Human Rights Watch Testifies Before Senate Subcommittee on Investigations

Human Rights Watch – (Beirut) – The United States should investigate and regulate sovereign wealth funds like Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) that have been linked to human rights abuses, Human Rights Watch said in testimony today before the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The hearing examined the fund’s substantial holdings in the United States. It followed the announced merger in June 2023 of the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) and LIV Golf, which is owned by the Saudi fund. Under Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the fund has facilitated and benefitted from human rights abuses. The crown prince is chairman of the US$700 billion fund, which is built on the state’s oil wealth.

“Mohammed Bin Salman has shown a clear interest in expanding his influence beyond Saudi’s borders often through high-profile business deals with sports teams and leagues,” said Joey Shea, Saudi Arabia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “US businesses considering a handshake with Saudi’s PIF should undertake extremely rigorous due diligence to ensure that sovereign wealth funds that invest in US companies are not furthering human rights abuses.”

Human Rights Watch has reported extensively on the Crown Prince’s consolidation of political and security power over the last few years in Saudi Arabia, and the dire implications for human rights. In tandem, MBS has consolidated economic power in the Kingdom notably via the PIF.

The fund has been directly involved in human rights abuses linked to the crown prince. They include the 2017 “anti-corruption” crackdown that involved arbitrary detentions, abusive treatment, and the extortion of property from former and current government officials, prominent businessmen, and rivals within the royal family, as well as the 2018 murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

This raises serious concerns for US businesses engaging with the PIF, and any possible links this may create between them and abuses in Saudi Arabia and abroad, particularly as the fund expands its investments in key sectors of the US economy, including technology, sports, entertainment, and finance. This should also be a concern for US regulators and Congress, Human Rights Watch said.

Some sovereign wealth funds are structurally separate and distinct from a government’s chief executive. But the crown prince wields significant control over the PIF, one of the largest such funds in the world, and exercises unilateral decision-making with little transparency or accountability over the fund’s decisions. While Saudi Arabia’s state finances have long been characterized by a lack of transparency and oversight, the restructuring and dramatic expansion of the fund has consolidated – to an unprecedented degree – vast economic power in Saudi Arabia under the Crown Prince alone.

Human Rights Watch wrote to the fund’s governor, Yasir al-Rumayyan, who, according to a LinkedIn page attributed to al-Rumayyan and various media reports, was managing director of the fund between 2015 and 2019, on December 21, 2021, and again on March 15, 2022, requesting his response to allegations of serious human rights violations associated with the fund. He has not responded.

As a result of the corruption crackdown, about 20 companies were captured as part of the crackdown and transferred directly into the fund at the crown prince’s instructions, according to documents in a Canadian lawsuit that Human Rights Watch reviewed. Some of those detained in 2017 remain in detention without charge, and others have not been heard from since.

There has been no transparency regarding the asset seizure process. Some of the assets seized during the crackdown appear, according to The Guardian, to have been transferred to a holding company that is wholly owned by the PIF, apparently on the orders of Mohammed bin Salman. Other assets were reportedly transferred to a different government-controlled holding company managed by the Ministry of Finance. It is not clear who ultimately took ownership of the other assets.

The documents also indicated that one of the companies transferred was Sky Prime Aviation, a charter jet company that owned the two planes used in 2018 by Saudi agents to travel to Istanbul, where they murdered Khashoggi. In February 2021, the CIA released a report assessing that Mohammed bin Salman had approved the operation.

Over the last several years, the Saudi government has embarked on a vast campaign to rehabilitate its image and deflect from the global perception of the Saudi state as a severe and persistent human rights violator, particularly under the de facto leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The PIF, although an arm of the Saudi government and controlled by the country’s de facto leader, has sought to portray itself as an investor acting based on financial interests, rather than at the direction of the Crown Prince.

Saudi Arabia has hosted or sponsored events that celebrate human achievement, like major sporting events in the effort to improve its image. The fund is a central component of the country’s Vision 2030, which explicitly laid out the role of sports in enhancing the image of Saudi Arabia abroad.

On June 6, the PGA Tour announced an agreement combining the fund’s golf-related commercial businesses and rights, including LIV Golf, with the PGA Tour and DP World Tour into “a new, collectively owned, for-profit entity.” Unlike the sponsorship of an event or ownership of a team, control over an entire sector of professional sports raises the possibility of pressuring players, sponsors, and media to stay silent on Saudi Arabia’s abuses, and raises concerns about what measures will be taken within the league to undermine human rights.

