What Selective Outrage over LIV Golf Says About Sportswashing
Where is the line that separates acceptable from unacceptable sponsorship?
If you pay any attention to the sport of men’s golf, then you have no doubt heard of the ongoing controversy and debate over a new golf tour called Liv Golf, which kicks off play tomorrow. In sport, new types of competition — whether the X Games, USFL or Super League — can be met with support or opposition, as might any effort to disrupt the status quo. The Liv Golf tour is controversial not simply because it may be disruptive, but because it is backed by Saudi Arabia, a country noted for its violations of human rights and allegedly responsible for the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The controversy is made more intense by the defection of a number of prominent PGA Tour golfers to the new Liv Tour, including Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Sergio Garcia, Lee Westwood, and Ian Poulter among others. Why would golfers leave the PGA for a new start up? Money, of course. Dustin Johnson will earn a reported $125 million for joining the Liv Tour, which is more than the $121 million that Tiger Woods has earned in competition his entire career. Johnson’s agent confirmed it was money behind the move, explaining that Johnson, who has already earned more than $74 million playing golf thus far in his career needed to look out for “his and his family’s best interest.”
Golf journalists, in particular are incensed. In the clip below, Lee Westwood, Graeme McDowell and Ian Poulter were asked if they’d play in a tournament organized by Vladimir Putin. Each refused to answer.
A first reaction to this controversy is to be careful to come to a quick conclusion about individuals. After all, how might you might react if Sheikh Mohammed bin Salman’s Public Investment Fund offered you $125 million to quit your job? Honestly, despite reservations, I’d surely give it some thought as I am sure many people would. The annals of famous (and not-so-famous) people taking money from oppressive regimes is a long one — J.Lo sang for Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov of Turkmenistan, Beyoncé performed on numerous occasions for the sons of Muammar Qaddafi and Sting performed for the daughter of President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan.
Sport is no different. You may have heard that the 2022 World Cup is in Qatar. Or that the 2022 Olympics were in Beijing. In auto racing, the F1 holds an annual race in Saudi Arabia — the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. Held annually in March, the recent 2022 Saudi Arabian Grand Pix was broadcast in the UK on Sky Sports, the same organization whose reporter asked in the clip above above if the three British golfers would play for Vladimir Putin. Of course, hypocrisy aside, it is a perfectly fair question.
Sportswashing has been defined as:
the practice of an individual, group, corporation, or government using sport to improve their tarnished reputation, through hosting a sporting event, the purchase or sponsorship of sporting teams, or by participation in the sport itself. At the international level, sportswashing has been used to direct attention away from a poor human rights record and corruption scandals within a government. While at the individual or corporate level sportswashing is used to cover up and direct attention away from said person's or company's vices, crimes, or scandals.
Where do we draw the sportswashing line? Russia is over the line but Saudi Arabia is OK? Saudi Arabia is over the line but Qatar is OK? Qatar is over the line but China is OK? These are hard questions because we typically do not take them on.
Sport has enormous power to do good in the world, by bringing people together, highlighting poor practices and elevating shared values. Take Qatar and the World Cup for example. There is no doubt that Qatar has engaged in human rights violations. At the same time, one can make a case that the presence of the World Cup has provided a mechanism to compel Qatar to improve its human rights record in a way that would not have happened without the leverage of the World Cup. Different people will come down on different sides of this issue, but we should all admit that there are various complexities and differing, legitimate points of view.
As a matter of sports governance, my view is that selective outrage, rank hypocrisy and reactionary responses do not help much at all. The International Olympics Committee, after a late start out of the blocks, last month issued a progress report on its Human Rights Strategic Framework. The strategy itself is not due to be released until later this year, so the details are to be determined. But the approach is the right one — major sports organizations that operate around the world need a coherent and principled approach to human rights.
Such strategies should include specifying how we might know where “the line” is between behaviors and practices deemed acceptable and those that are not. Such principled guidance will help to remove some of the ambiguity currently ever-present when assessing whether a particular nation is qualified to host a major sporting event, or such as the case with Russia and Belarus, whether individual athletes from certain countries should be barred from competition. These are not at all easy or straightforward issues, and they first require open acknowledgement that sport is political, deeply so — there is no escaping this fact.
So my recommendation for Liv Golf, the PGA Tour (and other tours) as well as the golfers that are participating in them is that each of these international sports organizations each need a human rights strategy. We should not expect professional golfers to be able to articulate such a strategy on the fly in a press conference, but these public figures should demand that their employers produce such a strategy. the issue here is not golfers taking oodles of money to chase a small white ball across manicured grass — the larger issue is that they are doing so in the context of organizations that lack serious attention to human rights issues. In 2022 the lack of a human rights strategy by a major sports organization should be interpreted as a lack of concern about human rights. And that is a problem.