Corrupt money from oil and football (Soccer)

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all the original, high-quality content we publish week after week despite the challenges of AI deleting content, anti-social media, inflation and other obstacles.

Soccer (also known as soccer) is the most popular sport in the world and it’s not even close. There are around 2.5 billion cricket fans worldwide, while there are 3.5 to 4 billion football fans. (There are ~2.2 billion basketball fans and ~1 billion tennis fans.) Across every demographic, there are people who love soccer. They may not be the first people we think of when we think of the fan base, but the fan community includes billionaires and heads of state. So if a billionaire wants a new game, a football club sometimes tops the list. Similarly, if a corrupt, scandalous or simply unpopular dictator/monarch/supreme ruler wants to improve his country’s image, sportswashing is often a card on the table, and what better sport to use for sportswashing than the most popular sport in the world? The bosses of Russia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have used it to “clean up” their image in various ways.

Maybe there’s something else you’ve noticed about those countries? Yes, they are all rich in oil. They all have reputations for undemocratic control and governance, and they all derive a large portion of their money and power from oil and gas. In general, many people are not in love with the oil and gas industry, and it is not that popular today to be an undemocratic ruler. So, hey, invest a lot of money in football and make yourself more popular, or at least more acceptable, in the eyes of the common man.

However, there are also cases where the corruption is too deep, or the figurative filth is too thick, and sportswashing attempts end up backfiring and tarnishing a country’s image. It may not have been at the top of my list of model nations, but I learned a lot more about human rights issues in the country of Qatar when the World Cup was held there.

More recently, we have the 115 charges against Manchester City, 114 of which have apparently been upheld and considered genuine irregularities. It is a scandal like no other in the Premier League or football generally, partly because the case and the start of the claims date back almost a decade. The breaking of the rules is so vast, so deep, and so unprecedented that no one really knows what punishments will fit the crime.

However, one punishment that has yet to be determined or applied is the reverse sportswashing that is happening now. Many people absolutely hate what the Manchester City owners’ oil money has done to help dominate and now completely ruin almost a decade of league results. Instead of making Abu Dhabi or the UAE look better, the effect today is to make them look more corrupt and worse. Given how much they have unbalanced things, people are going to despise the people and the government behind Manchester City FC.

This story made me think about a much broader topic. That problem is the blatant and widespread corruption in the oil and gas industry. The rich and powerful people from oil and gas have gained their wealth and power because of how centralized the resource is, how centralized the industry is, and the way certain people capture portions of the industry. These people often use that wealth corruptly to gain and maintain political power. They get used to breaking and bending the rules to get their way. And it seems that this extended to football. “We can’t make mistakes, because we have money and power and we can do whatever we want. We can always hire lawyers (hundreds of them, the best ones) to win our cases no matter what we do.” This has long been the strategy and mentality of the oil industry. Of course, this week that tactic does not seem to be working in the epicenter of the football industry, and the reaction to that arrogant corruption has been enormous. The repercussions are also expected to be enormous. Can we use it as a symbolic turning point, as another symbol of the failure of the old oil industry paradigms and the changing of the world? Well, one can dream, but at least now it seems that the oil-financed sportswash has gone horribly wrong.