Human Rights Watch wrote to the PGA Tour’s Policy Board on June 22 detailing concerns about the implications of the fund effectively obtaining a monopoly over professional golf while it is also complicit in human rights abuses. As of September 13, Human Rights Watch had not received a response, nor are there indications that the tour has sought to develop a human rights strategy.

“It’s important that the US Congress is looking into the influence of the Saudi fund into US business,” Shea said. “The Biden administration should be taking similar cautions in its further engagement with the Saudi government, given its rights record and how it is using its billions to launder its image.”

(The Conversation) – For Liverpool supporters like me, Jordan Henderson was one of football’s good guys. He was the club captain who fundraised for the UK’s National Health Service during the COVID-19 pandemic and vocally supported Liverpool’s LGBTQ+ community.

However, in July 2023, after 12 years at Liverpool, Henderson left for Al-Ettifaq, a club from the Pro League in Saudi Arabia, where same-sex relationships are criminalized. Henderson’s weekly wage at Al-Ettifaq is reportedly US$900,000 — triple what he earned at Liverpool, the world’s fourth richest club.

Some have labelled Saudi Arabia’s investment in football as sportswashing. This describes a government’s attempt to launder its domestic and international reputation through sport. It’s often associated with Gulf states like Qatar, which hosted the 2022 World Cup, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

Henderson isn’t the only footballer following the money. Some of football’s biggest names now call the Saudi Pro League home. Cristiano Ronaldo got the ball rolling, signing for Al-Nassr in December. He’s been joined by the current Ballon d’Or holder, Karim Benzema, who left Real Madrid for Al-Ittihad. Liverpool star Mohamed Salah has reportedly agreed to move to Al-Ittihad, however Liverpool have thus far not accepted a deal.

Brazil’s Neymar signed for Al Hilal from Paris Saint-Germain (PSG). Al Hilal also offered PSG US$332 million for French superstar Kylian Mbappé.

Al Hilal’s bid for Mbappé would have smashed the world transfer record; however Mbappé rejected the move. So did one of the world’s best-known footballers, Lionel Messi. He chose to move to Inter Miami in the United States rather than accept a US$1.6 billion deal to join Al Hilal. But Messi will still earn US$25 million over the next three years as a tourism ambassador for Saudi Arabia.

Money outpacing morality

Via its Public Investment Fund (PIF), the Saudi monarchy has spent US$6.3 billion on sport since 2021. This includes buying English football club Newcastle United and creating LIV Golf.

But there’s another aspect to the Pro League story. A super-rich newcomer is buying influence in a game whose profit-driven stakeholders, like FIFA, have faced repeated corruption scandals. The wealth and ambition of the Saudi project challenges Europe’s stranglehold on world football. But it’s the logical next step for a sport where money has outpaced morality.

Sport is key to Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia’s US$7 trillion project to diversify the country’s global image and oil-dependent economy. The Saudi monarchy wants to host the 2030 or 2034 World Cup. It’s pouring money into boxing, Formula 1 racing, golf and football.

In 2023, PIF took majority ownership of four Saudi clubs, Al-Ahli, Al-Ittihad, Al Hilal and Al-Nassr. Ronaldo’s annual salary at Al-Nassr (US$200 million) makes him the world’s highest-paid footballer.

Money talks, and sportswashing often works. Human Rights Watch recently reported that Saudi border guards killed hundreds of migrants along the Kingdom’s border with Yemen. A Saudi-led military coalition has been accused of war crimes in the same neighbouring country. The Saudi government was responsible for the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Amnesty International has documented the Kingdom’s many human rights abuses, from its use of the death penalty to its treatment of migrant workers and protesters.

All that is unlikely to matter to many Newcastle supporters. Success on the pitch matters more than the politics of the club’s owners.

A league that’s here to stay?

As with Qatar’s World Cup, the Saudi Pro League has provoked genuine ethical concerns. However, many in the Gulf states also point to the hypocrisy of Western criticisms that highlight human rights abuses elsewhere, while ignoring problems closer to home.

There is a neo-colonial element to the dismissal of Saudi ambitions that reflects Europe’s long dominance of world football. Football is highly popular in Saudi Arabia and much of the Middle East, so why can’t a league there rival the English Premier League or Spain’s La Liga?

Saudi Arabia wouldn’t be the first place where an authoritarian government has enriched domestic competition with overseas talent. Mussolini did it with Italy’s Serie A in the 1920s. China’s government did it with the Super League after 2004.

