"Sportswashing" in Football - 2022

Shrewsbury Town vs Qatar SC, scheduled for today, has been cancelled, after fan protests.

It has now been turned into an "open" training session for all the fans who are in Spain at the moment.

I'm probably going to be alone on this but I have much more of an issue with the new Burnley owners.

Yes Saudi Arabia is a horrible country with horrible leaders, but they aren't going to destroy a local club. They have to spend their money somehow and investing money in a team and the local area like at man City seems like a good use of the money.

Burnley on the other hand are going to fall down the league as their owner asset strips them after a leveraged takeover.

Football was rotten to the core long before the likes of the Qataris or Saudis appeared.

Just new players on the scene.

Fans won't care too much about where the money comes from, if it allows them to compete and brings them good times.

The biggest lie in football has been "for the fans".

Fans are an after thought, and have been for years.

I've been wondering over the last few days how the average fans of Newcatle & Man City two cub with huge major foodbanks collections outside their staduims on match days will view there owners this winter.

Now with their owners backing Russia and the other OPEC Countries in slowing down oil production which will mean for many of the struggling fans who this winter will more than likely struggle even more to heat their homes and fill their cars with petrol as prices rise and line the pockets of their owners will that even effect their thoughts on the ownership of their clubs.

Or will they just blame the Tories and keep cheering their Middle East owners because they buy them new players.

or will the average fan watch the WC this winter - dont think I have been so under-whelmed for a WC ever - was it 8 years ago FIFA delivered the WC to Russia and Qatar , corruption and greed is not just at City and Newcastle its widespread , except at the grass roots local level. Gary Neville is still virtue signalling about football, and yet is going to be a pundit from Qatar this winter. Total hypocracy.

And don't forget Mr Nice Guy David Beckham, already worth a reported 400 million, feels he needs another few million so badly that he will promote the Qataris too.

Football has stunk for the last decade or more. Its all about money now. And for that reason, the ESL will happen some day. Fact.

?

The post you quoted doesn't say anything even remotely like that...

It says their owners (Saudi Arabia, and Abu Dhabi) are major contributors to it, which is pretty undeniable ...

Is it not a topic that can be discussed ie the complete ease people can overlook morally abhorrent behaviours because the team they support might win some trophies.

Absolutely come into a discussion change people's comments accuses them of things they never said do the upmost to shut down an open discussion and use as much whataboutery as they possibly can to kill those discussions.

That is the trend and proof sportswashing for genocidal murderous regimes works.

I wouldn't necessarily expect someone to turn their back on their club - I would've expected to see more discourse about it from fans though, and more of a grudging acceptance rather than the predominantly total embrace of it. I'd have expected something more similar to the reaction of Utd fans towards the Glazers, or Liverpool fans towards Hicks and Gillette back in the day - still supporting your team, but you make your displeasure at the ownership known. Protests, marches, online campaigns etc.

The total lack of any meaningful critical reaction from fans of these clubs has been really surprising to me - especially with Newcastle and the Saudi's. It really goes to show that as long as you simply throw in the money, the obvious broader concerns of having an owner who is guilty of genocide, state sponsored murder, who had 81 people put to death earlier this year, who routinely orders the death penalty for child offenders (not to mention having state policies that are outright misogynist and homophobic)... all these things just don't even seem to raise a peep out of the fanbase.

So where I wouldn't have expected someone to turn their back on their club, I would've at least expected some more meaningfully expressed discomfort at their new owner. The most depressing aspect is that we all know if they were to tighten the purse strings, the protests wouldn't be long coming (which we know they're well capable of organising after Mike Ashley - and of course UEFA and the PL bodies totally accepted him as an owner too, so by your rationale so too should the fans supposedly?).

I don't expect them to turn their back on their team.

However I would hope all the supporters and groups that go to matches every week would openly protest their owners human rights records week in week out in support of the downtrodden peoples of the middle east who are being arrested, tortured and executed by the owners of these clubs.

I would expect the LGBTQ+ Supporters of these clubs to openly protest every week and not put out supporting tweets about the owners who would jail them and maybe excute them for the sexuality if they lived in the Middle East. I would expect these groups to openly week in week support the LGBTQ+ peoples of the Middle East very vocally both inside and outside the stadiums.

I would hope that they would bring attention to the ilgeal wars their owners are carrying out in the Middle East.

I would hope they would protect the decision of their owners to slow down oil production to hold the rest of the world to ransom in a fuel war and back Russia in its illegal war in the Ukraine.

I would expect the fans not to wear tea towels on their heads and cheers for the genocidal murderous regimes that own their clubs.

