Ken Early: Sportswashing suggests guilt when it’s more likely the Saudis are not embarrassed at all

How sad that the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour started a couple of weeks after the Premier League finished up for the season, or we would have had running commentary from the golf-obsessed football managers, mined from their regular press conferences.

Eddie Howe, the golf-loving manager of Saudi Newcastle (whose chairman Yassir Al-Rumayyan is also, in his capacity as head of Saudi’s Public Investment Fund, one of the faces of LIV Golf), would clearly have been absolutely ecstatic. Not only would the LIV guys be making more great golf for him to watch, but Phil Mickelson’s press conference performances were promising to take a bit of heat off his own.

You can imagine that Pep Guardiola, another golf nut, would also have been prepared to offer an optimistic take on the interaction of new investment and legacy sporting structures. It’s harder to guess who would have emerged as the golf traditionalists among the Premier League managers, but most of them would surely have had some thoughts about the tectonic potential of the state cash that had erupted into the world of the PGA Tour, since in football this process has been ongoing for some time.

The PGA commissioner Jay Monahan wrote a letter to the rebel golfers which included the sentence: “I am certain our fans and partners — who are surely tired of all this talk of money, money and more money — will continue to be entertained and compelled by the world-class competition you display each and every week, where there are true consequences for every shot you take and your rightful place in history whenever you reach that elusive winner’s circle.”

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[ LIV golf series continues to cast cloud over traditional circuits ]

[ Matt Fitzpatrick wins US Open after tense battle at Brookline ]

[ LIV golfers merely hard-faced stooges for a deeply cynical regime ]

Don’t get distracted by the fact the sentence doesn’t really hang together grammatically and simply savour the marvel of the PGA Commissioner suggesting that PGA Tour partners (such as Fortune, Citigroup, Amazon Web Services, Morgan Stanley and Bet MGM) must be getting bored by all this money talk.

“Why is this group spending so much money — billions of dollars — recruiting players and chasing a concept with no possibility of a return?” Monahan wondered in an interview last week. The answer, as Monahan well knows, is that they’re not in it for the return. This is about something else.

It’s at this point that we are confronted with the slippery concept of sportswashing, which increasingly feels like the wrong way to describe whatever this is. The presence of that word “washing” suggests an impulse that originates in guilt, in the consciousness of a need to get clean; it implies an awareness that there is something dirty that needs to be washed away by the cleansing lather of big-time sporting events.

Psychologically the theory of sportswashing doesn’t fit with what we see around us every day. In the real world when you are accused of doing something bad, you don’t respond by pointing to something fun and cool that you are also involved in, as though that sort-of-compensates for the bad thing. In the real world you respond to accusations with counter-accusations and whataboutery.

That’s what LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman was doing yesterday, pointing out that many of the PGA Tour sponsors (the ones Monahan thought were probably bored of talking about money) were doing business with Saudi Arabia while the Tour squawked about the evils of Saudi money.

“Why is it okay for them? Why is it not okay for these players?... The hypocrisy in all this, it’s so loud. It’s deafening,” Norman said. The apparent logic is that since governments and corporations do bad things, it’s hypocritical to accuse individuals of also doing bad things. Britain sells arms to Saudi Arabia, therefore everything is permitted. Even Machiavelli shrank from the notion that each one of us should act in our private lives as though we were the warlord of an Italian city state, but to Greg Norman and many other top sportsmen this ethical outlook apparently makes intuitive sense.

Unlike the theory of sportswashing. It’s clear an attempt is under way to buy the world’s attention, but might this not be an end in itself rather than a means to an end? Whom or what do we think is getting washed, and why? Why should we imagine that the Middle Eastern aristocrats pumping in billions to take over sports feel some restless anxiety to be clean, when most of us wouldn’t recognise dirt if it fell on our heads?

Think back to that memorable press conference at Stamford Bridge last March, after Newcastle lost 1-0 to Chelsea, and Eddie Howe was asked what he thought about the fact that the previous day, the Saudi government had put 81 people to death in what international media were calling the kingdom’s largest mass execution in decades. “I’m just going to answer questions on the game and on football,” said Howe, apparently unwilling to take a public position either for or against mass executions.

But if the Newcastle manager’s views on the issue remain a mystery, the Saudi state’s views surely do not. If the government of Saudi Arabia, embodied in the person of the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, felt that the execution of 81 prisoners in one day was in some way embarrassing or shameful or damaging to the image of Saudi Arabia, maybe they wouldn’t have carried out those executions in such a blaze of publicity.

The truth is that the mass killing was not something to be swept under the carpet or distracted from or somehow compensated for by a winning Premier League team or 54-hole golf tournaments or anything else. It was conceived as a spectacular, deliberately designed to inspire shock and awe. Behold the implacable power of the state, behold the iron will of the ruler, oppose us at your peril. The gruesome murder of Jamal Khashoggi was, likewise, a message.

Talk of sportswashing suggests the people who ordered such killings feel somehow guilty about it, or at least embarrassed by the reaction, and are trying to use sport to cast themselves in a more flattering light. It seems more likely they are not embarrassed at all - that the mass executions and the sporting spectaculars are manifestations of the same will that serve the same ultimate end: to bathe their commissioners in reflected glory.