Henderson might have disappointed Liverpool fans, but focusing on a single footballer misses the point. Vast networks support Saudi sportswashing. Chelsea Football Club, once owned by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, is now 60 per cent owned by Clearlake Capital, a PIF-backed investment firm.

Boris Johnson’s Conservative government approved of PIF’s ownership of Newcastle United. Meanwhile U.K. weapons are sold to Saudi Arabia for use in the civil war in Yemen, which the UN estimates has killed 377,000 people.

The problem with the Saudi league isn’t the league alone, or the unpleasant regime that bankrolls it. The problem is football and the economic structures that underpin it.

Football’s vulnerability to sportswashing tells us a lot about how and for whom the world’s most popular sport is run. It’s not for the supporters, smaller leagues or most players. It’s for unaccountable states, corporations and individuals.

There’s a history of upstart competitions briefly challenging football’s status quo, from Colombia’s El Dorado league in the late 1940s to the Chinese Super League. The Saudi Pro League looks likely to have more staying power.

Many might be unnerved by Saudi Arabia’s involvement in sport. However, the Saudi authorities are following the example set by football’s governing organizations. They just have more money to exploit the greed and inequality that has seeped into football’s DNA.

Alan McDougall, Professor of History, University of Guelph

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As Saudi Arabia continues to open up internationally, it is yet again in hot water over its human rights record. The current controversy revolves around the kingdom’s increasing presence in the sporting world and accusations of “sportswashing”.

In recent years, the Saudis have thrown the heavy weight of their Public Investment Fund into partnerships with Western institutions like the PGA, Formula One racing and World Wrestling Entertainment.

Riyadh is also luring top soccer players like Cristiano Ronaldo to its national league and using Lionel Messi as an influencer to promote the kingdom.

Recently, Saudi Arabia has signalled its interest in holding women’s tennis tournaments and even potentially hosting the 2030 FIFA World Cup, as well.

While the precise dollar figure of all of these efforts is difficult to determine, it has easily reached into the billions.

‘Sportswashing’ atrocities?

But the Saudi sport blitz has been received with less enthusiasm by many outside onlookers.

Human Rights Watch and many Western commentators describe it as simple “sportswashing” – an effort to distract the world’s attention from its continual disregard for international human rights.

For instance, the kingdom has racked up a well-documented record of human rights violations during its eight-year proxy war in Yemen.

Despite Riyadh’s murky peace deal with the Houthi fighters in Yemen in April, the war will remain a stain on its humanitarian record for the foreseeable future.

The lack of any meaningful reparations following the peace deal also raises the question whether the deal was simply a way for the Saudis to disengage from the war at a time when a serious rebranding campaign was needed.

At home, political freedoms and rights remain tightly constrained by the regime. Despite moves to relax some restrictions on women and religious minorities, these reforms have paradoxically come with increasingly harsh measures towards peaceful dissidents.

Only last year, female activists Salma al-Shehab and Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani received prison terms of 34 years and 45 years, respectively, for their engagement with social media posts criticising the regime.

More recently, several Howeitat tribesmen were sentenced to death on terrorism charges for peacefully protesting a megacity project that threatened their ancestral village.

Building a new Saudi brand

But while obfuscating human rights issues is certainly part of the equation when it comes to the kingdom’s sports mania, its motivations are far more strategic than simple bait-and-switch tactics.

At their core, these actions fit within a broader effort outlined in the Saudi Vision 2030 campaign to rebrand the country and normalise it within the wider liberal international order.

For many outside observers, the kingdom has long been an outlier on the international stage. It’s been characterised as a primitive backwater cut off from the outside world and ruled over by a despotic monarchy that has relied on a combination of oil wealth and Islamic extremism to maintain its hold on power.

Such reductive depictions ignored a far more complex, rich and colourful history. However, few in the West were keen to explore this more nuanced viewpoint (at least if my book sales are anything to go by).

Saudi royals have historically been content with such stereotypes, too, provided they maintained their sovereignty and security at home. The kingdom made little effort with soft power initiatives outside the Islamic world.

The international art, culture and sporting worlds were seen as being in stark contrast to the psychological and cultural norms of the Wahhabi orthodoxy that has long governed Saudi public life.

This all changed in 2015, however, with the ascension of King Salman and his chosen heir, Prince Mohammad bin Salman. The younger bin Salman quickly assumed de facto control over many of the country’s key portfolios.