That would be my expectation.

However I doubt I will ever see in on any wide scale sadly.

I also expect whataboutery replies about American and British government's legal wars however no one can show me a football team those goverments actaully own and fund to sportswash there Countries.

I think you missed their point entirely on Britain and America (read the second half of the sentence)...

And they just want to go follow their team as they always have done... as long as their team is successful, right? If they're not, the placards will be out in no time, and the protests will be organized. As was already said, the fact the clubs LGBTQ+ wing even came out in support of an owner who would criminalise their very existence is just insane to me - and it's not like those folks can claim ignorance the way Barry from Blyth might be able to.

And yeah, I'm sure there are fans who literally never see any news, and somehow missed all the sports coverage of the Saudi regime, but I'd expect most fans at least took a passing interest in the new owners and, well, their misdeeds aren't exactly nuanced. As everyone has already stated, to have literally nothing critical about them from the fanbase is just very weird. (It's also interesting how you've climbed back from complaining about people supposedly expecting fans to turn their backs on their club, to complaining about people expecting fans to have literally any emotions at all about being owned by a literal murderer... quite the big step back! And quite infantilising towards the fanbase too).

I think the lack of success has a part in the way fans turn a blind eye to less than savoury owners.

Newcastle have not won anything in decades, City had not won anything in decades before they got rich.

Utd on the other hand were flush with success when the Glazer family arrived, Liverpool were successful in the relatively recent past and had won a champions league and FA Cup by the time Hicks and Gillette came calling.

So it's much easier for fans who have success to protest against something than those who hope that this investment will end their long runs without a trophy.

On your first point, you're skipping most of the point made for some reason... you said fans just want to watch football and not engage in any further activity, I replied that seemingly they are indeed happy to watch - but when the team isn't successful or something is wrong they are demonstrably happy to have protests as we saw under Ashley. This in no way means they're "not following their team when not successful" as you invented afterwards. They were happy to follow their team, and also to protest the owner. The two things are not mutually exclusive. We know for a fact from recent history that there ARE ownership issues that will spur them into protest as a sign of support for the protection of what they believe their club to be about.

Nobody expects their misgivings to be stronger than their love of their football club, merely that they actually show some signs of even having some misgivings. And nobody is holding them responsible for their owners misdeeds, merely asking why it is they turn such a complete and total blind eye to them, and even spend hours online defending them with all sorts of nonsense and whataboutery etc. In fact, if as much effort was put into criticising their actions as is put into defending them, I think a lot of us would be able to understand the situation a bit better.

Like, honestly, do ya not find the deafening silence on it from an absolutely massive fanbase just a bit weird!?

Ah deadly - “you’s are all just jealous”. Was waiting for that old chestnut to come up. I think we’ve hit ‘sportswashing defender bingo’ now.

Think you're missing the point of sportswashing fairly heavily there. In the short term it shines a bit of a light on wrongdoings, but as we've seen every single time it's happened, this comes with fatigue very very quickly and people simply move on with absolutely no repercussions for the purchasing state. It also buys you legions of fans who'll jump on any detractors in a second - just look at what the Man City fans get up to online if anyone dares say anything bad about their owners.

But much more than that it buys soft political power and influence by embedding themselves in local cultural entities. Saw that hugely with the explosion of Russian influence in London and the Tory party, with buying Chelsea being one part of that as a gateway to power.

And on top of that, this widespread association they create across all sports builds some level of connection/affinity with nearly everyone in some capacity or another. Whether its football, or golf, or boxing, or MMA, or WWE, or F1, or motocross, or athletics etc etc etc, they've built a connection between things people feel positively about, and their name. That counts for a lot more than you'd think. And it also means a near continuous year round news cycle of content - so when you search for any of these places, you may still see the negative human rights story, but instead of that being the only thing it'll just be one story amidst another 50 about all the different sports, or Salt Bae's new restaurant, or Beckham's holiday photos, or Newcastle's training camp, or Verstappen and Hamilton's rivalry etc etc etc.

It's sport as a byproduct of influence.

We've always heard the line "we're growing relations so we can bring our cultural behaviours to them", when in reality it's the other way around - they're buying influence and dependance so they can increase their global position without having to change a thing.

If ya still reckon it doesn't work, then ask yourself why they keep doing it, and why they've in fact been going harder at it than ever.

They're running the day-to-day alright so far, but I do totally agree with Rover that the league shouldn't allow leveraged buyouts though. Totally unnecessarily dumps a tonne of debt to be serviced on what was a perfectly functioning profitable entity before the buyout.