If you think Jamal Khasoggi-type alleged eliminations are Saudi Arabia’s area of speciality, you implicitly charge the country with limitations in its imaginative expanse when it comes to driving a lesson home. When it finds itself obliged to deal with a woman student in an English university, who has posted a tweet about women’s rights, it simply hands her a 27-year prison term, whereupon everyone in the oil-rich kingdom clams up, looking as far away as possible as they apprehend somewhat unpleasant consequences.
People elsewhere in the world keep talking though, and writing about it, which is where sports-washing comes in. Bring on the sporting superstars, have them dazzle the people and Bob’s your uncle. The word has caught on. Its functional bedrock is an eminently serviceable ploy to rehabilitate badly tarnished reputations. So, the more of it there is, the better it is deemed in a world where top-level sport featuring the best in the business seldom fails to pull in the crowds, the flip side of it obviously forgotten.
The choice made available is as wide as it gets: wrestling, golf, football, tennis, boxing, motor sport of all varieties, horse racing, combat sport, water sport, beach sport, urban sport, equestrianism and handball, to name just a few. Riyadh is said to have at its command a sovereign wealth fund of $600 billion, supplemented by several other stashes, central to sending out come-one-comeall messages and people looking contentedly on as the action unfolds. It matters little that this purse is independently ranked 56th among 64 of its kind for transparency.
The smaller specimens of sport-oriented treasure troves cough up for La Liga and Manchester City. Next month, football’s Club World Cup will vie for popular attention with the kingdom’s first Association of Tennis Professionals tournament focused on young aspirants already to have made a mark. Saudi Arabia’s star ~ spangled top-perch football league boasts, among others, Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar and Karim Benzema, all of whom have turned their backs on major European clubs. Saudi Arabia hopes to wash and wear the shirt from the game’s new, awesome department store ~ with European football left baffled as to why government money, which leaves it outgunned, is allowed to go into it, seeding turmoil in the transfers market. Whether the strategy works is a big query all right.
Some European experts do think it does. Sport would take money wherever it gets it and if you follow up social coercion with sporting ambition, fans are said generally to be game for spectacles, as in Qatar 2022. The chance to see the big boys in action is a temptation they will not resist. Saudi Arabia says it wants a sports-conscious citizenry, at least rhetorically chasing international fame. They upset Argentina in the World Cup, after all. If Riyadh pulls the plug on the elaborate exercise when its experience falls short of its expectation, it can always be moved on from with freshly orchestrated optimism.