What do Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar have to do with politics? Both participate in Saudi Arabia’s “image washing”, an expression used by the BBC in a podcast that discusses the exploitation of sport by the dictatorial monarchy in the Gulf region.
Amnesty International places the Saudis in sixth place among the most problematic countries in human rights, in a list headed by China and Iran. The reputation of the Saudis was dragged through the mud in 2018, when journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who worked for Washington Post, mysteriously disappeared inside his country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.
It was learned later that he was killed and quartered. In 2021, an investigation by US intelligence services named Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the mastermind of the crime, who denied any complicity.
In any case, it is MBS (acronym by which the prince is best known) that is responsible for the high Saudi investment in sports, not just in terms of the local football championship, disputed by the 18 teams of the Saudi Roshn League –among them Al-Hilal, of Neymar—but also by buying the British team Newcastle United.
In addition to the acquisition of football celebrities such as Karim Benzema and N’Golo Kanté, the mechanism set up by the prince also attracted Formula 1 prizes, world boxing titles and golf champions to Saudi Arabia.
Dina Esfandiary, Middle East researcher, summarizes in the podcast the role of sports in Prince MBS’s plans. In their many modalities, they “have become a fundamental instrument for the Saudis, who make use of these means to improve their reputation and host any event that brings some prestige.” In time, nobody dares to quantify how much the Saudi monarchy spends on sports.
Matt Slater, a veteran sports journalist and editor of The Athletic website, recounts the Saudi effort to buy passes from prestigious golfers to play their matches on local throne lands. In fact, the Saudis used resources from a public fund for economic development and practically took over a foreign association of golfers.
The country, originally a desert, has seven golf complexes that had to be planted with imported soil and very expensive irrigation. And that’s without taking into account the local heat that makes departures around midday unfeasible.
Another podcast participant, Dan Roan, BBC sports editor, says that for Saudis, sport became a means by which the metropolitan mindset would prepare the kingdom’s image for the post-oil period. Despite having one of the largest fuel reserves, the country reasons with the hypothesis that oil runs out or becomes politically unfeasible due to environmental issues. Other gulf monarchies, such as the United Arab Emirates, are also working on a similar transition.
The fact is that since the 1970s the Saudis have sought to diversify their economy, says Lina al-Hathloul, spokeswoman for a regional human rights body. But this diversification has been slower than desired, and non-oil investments paradoxically depend on oil money.
The unfortunate thing, says the spokeswoman, is that the search for other means of subsistence, such as high-tech products, overshadows other priorities, such as better performance in fundamental human rights. Certain aberrations of the past, such as the ban on women driving cars, have already been abandoned by MBS, but there is much more to be done.
Faced with this potential scenario of dissatisfaction, sport becomes the anchorage on which the regime has contributed its reputation. So says Aziz Alghashian, a specialist in Saudi Arabia at the University of Lancaster, in the United Kingdom.
This helps to explain the fact that the country recently paid £47m (R$298m) for a young European player still in his twenties.
Football is extremely popular in the Saudi kingdom, and that is why the government directs the sponsorship mechanisms for this activity, which ends up anesthetizing potential fields of political demand. It is what even in the times of the Roman Empire was called “bread and circuses”.
Bread comes from food that does not pay taxes and from a tax system in which wage income is not subject to any tax. And the circus is given by sports, especially football.
