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Episode transcript
HOST (ANDIE CROSSAN)
Hey there State of Play listeners and those new to the pod.
Welcome to another bonus edition.
This week we’re going to start with a little quiz.
If I asked you where Saudi Arabia is, even without the power of Google you probably know it’s in the Middle East – on the Arabian Peninsula.
So here’s my next question.
Why did Saudi Arabia play in a regional soccer tournament specifically for teams from North America, Central America and the Caribbean?
If you haven’t guessed already, the answer is money.
Coming up on this bonus episode we’ll talk about why Saudi Arabia was playing in the CONCACAF Gold Cup.
And why it’s not enough to call it sportswashing when countries buy their way into the world of sports.
I’m your host Andie Crossan.
And this is State of Play.
GAME ANNOUNCER
Step two of the Gold Cup journey brings us deep into the heart of Texas, and a much sterner test tonight awaiting the men of the United States here in Austin as they take on Saudi Arabia.
ANDIE
That’s the group match between the U.S. and Saudi in the CONCACAF Gold Cup.
Last episode, we dove deep into Saudi Arabia’s incredible investments into major sporting events like the FIFA Club World Cup and Men’s Soccer World Cup.
Well, Saudi Arabia also made a significant long-term investment in CONCACAF, estimated to be worth around $650 million.
This year, Saudi was invited to be a guest-team at the tournament.
GAME ANNOUNCER
Saudi Arabia will be continuing their World Cup qualifying campaign this fall.
ANDIE
Now, there is a term that gets used a lot when you hear about countries investing in sports. It’s often referred to as sportswashing.
SEPP BLATTER (FORMER FIFA PRESIDENT)
The winner to organize …
ANDIE
A way to launder your reputation …
SEPP BLATTER
… the 2022 FIFA World Cup is Qatar.
THOMAS BACH (FORMER IOC PRESIDENT)
The International Olympic Committee …
ANDIE
By, maybe you host the Olympics,
THOMAS BACH
… the host city, Beijing.
ANDIE
Or, create a golf league.
ANNOUNCER
The PGA and Saudi-backed LIV Golf, formerly bitter rivals, have officially announced a merger. The deal is a major victory for Saudi Arabia.
ANDIE
Or, purchase a soccer team.
ANNOUNCER
… Newcastle United this deal move to the very top of the finance league in world football. The amount of investment coming in from this Saudi-led consortium.
KARIM ZIDAN
My name is Karim Zidan, I’m an investigative journalist covering the intersection of sports and politics.
ANDIE
Karim Zidan has reported for the Guardian, New York Times and Foreign Policy, and now also runs Sports Politika, a popular newsletter focused on this very topic. I sat down with Karim to talk about sportswashing.
KARIM
I haven’t used that term in several years, but I’ve been guilty of using it when it was really popularized about a decade ago. But it dawned on me as the years progressed and as I sort of investigated and researched these countries more and more, that it was a really incomplete understanding of what they were attempting to achieve. For instance, sportswashing is really just about distracting from human rights abuses, right? While that’s, that’s really not what Saudi Arabia is doing, it’s attempting to change the global narrative. It’s utilizing a form of soft power that’s actually quite easy to wield. In Saudi Arabia’s case, they spend a fraction of their resources on sports, yet it’s the entity that gets the most attention.
You go into their website and you see the breakdown of the spending of the Public Investment Fund, which is Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. You’ll see a pie chart, and in that pie chart you’ll see that sports, which is combined with entertainment, not even split from entertainment, takes up just a small sliver of that whole pie. They spend far more on venture capital funds. They spend far more on healthcare. They spend more on investments in oil and gas and other entities around the world. And yet everybody wants to talk about sports. That’s because the return on investment is massive for Saudi Arabia. All they have to do is spend some, a small percentage of what they make, and they get an incredible amount of attention.
And it goes beyond attention when they purchase cultural assets, British cultural assets, like Newcastle United, one of a very, very prominent football team in England, they are not just purchasing the team and the cultural asset itself. They’re purchasing the loyalty of an entire base of fans that have supported this team sometimes for generations.
ANDIE
So what you’re talking about is a model of success. Looking at Saudi Arabia participating in CONCACAF. They’re doing this ’cause frankly it’s successful.
KARIM
It’s extremely successful, at least for the goals that they’re attempting to achieve at the moment, which is sort of elevate Saudi Arabia’s status on the world stage and sort of introduce them as this global powerhouse in the world of sports and entertainment and so far, very, very successful. But they’ve also, I love that you mentioned CONCACAF because one of the tactics Saudi Arabia is doing, and another reason why sportswashing does not describe this enough, is the types of investments they’re doing. They’re sponsoring a lot of sports leagues. And once you invest in people that way, once you offer them money, they make a little bit of money from Saudi, and now they’re self-censoring themselves. Saudi doesn’t even need to tell them to censor at this point. So that’s a great tactic for Saudi Arabia.
