Photograph Source: albinfo – CC BY-SA 4.0
FIFA has done it again. With its usual sparkle of inventive interpretation, amoral reasoning, and snappy bravura, the world football federation has deemed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia fit for hosting the largest sporting event on the sporting calendar – not counting the Olympics. The FIFA Men’s World Cup will be hosted, yet again, in a desert country, where football is a most recent thing but cunning opportunism not.
There are certainly many things going the way of Saudi Arabia, which submitted its official bid to host the tournament in July this year. For one thing, hosting such gargantuan events is crushingly costly to country, city and populace. Such discouragement tends to thin the field of contenders. (Saudi Arabia was the sole bidder for the 2034 tournament.)
The country has also engaged in a sporting strategy that currently involves more than 900 sponsorship deals, one-third of which can be linked back to the country’s US$925 billion sovereign wealth fund. Football, in particular, has seen enormous investment from the Kingdom, be it through sponsorships, partnerships or investments. These measures are vital parts of the Kingdom’s “Vision 2030” program.
A report by the publicly funded Danish sports ethics institute Play the Game notes a degree of sophistication and versatility on the part of the Kingdom’s sporting leaders. “Unlike many of their counterparts in global sports, Saudi sports leaders hold multiple roles that combine leadership in the sports sector with high-ranking positions within the state apparatus, granting them unparalleled political and financial authority.”
These figures are chameleon in nature, simultaneously holding positions in the sporting field, vital ministries, state-owned enterprises, and the sovereign wealth fund itself. The authors of the report identify Yasir Al-Rumayyan as an example, a figure who occupies the position of governor of the Public Investment Fund and chairman of the state-owned oil and gas giant Aramco, in addition to being directly involved in sports. Doing so permits a seamless “transition between acting as a sports leader, financial heavyweight, or a state representative, depending on the context.”
Given the Kingdom’s extensive cultivation and fostering football, FIFA’s assessment of the bid was never going to be too harsh. Besides, football’s main governing body has its own partnership with Aramco, which was announced in April this year. “This partnership,” stated FIFA President Gianni Infantino, “will assist FIFA to successfully deliver its flagship tournaments over the next four years and, as is the case with all our commercial agreements, enable us to provide enhanced support to our 211 FIFA member associations across the globe.” Infantino went on to note Aramco’s “strong record of supporting world-class events” while also taking an interest in “developing grassroots sports initiatives.”
The announcement did not impress over a hundred international women footballers who signed an open letter to the FIFA president decrying the Kingdom’s elaborate sportswashing exercise. “Saudi authorities have been spending billions in sports sponsorship to distract from the regime’s brutal human rights reputation, but its treatment of women speaks for itself.” These included the imprisonment of Salma al-Shebab, Manal al-Gafiri, Fatima al-Shawarbi, Sukaynah al-Aithan and Nourah al-Qahtani.
The letter also went on to lacerate the Saudi authorities for trampling “not only on the rights of women, but on the freedom of all other citizens too. Imagine LGBTQ+ players, many of whom are heroes of our sport, being expected to promote Saudi Aramco during the 2027 [Women’s] World Cup, the national oil company of a regime that criminalises the relationships that they are in and the values they stand for?”
These were merely rumblings to FIFA, whose assessment was almost embarrassingly glowing, coming in at 4.2 out of 5. The risk assessment for human rights was graded as “medium”. The Saudi Gazette cooed with satisfaction at an evaluation that was “the highest in the tournament’s history.”
In its assessment, FIFA claimed to have “consulted various sources, including the bidder’s human rights strategy, the mandated context assessment, as well as direct commitments from the host country and host cities, together with all contractual hosting documents, all of which notably contain provisions relating to respecting human rights in connection with the competition”.
The governing body pushed the familiar and erroneous argument that the sport had “good potential” to engender reforms and “contribute to positive human rights outcomes”. Riyadh had also shown a “good commitment to sustainability” though FIFA had to accept that the climate posed an “elevated risk”.
Many of the findings were reached on the basis of a report entitled “Independent Context Assessment Prepared for the Saudi Arabian Football Federation in relation to the FIFA World Cup 2034”. (The term “independent” in most reports suggests the contrary.) The assessments were always going to be favourably cooked. For one, it was authored by the Saudi arm of the Clifford Chance law firm. The report also failed to consider a range of relevant international human rights instruments given that the Kingdom had either not ratified them or because the Saudi Football Federation did not deem them relevant to the assessment. No mention, then, of freedom of expression, association and assembly, let alone discrimination against LGBTQI+ communities, the right to freedom of religion or certain labour rights such as trade union membership.
Human rights groups have been busy trying to shift the focus back to the Kingdom’s spotty resume. In a October 28 statement, 11 organisations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Football Supporters Europe, labour organisations, Gulf human rights groups and a Saudi Arabian diaspora group warned that a poor human rights record had worsened “under the de facto rule of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has presided over a soaring number of mass executions, torture, enforced disappearance, severe restrictions on free expression, repression of women’s rights under the male guardianship system, LGBTI+ discrimination, and the killing of hundreds of migrants at the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border.” The Kafala (labour sponsorship) system, along with the prohibition of trade unions, continued to result in the exploitation of migrant workers.
Not all has been smooth on the matter of endorsing FIFA’s decision, at least at the level of various football organisations whose approval is also sought. But even there, Saudi sporting strategy has been in evidence to ensure a lack of dissent. The Asian Football Confederation (AFC), for instance, was hardly going to disagree with the choice, given Riyadh’s embrace of the AFC as a global partner between 2021 and 2024, a relationship that was renewed in July 2024 for a further five years.
At this writing, the Football Association remains uncertain on whether an official endorsement will be forthcoming. While the BBC has been told that FA officials are troubled by the human rights dimension, there is also a concern that accusations of hypocrisy will follow should the organisation then participate in the tournament. No one, it seems, wants to miss out on the party. And the Saudi authorities know this all too well.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