In contrast to his conservative predecessors, the prince was seen as a “disruptor” with little regard for tradition. Like with many of the Silicon Valley tech-bros he emulates, bin Salman likes to move fast and break things. This includes everything from traditional religious institutions to architectural rules.

Bin Salman’s vision is to remake the Saudi brand as a modern authoritarian technocracy in the mould of the United Arab Emirates or Qatar. He wants to emulate these successful case studies through economic reform, military modernisation, technological innovation, cultural modernisation and the opening of the kingdom to cosmopolitan cultural engagement and exchanges.

A new platform to engage with the world

These efforts took a hit, however, after the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Bin Salman denied being personally involved in the murder, counter to what US intelligence reports concluded. But some believed the global anger of Khashoggi’s killing could have
damaged the prince’s reputation badly enough to hamper his future as a statesman.

Memories can be remarkably short-lived, though. And five years on from the killing, bin Salman’s rebranding agenda is charging ahead with increased urgency. This is where the Saudi sporting onslaught comes in, and why it needs to be understood.

Control and influence over these sports provide the kingdom with enormous cachet. Saudi Arabia can use this new stature to engage in cultural outreach with the world, influence global opinion and portray itself as modern and dynamic.

To characterise all of this as mere sportswashing may be catchy, but reduces a much broader and strategic effort.

Indeed, implicit in the notion of sportswashing is that the Saudis are suddenly concerned about the country’s association with human rights violations.

But looking at the examples of Qatar and the UAE, authoritarian regimes are able to flout international norms and laws on human rights and still fit quite comfortably within the wider liberal international order. The reason: the countries serve a valuable function in sustaining that same system.

While human rights abuses will undoubtedly continue to plague the Saudis’ efforts, bin Salman is betting big they won’t stand in the way of other states and companies engaging with an increasingly open and cosmopolitan kingdom. If history is anything to go by, he may just be right.

Ben Rich, Senior lecturer in History and International Relations, Curtin University and Leena Adel, PhD Candidate, Political Science and International Relations, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Tomdispatch.com) – Jim Brown was a monster, not only as a wrecking-ball running back on the football field but also as a prime example of an ever more popular obsession with people (mostly men) whose admirable achievements are shaded by despicable behavior (mostly directed at women). He died last month at 87 and his obituaries, along with various appraisals of his life, tended to treat the bad stuff as an inevitable, if unfortunate, expression of the same fierce intensity that made him such a formidable football player and civil rights activist.

Often missed, however, was something no less important: what a significant figure he was in the progress of the Black athlete from exploited gladiator — enslaved men were the first pro athletes in America — to the sort of independent sports entrepreneur emerging today. Brown was a critical torchbearer and role model on the century-long path between the initial Black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, who went to jail for his “unforgivable blackness,” and one of the greatest basketball players ever, LeBron James, who was the first Black athlete to successfully create his own narrative from high school on.

Jim Brown didn’t control his narrative until 1966. By then, he had already spent nine years in pro football, retiring at the peak of his sports career in what was then both condemned and acclaimed as manly Black defiance. In doing so, he presaged Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be drafted during the Vietnam War and the Black-power salutes of protest offered by medal-winning runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos as the Star-Spangled Banner began to play at the Mexico City Olympics of 1968.

A Life Demanding Study

A year after retiring from football to concentrate on his movie roles, Brown organized “the Cleveland Summit” in which the leading Black athletes of that time, including basketball’s Kareem Abdul Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor), debated whether they should support Muhammad Ali’s refusal to join the Army. Their positive decision, based on Ali’s in-person defense of his antiwar moral beliefs, was important to so many Americans’ acceptance of his sincerity. It was also a glimmer — as yet to be fully realized — of the potential collective power of Black athletes. And it was all due to how much Brown was respected among his peers. His close friend Jabbar, an important voice in his own right, has written that “Jim’s lifelong pursuit of civil rights, regardless of the personal and professional costs… illuminated the country.“

And that’s probably more than you can say for Miles Davis, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, or Roman Polanski, among the dozens of male stars of one sort or another whose lives have been reevaluated in the wake of the #MeToo movement and a question it raises: “Can I love the art [sport] and hate the artist [athlete]?”

As Nation magazine sports editor and Brown biographer Dave Zirin has pointed out, “Brown’s life calls for more than genuflection or dismissal; it demands study.”

