.
No matter how much we might wish it to be different, when the countries we live in are so deeply tethered to this world, we’re involved too.
Less than five years ago the US Government agreed a $460 billion deal to sell arms to Saudi Arabia (which then President Trump called “a tremendous day”).
As a piece on the website of the Campaign Against Arms Trade outlined:
The US is the leading supplier of arms to Saudi Arabia … the US supplied 79% of the country’s major conventional weapons between 2016-20. This accounted for 24% of all US arms sales in that period, making Saudi Arabia by far their largest customer … Around half the Saudi Air Force is US-made (the other half being from the UK).
As one observer put it on Twitter:
Should golfers be held to higher account than politicians? All this morality talk is bullshit deflection by PGA tour desperate to hold its monopoly.
The US is no outlier here. Most Western countries are neck-deep in Saudi trade.
A 2017 article on the website of the European Parliamentary Research Service outlined how tightly woven the EU and the Saudis really are, and while oil is a big part of it, it’s a two-way street. (Emphasis mine):
The EU is Saudi Arabia’s first trading partner in goods, with 16.3% of Saudi Arabia’s global trade, followed by China with 14.1% and the US with 11.8% … Trade between the EU and Saudi Arabia takes place within the framework of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) … [A]round 50% of the EU’s exported goods to the GCC are machinery, including power generation plants, railway locomotives, aircrafts, electrical machinery and mechanical appliances. Meanwhile, approximately 70% of all EU imports from the GCC consist of fuels and their derivatives.
If the murky morality of international trade is one step too far for you, something you don’t want to be a part of, then fine. A clear conscience is often worth a lot more than money in the bank. It’s great and admirable to know where the moral high ground is, to climb up there and to say, firmly, no.
But the system here is miles deep, and it contains almost all of us.
And when the line between what is right and what is wrong becomes ever more blurred, when it becomes clear that both good and evil run through our own hearts, it gets more and more difficult for any one of us to make a stand, and more and more worthy of praise when someone actually does.
Rory McIlroy, pro golf’s most compelling voice against the breakaway tour, has done that. He has spoken about legacy and prestige, and shown himself to be a mature and clear-thinking advocate of progress and cohesion.
Amid all the mud-slinging and legal letters, McIlroy deserves huge admiration for his stance.
The Saudi International is a big-money tournament that started in 2019 and took place for the fourth time last January (and was, it must be noted, part of the European Tour for its first three years). We must expect that at some point in the past five years, whether for the Saudi International or for LIV Golf itself, obscene money was floated in McIlroy’s direction.
He was able to say no. Countless millions of the rest of us, beset by our day-to-day insecurities and fears, might allow ourselves to doubt whether we’d have been able to do the same.
That’s it for Part 3.
Click here for Part 1: Golf’s New World Order, Part 1: The Business of the PGA Tour and LIV Golf