And they end up in these incredible partnerships like CONCACAF. Football’s governing body in North America, partnering with Saudi Arabia, not just partnering. That governing body was in a desperate situation in many ways because they didn’t have enough money to really build the game the way they needed to. Now, here comes Saudi Arabia telling you, we’re not just going to sponsor you, we’re going to actually invest in your teams and in your youth system to improve football in the United States and in North America permanently. How do you say no to offers like that? That’s how Saudi Arabia really wins you over. This is why sportswashing is not a good term here because as a matter of fact, they have, they’re making no effort to distract from the human rights abuses. This is chequebook diplomacy at its finest because what they make you do is you know just how bad they are, but you still keep coming crawling on your hands and knees begging for that money. They are in the position of power and that’s what this is about.
ANDIE
Do you think that frankly the public is like, well, this is just how business is done in the world of sport? That corruption and backroom deals and big investments from folks like Saudi or Qatar or others, that this is just, this is just a quiet Tuesday.
KARIM
I mean, unfortunately, I think we have normalized this not just through sports, but generally through capitalism and modern, particularly aggressive American capitalism. Isn’t this exactly what they’ve always dreamed of the utopia where, you know, the, the, the strongest succeed in competition? Well, Saudi Arabia’s challenging exactly that. It’s taking American capitalism and it’s utilizing it against America, lobbying in the United States, which they’re totally allowed to do, investing in absolutely everything they can get their hands on. This is how they grow their influence and their power. And the United States is more than willing to accept this through CONCACAF, through other industries entirely. The UK as well. They have sold not just cultural assets in sports, but they have sold off piecemeal parts of their airport. Harrods their great and fancy luxury store. All these entities that were known as British are now actually Gulf. They belong to the Gulf. They don’t belong to the Brits anymore. So the world is changing very, very significantly, and it’s not just the fault of the Gulf. They’re playing the game that exists already,
ANDIE
But for the U.S. they’re actually in the midst of all of this right now. So FIFA World Cup will be in U.S., Mexico and Canada next year. We’ve got the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.
KARIM
Is the U.S. even in a position now where we can really distinguish it from these other authoritarian regimes that we are referring to? I actually was, was doing an interview recently and I made a statement that some might’ve considered the hot take. I think it’s a safer for the vast majority of people to have attended the World Cup in Qatar in 2022 than the upcoming World Cup in the United States, particularly in 2026. I still think that statement is accurate based entirely on the direction of the Trump administration right now. Listen, America was never an innocent place, but what we are seeing now, this creeping authoritarianism is on a different level. And it, at this point, I don’t see the United States as a rightful host, but when we talk about a rightful host or somebody who should or gets to host at this point, who does get to host?
ANDIE
Now, for so many people who are fans it might feel kind of innocuous to them. Like they’re just, there’s a level of enjoyment and boosterism around sports that make them kind of seem, you know, sort of harmless
KARIM
In many cases. It can be harmless fun. Listen, I understand completely when people want to be. Life is stressful as it is for all of us. It’s not getting any easier in this modern age. And I understand if people want to use sports as sort of an escape from reality, it’s perfectly natural. We do it with so many things. We do it with music, we do it with our friends. Why not sports? And in many cases, sports can be simply harmless fun. But the truth is that this idea that sports is the ultimate form of escapism is a really privileged concept as far as I’m concerned. I’ll use myself as an example. I would’ve loved to have treated sports as just a form of escapism. That’s what I thought it was. When I was a teenager. Then I was living in Egypt, I was 14 years old when I had my first sort of harrowing experience at a sports event.
I was surrounded by my cousins and friends who were members of these, of the Egyptian football group called the Ultras. And the Ultras were supporters of Egypt’s biggest football club at the time, which was known as Al-Ahly remains one of the biggest football clubs in all of Africa. The Ultras are, is a term for let’s, to simplify this football hooligans, let’s say. But in Egypt, they didn’t really occupy the space as hooligans. It was a group of young boys and men coming together and sort of finding their voice at a time where it felt like there was no hope for an entire generation of Egyptians. The country was, wouldn’t say collapsing, but economically it wasn’t doing great, politically it wasn’t doing great, and it was a very oppressive environment, especially for us as teenagers. We could feel it, it didn’t feel like there was a hope in the future for us in Egypt.
