Sportswashing or Xenophobia? Football's Problem with a Qatari Man Utd

The UK is home to the world’s most prestigious and successful domestic football league following its rebranding 31 years ago. But it, and the wider sport, has increasingly become politicised, where players, clubs and sponsors become political footballs. Most notably, a massive influx of Arab investment and involvement in the sport has given rise to great scrutiny and brought about an issue of ‘sportswashing’—a ploy to distract and profit from potentially egregious human rights violations in the Middle East. But are such claims well-founded and well-intentioned? Or is there something more sinister and xenophobic at play?

No one disagrees with how sport and especially football (added caveat of just men’s) has become so successful and one of the UK’s most profitable exports. In the 2016/17 season, the Premier League alone generated £7.6 billion, paying £3.3 billion in tax and supporting over 90,000 jobs. It is no wonder that foreign direct investment has come thick and fast; just 3 of the 20 clubs are majority–owned by British investors. This is in stark contrast to 1992, upon the founding of the League, where there were just 13 foreign players. Foreign involvement in top-flight football has not always existed, but it is entirely normal now.

But this raises another question: if there has been a steady increase in foreign ownership of clubs since 2000, when all clubs were domestically owned, to 2011 when 9 clubs were majority foreign-owned, to the current state, why is the issue of sports-washing a novel one? Why have owners never been under more scrutiny than now? It may also be worth considering why there is such a level of scrutiny on football club owners but not when it comes to other UK institutions, such as Harrods or The Shard, both majority owned by Qatar.

At a speaker’s event at the Cambridge Union, Tottenham Hotspur CEO Daniel Levy was clearly uncomfortable at the barrage of questions surrounding football and politics, not least because of his close relationship with PSG President and Qatari Minister without Portfolio, Nasser Al-Khelaifi. It is easy to argue that this scrutiny is a function of the connection Arab investors have with their respective governments. Whereas, US hedge funds and private equity firms are only interested in ‘making green’, and are (mostly) independent of their government policies. With most Arab investors this is not the case; their wealth is usually connected to the state and its enterprises and they are generally closely linked to ruling parties and families, condoning and sometimes actively participating in their policies.

In the case of Newcastle United F.C., it was the Saudi sovereign wealth fund that directly purchased a controlling share (80%), similar to the Abu Dhabi takeover of Manchester City F.C. by the investment firm of its Deputy Prime Minister Sheikh Mansour (who insists on separation from the government). It is the potential takeover by Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad of Qatar, a half-brother of the Emir and former heir apparent until his abdication, that has shaken the trees though. And this is where we have to dig into the politics of it all.

In 2017, Qatar was subject to severed diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and 10 other countries, with its airspace and sea routes also being blockaded. Among the charges was state-sponsored terrorism, including links to Al-Qaeda. While this tense situation ended with normalised relations in 2021, it gives an idea as to the political standing of such a state. An oil-rich monarchy which until very recently was seen as an Arab rogue. Throughout this time, there have been claims of corruption (including a controversial and successful bid for the 2022 World Cup) and severe human rights violations; from a censored press to forced labour and criminalised homosexuality.

While the severity and credibility of the many reported violations may differ, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch among others have published credible reports. The takeaway from all this is that Qatar is not exactly held in good stead for its human rights record. And, as the argument goes, we should not let such people take ownership of our proud institutions and profit from them. And this argument holds, to a degree, on its own merits. It is indeed well-founded.

Where the overall opposition to, among other investments, state-owned clubs flounders is through the farrago of desperate inaccuracies to stir political resistance. It is not just the moral issue of human rights which drives this opposition; people are simply not trusted to care about human rights. Instead, broad, sweeping and sometimes misleading claims are made with the simple and holy objective of keeping the Qataris out, as with the rest of the Middle East. For example, it is claimed that Manchester United under Qatari ownership would be so financially strong as to be uncompetitive: their financial pull would be so strong that they would run away with every honour season after season. Of course, what proponents of this argument fail to mention is the failure of Manchester City and PSG to win the Champions League after an entire decade’s worth of investment. It is the Champions League, the glory of European football which, perhaps fittingly, has evaded these two financial giants and so lends credence to the idea that you can’t just buy success.

Yet it is still claimed that a Qatar-owned Manchester United would guarantee a lack of competition. Besides, what does it matter if it is oil-rich state money which invests in United rather than a US private equity firm, such as Elliott Management? It is possible to oppose supposed ‘sportswashing’ on moral grounds while still not abandoning reality and evidence. It must be said that it seemed very unlikely that Manchester City and PSG would have achieved such enormous success had they not been bought by their respective owners. I may well be proven wrong by Manchester City finally achieving the feat this season, or Kylian Mbappe guiding his team in the next. But the point stands.

Another important question raised is whether criticism is limited to Arab investors. For years we have had investors with not-so-clean records; the Glazer family owning Manchester United (not to mention the cardinal sin of neglecting the club). While they are well within the rights to do so, and may well be right to do so, the fact that this hasn’t been highlighted by a liberal media who scarcely share their politics raises the possibility of an ulterior motive. And this isn’t limited to a single family.

Between 2007-2018, the pro-Putin Russian Oligarch Alisher Usmanov owned a significant holding in Arsenal F.C. with much less noise being kicked up. Fellow Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke, after donating $100,000 to Hillary Clinton, donated $1 million to Donald Trump. And most embarrassing of all was Roman Abramovich’s ownership of Chelsea F.C. The question remains how on earth someone ‘with close ties to the Kremlin’, so close that he had his assets frozen in the wake of the Ukraine war and was forced to forgo his $2 billion loan to the club, was able to buy the club in the first place. It raises the issue of whether criticism lodged at Arab investors may indeed have a racial component.

Another justification, detached from the moral case, is that football should stay separate from politics, and thus states shouldn’t be allowed to use football clubs as a marketing tool. This is again another desperate and incoherent excuse. Football is not excused from this new, Gen-Z era of social media where politics transcends everything. And this has escalated over time, from the simple debate of footballers’ wages to the likes of Marcus Rashford taking the government head-on for free school meal vouchers and taking a knee before every match started. And whether we think these are quite simple issues which needn’t be political, the fact remains that they are.

When it comes to ‘greenwashing’ by petro-states, which unfortunately is a political issue, football is fine to delve into the realm of politics, and more power to it. However, for some inconsistent reason, football should otherwise refrain from doing so when attracting foreign investors. What’s more, the issue of involving human rights and the environment among others is itself politicising football. These are areas of large debate among academics where there is no broad consensus, such as the issue of cultural relativism versus universality. Again, a quite hypocritical stool to stand on, which writers such as Miguel Delaney, Chief football writer at The Independent, do so proudly. And, in this particular case, it is quite amusing to know that his newspaper and employer is owned by Evgeny Lebedev (41%), the son of a Russian oligarch and former KGB officer, as well as the Saudi investor Sultan Muhammad Abuljadayel (30%). Though, I’m sure Delaney can separate his politics from his work.

And so it may not be the case that our beloved Premier League is just a political chess board. It could easily be a smear campaign to keep investors of an Arab background from any involvement in top-flight football, which xenophobes can happily get behind. The 2022 World Cup and its success certainly wasn’t the end of this debate, rather it kickstarted it. And it is clear we will return to it, whether because of boxing heading back to Saudi Arabia, or of Mclaren F1 and its ownership by the Bahrain sovereign fund, or of a potential move by Lionel Messi to Saudi club Al Hilal.