Jordan Henderson captained Liverpool for eight years. He is one of the leading players in the England national team. He is also known as the loudest defender of the rights of the LGBT+ community in the world of football. "I believe that when we see something that is clearly wrong, something that makes other human beings feel excluded, we have an obligation to stand shoulder to shoulder with those who are threatened," he wrote two years ago about supporting gay rights.
To the surprise of many fans, Henderson is now moving to Al-Itifaq, a club in Saudi Arabia, a country where homosexuality is banned and where there have been cases of executions of gay men by beheading. The offered salary of allegedly £700.000 a week must have contributed to his decision. But that decision caused numerous condemnations from LGBT+ organizations and accusations of "hypocrisy".
Henderson's controversial action shows how money from the Gulf countries, primarily Saudi Arabia, is transforming the landscape of professional sports and opening new questions about the relationship between sports and politics. For more than a decade, Riyadh has made a calculated attempt to use sports and culture to project soft power, in an effort to free itself from the status of "pariah" and gain more respect on the global stage. That strategy is the central element of "Vision 2030", the great development program of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), which should bring diversification of the economy, overcoming dependence on oil and gas and modernization of the country.
The liberalization envisaged by the crown prince's social policies is praised by Western commentators. Thomas Friedman published in the New York Times a eulogy of the new "Arab Spring" in Saudi Arabia. But if Salman's propagandist agenda is ignored, it is clear that behind the minimal social reforms there remains a continuity of political despotism and suppression of all dissent. Intolerance towards critics is illustrated by the gruesome case of the torture and murder of Washington Post correspondent Jamal Khashoggi, a murder which the CIA claims was authorized by MBS himself. The decade-long war in Yemen shows that Saudi Arabia's foreign policy is as brutal as its domestic policy.
Sport is needed by Riyadh to clean up Saudi Arabia's international reputation. Sport is a universally understood language, and in today's world it is the language that money speaks the loudest. From boxing and football to Formula 1 and golf, wealth has allowed Saudi Arabia to conquer many new global arenas.
There is a long history of using sport to demonstrate power and direct political debate, both in authoritarian states and in liberal democracies. But what Saudi Arabia is doing is unprecedented. Riyadh was not satisfied with organizing one big event, like Qatar, when in an attempt to improve its global image it organized the World Cup in 2022. Riyadh has the ambition to become the center of the global sports industry and to shape global sports.
This is possible because sport has already become a global commodity. Let's take football as an example. In the immediate aftermath of the Bradford Stadium tragedy in 1985, an editorial in the Sunday Times described football as "a poor man's sport played in poor stadiums in front of mostly poor audiences". A quarter of a century later, Richard Scudamore, at that time the director of the Premier League, told members of parliament that football was "an optimistic and ambitious business with good prospects".
When the Premier League was founded in 1992, revenues generated in the first season were around £170 million; last year that figure rose to £5,5 billion. The richest club, Manchester City (owned by Sheikh Mansour, a member of the UAE royal family), earned three times more than the entire Premier League in 1992.
The Premier League is the richest, but other leagues are not doing badly either: Spain's La Liga earned 3,3 billion euros, and France's Ligue 1, the poor cousin of the leading European leagues, about 2 billion euros.
Soccer has turned into a sport where the business skills of wealthy investors are as admired as the soccer skills of Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappé. This trend is most noticeable in football, but other sports, from golf to cricket, are increasingly commercialized, and the organizational structure and annual calendars are adapted to the needs of sponsors and managers more than to the wishes of players and fans.
Saudi Arabia has correctly observed that it is a world where the market does not care much for moral rectitude. "We know they killed Khashoggi and that the human rights situation in the country is catastrophic," said Phil Mickelson, an American golfer, while joining the Saudi-funded LIV golf association. "They kill people there because of homosexuality. That being said, why am I even considering such an offer? Because it's a once-in-a-lifetime offer."
It's a brutally cynical attitude, no doubt. But as much as we don't like it, we have to admit that the source of cynicism in this case is not Mickelson himself or golf and sports in general, but a system in which morality is less important than the interests of business and realpolitik. It is a system in which politicians and business leaders have their mouths full of "human rights" at one moment, only to side with people like the Saudi crown prince the next, if they judge that it is more profitable.
Trade between the UK and Saudi Arabia reached £17,3bn last year. According to the Campaign Against Arms Trade, since the start of the attack on Yemen, Saudi Arabia has bought weapons worth £27 billion. From 2015 to 2019, Saudi Arabia was the world's largest importer of arms, with nearly three-quarters of its purchases coming from the United States. Joe Biden banned the sale of offensive weapons to Riyadh in 2021, but last year approved the £2,3bn sale of the Patriot system.
Compared to the willingness of London, Washington, Paris and Berlin to do business with Riyadh and profit from the sale of weapons used in the massacres in Yemen, the hypocrisy of Jordan Henderson and the cynicism of Phil Mickelson seem like minor offenses. I am appalled at the way Saudi money buys athletes and sports. But they are just playing a game whose rules have already been established. We cannot expect the Hendersons and Mickelsons of this world to shoulder the burden of opposing Saudi tyranny. As the great CLR James once said: "What can those who know nothing but cricket know about cricket?"
The Guardian, 23.07.2023.
Translated by Đorđe Tomić
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