So we used our voice as young men to try and sort of express what we were feeling. And we would attend football matches in a very specific section of the stadium called Talta shemal. Talta shemal translates to the third section on the left. Now this was the cheapest seats in the entire stadium ’cause the intention was to make this accessible to as many people from as many classes of society as possible. And that was the case, and it was a brotherhood of sorts. In Ramadan you’d be passing around food, making sure everybody’s had something to eat and drink when it’s time to break fast. All that sort of behavior took place in this little environment that, that we created during the, during the event. And then suddenly the Egyptian government took it too seriously and thought, well these, this is a threat to us. So before you’d know it, at the age of 14, I would see, I would see security forces surrounding us in the stands, pulling out people I know and beating the crap out of them with batons. So try to explain to a 14-year-old who’s there just trying to watch a football game, that the government doesn’t trust you enough to watch a football game, that they see you as a threat. How am I to understand this without a political context to it? Of course sports are political. it’s just sometimes you’re lucky and privileged enough not to experience that.
ANDIE
You’ve seen how politics and power and sports are all threaded together in this way, and you had a front row seat to this. So, from the context of today, what does it look like in terms of sports that we are watching now?
KARIM
Okay, so to finish off first the story that I started ’cause it leads into this question that you just asked. Well, this group of ultras that I ended up spending a lot of time with and the government was afraid of. Turns out they had a bit of a right to be afraid of them. Those same ultras would end up becoming revolutionaries during the Arab Spring in 2011, just four years after all these incidents were taking place, where I met them and where people were being attacked with batons, suddenly there are revolutionaries who have so much experience in sort of gorilla style street fighting with the cops that they were the best prepared for the protests and for the thuggery that took place thereafter by the Egyptian government. They saved a lot of lives at the time, and they helped topple an entire regime, one of the most powerful Arab regimes at the time. This is exceptional, but it also shows you that sports do play a very interesting role in society.
Now the truth is, I think the Arab Spring was unfortunately a failure in many ways. Democracy did not arrive in the Middle East. And if anything, a lot of these dictators learn their lessons from the Arab Spring, including from a sporting perspective in Egypt, we’re still not allowed back into the stadiums at full capacity. And those who operate under a system called the Fan ID, which has been used in the World Cup in Russia, the World Cup in Qatar, it’s a great way to make sure you know everything about every person in the stadium. So if anything goes wrong, you know how to pull those per people into the police station instantly. Right? So it’s a massive invasion of privacy, it’s a whole new form of surveillance.
And all of this emerges in the wake of the Arab Spring. Now, this leads us to say the World Cup that’s going to take place in Saudi Arabia in 2034. Saudi Arabia might be a country that’s opening up to the world now. And in many ways, in their own societies, which are extremely conservative, they are opening up to an extent, but they’re also extraordinarily oppressive. If anything, the police state of Saudi Arabia is now emerging and expect that kind of behaviour to take place at football stadiums. Just at some point last year, there was a football team in Saudi Arabia, one of the smaller ones, and it was known for its Shia population being the minority sect in Saudi Arabia. Nothing threatening to the government in any way. The government ended up arresting more than a hundred of those youths fining the team and suspending them entirely for several months. This is the sort of surveillance that we’re seeing throughout football, and it’s a direct result of what we were witnessing in Egypt and elsewhere around the world. So politics and all these instances still interact so significantly with modern sports right now.
ANDIE
To think about you as a teenager and your first sort of eye-opening experience, what is the thing right now that you’re looking towards in the future that’s concerning you? And as you’ve pointed out many times, this is more than just throwing the word sportswashing out as being this is the catchall for all these things.
KARIM
Oh, to me, the issue now is sort of more on a macro level. I’m looking to the future and thinking, well, how do we stop this, how do we get off this train, this train of sort of nation states controlling sports? Well, the problem is, the alternative at the moment is venture capital funds controlling sports. That’s, that’s the only choice you have as a fan. You have a choice of either these major venture capital funds who are only interested in profit buying your team and then sort of gutting it for profit, or you have nation states, is that what you’d prefer, who are going to utilize weaponize your team as a means of propaganda and just become another asset to their state? I would not be surprised if some fans say they would prefer that because we’ve seen what venture capital funds have done to a lot of sports and to a lot of teams, while at least nation states have the incentive to do well and to treat the team well because that would be good PR for them.
Sports league have become so corrupt, so willing to follow the pursuit of profit, no matter the cost that they have demolished any hope for sports to return to its origins as grassroots organizations that belong to working class teams and families. I don’t think sports teams now actually represent the cities that they come from. We see it in the United States all the time with sports teams moving locations just because they were offered more in a different city. That goes against the very ethos of a sports team, yet we act like this is completely normal now.
ANDIE
So I will say that I grew up in a soccer household. I have an uncle who played for Norwich City, my dad played semi-professional. Before I, you know, really knew how to walk and talk I think there was a soccer ball rolling around our living room. So for folks like my family and so many others who grew up in with such a love of the beautiful game, is there anything that you think of that is like the action they can take or the thing that they should think about or the ways that they can somehow regain this?
KARIM
There is, at least here’s, this is a great question. ’cause you actually give me an opportunity to maybe be a little bit optimistic here.
ANDIE
I love it.
KARIM
Great, thank you for the layup there. So here’s the thing. I think even, even the, what I’ve been saying right now, this, this, this sort of negativity can make you feel a bit sort of hopeless or helpless even, that you really can’t do anything that is nothing within your hands. And I won’t pretend that you have all the power in the world, and I have never been one to sort of recommend boycotts for instance, like with all my writing, all I’m really after is for people to be aware. I want you to not rely on willful ignorance. I want you not to ignore it just for the sake of ignoring it. That’s too difficult to hear, or that it won’t, it won’t make you happy. The truth is, if you’re aware of what these nation states, what these dictatorships and authoritarian regimes are trying to do with your sport, you won’t be so susceptible to the propaganda and vulnerable to the propaganda. You won’t suddenly become a, you know, a mouthpiece defending them either, right? Those are very significant things.
If you can strip Saudi Arabia of its power of utilizing those fans and their loyalty against themselves, well then that’s half the battle right there. But it doesn’t really just stop there. I have seen fan groups come together since we’re talking about Newcastle, there’s a group called Newcastle United Fans Against Sportswashing. This group actually has done quite a few things, they’ve, you know, held protests, they have brought Saudi activists to, to group meetings to speak in public, they have lobbied. I’m not going to say it has changed much, but it’s given people hope that an alternative in that you are not alone for being disgusted by the direction that your team has taken.
I’ve recently been on a panel moderating a panel discussion at the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway, which featured a German lawyer and a young football fan himself for Bayern Munich called Michael Ott. He was the person who challenged Bayern Munich being the biggest football team in Germany. Its partnership at the time with Qatar Airways challenging this partnership, taking them to court. And eventually Bayern Munich refused to renew that partnership. Now, to caveat this is to say that they ended up associating themselves with the Rwandan dictatorship, so you know, you go from one to the other, but small victories and small victories matter and the idea that we as fans have no say and no control, well, then you don’t understand how sports came to be or were popularized to begin with.
ANDIE
Thank you so much for your time today in this conversation.
KARIM
Oh, it was such a pleasure, Andy. Thank you so much.
ANDIE
Like Karim says, fans are the backbone of sport. And next year, North America is gearing up to host a whole lot of soccer fans, including in my hometown of Vancouver.
Annaliese Gumboc is a student journalist working on State of Play this summer. She and student journalist Huma Javeed hung out with some fans at the CONCACAF Gold Cup game in Vancouver last month.
ANNALIESE GUMBOC
Why are you here today?
CANADIAN SOCCER FAN #1
Big Canada supporter, supported Canada for many years, went to the Copa America, to the World Cup, and now to the Gold Cup, and watching Canada have the best team we’ve ever had, and I’m so excited to see them play.
ANNALIESE
And visiting Qatar for the World Cup, how was that experience?
CANADIAN SOCCER FAN #1
I think one of the things about the World Cup is you’re experiencing different cultures, different countries, people coming together for a celebration of football, and once the ball drops, that’s the beauty of the sport.
ANNALIESE
And do you plan to travel to any games next year for the World Cup?
CANADIAN SOCCER FAN #1
I’m hoping to get tickets for the World Cup for Vancouver here. We’ll see. Um, and we’ll, that’s my hope.
CANADIAN SOCCER FAN #2
It’s great, I wish we had more soccer games like this here, especially in the buildup to the World Cup next year. Really looking forward to that, uh, happening. Um, seven Games, I mean, should bring a lot of, a lot of people from around the world to Vancouver, uh, and I’m hoping that they’ve got tickets set aside for locals.
ANDIE
That’s it for this bonus episode of State of Play.
We’ll be coming back for a new season next summer as we investigate the power and politics behind the world’s biggest sporting event. Yep, the FIFA Men’s World Cup.
From host city struggles to backroom deals, we examine how FIFA’s promises of unity and prosperity collide with travel bans, trade wars, and the realities on the ground.
That’s coming up next season.
The bonus episodes of State of Play were produced by Sharon Nadeem, Calyn Shaw and by me, Andie Crossan.
With reporting by Zach Gaouad, Annaliese Gumboc, and Huma Javeed.
Production support from Diane De Vignamont.
Digital production by Andrew Munroe.
Michelle Meiklejohn does our marketing and social media.
State of Play is produced by the Global Reporting Centre at the University of British Columbia.
Thanks for listening.
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