Buy the Book

Indeed! Consider some of the countervailing pieces of evidence to his greatness. Although never convicted, Brown was accused of a number of acts of violence against women, which he, along with the male-dominated culture of his time, tended to dismiss as of no significance. In one notorious and oft-recounted incident, he was accused of throwing a woman off a second-floor balcony. He always denied it, claiming she fell while running away from him. Tellingly, when the victim declined to press charges, macho culture interpreted that as proof of his irresistible virility, an extension of his being, arguably, the all-time greatest football player ever (and he was thought to have been even better at lacrosse in college). His brutal style of play would later be reflected in his aggressive, independent style of business and everyday life.

That image gathered force when he was 30 and in London on the set of his second film, The Dirty Dozen. It was then that Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell threatened to fine him daily if he didn’t show up on time for pre-season football training, which was soon to begin. Brown, then one of the sport’s major stars, eventually responded by simply quitting football.

It was perceived as a battle of wills. Modell was usually characterized as a boss always operating in the best interests of his team or (though this was rarer in those days) a classically uncompromising, deeply entitled Big Whitey plantation owner. And Brown was either seen as a defiant Black man, ungrateful for his celebrity and money, or like Ali, as a warrior prince of Black manhood. As in the heavyweight champion’s case, the reality was, of course, far more complex.

On Raquel’s Team

At the time, Brown was conflicted about his choices. In May 1966, as a sportswriter for the New York Times, I happened to be in London covering an Ali fight and had been invited to the Dirty Dozen movie set. Brown confided to me that the film was far behind schedule and there was no way they’d finish shooting his part so he could make pre-season practice in a timely fashion. He had, in fact, hoped to play one more season, his tenth, but couldn’t imagine bailing on the production before the film was wrapped. There were just too many people dependent on him, he told me, and so the Browns would have to wait. After all, it wasn’t as if he were going to miss regular-season games.

But Modell’s insistence that he return immediately (echoed by the media) eventually pushed him into a corner. And Hollywood simply seemed like the better choice — a potentially longer career, more money, and less physical damage. Indeed, Brown would go on to succeed as the first Black action hero in mainstream movies. His on-screen interracial sex scene with Welch in the 1969 film 100 Rifles would also be considered a Hollywood first.

His football retirement, which began as expedience, would only enhance his macho aura, which, for better or worse, was all too real. That same year, in Toronto (also to cover an Ali fight), I found myself having dinner at a Chinese restaurant with Brown, Carl Stokes, soon to be the first Black mayor of Cleveland, and comedian and activist Dick Gregory, whose autobiography I had written.

It was a lively, friendly meal until the check arrived. The waiter, an elderly Chinese man, set it in front of me. Stokes and Gregory burst out laughing and began bantering about the racism implicit in the poorest of the four of us getting the bill. But Brown suddenly leaped up, yelling at the waiter and grabbing for him. The other two managed to push him back into his chair, where he then sat, muttering to himself. Eventually, he did manage to see the humor in the situation, but initially he had been deeply offended, and that simmering rage of his (always a potential prelude to violence) seemed ever ready to boil over.

He was in his eighties the last time I saw him, moving slowly on a cane, and yet he still seemed like one of the two scariest athletes I had ever covered, men whose baleful glares rose so much more quickly than their smiles. (The other was former heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston.)

It should be no surprise that Brown’s contributions to advancing Black equality were of a piece with his complex life. After all, he often derided civil rights marches as nothing more than “parades” and his best efforts were directed toward lending a hand to the economic advancement of Black small businesses and marginalized former gang members.

What always seemed like a paradoxical conservative streak in him was, in fact, essential Brown, the mood of a man who believed that Black progress would never come from protests or demonstrations — they always seemed like a form of begging to him — but from the power of money, of muscling your way into the marketplace and buying into the system. He believed, in other words, in economic power above all else and, for what must have seemed to him like short-term pragmatic reasons, would end up allying briefly with two otherwise unlikely presidential figures — that football ultra-fan Richard Nixon and then former football franchise owner Donald Trump. Brown even went so far as to defend Trump when iconic civil-rights activist Congressman John Lewis called him an illegitimate president.

Forebears and Descendants

Brown’s unyielding rage evoked the earliest celebrity Black athlete who rattled white folks: Jack Johnson. Although that boxer’s style was different from Brown’s — living in the Jim Crow era, he flamboyantly derided his opponents and flaunted white girlfriends and wives — Johnson also offered a version of intimidating masculinity that led all too many white men to call for a “great white hope” to defeat him. It took the self-effacing, self-destructive Joe Louis, who carefully concealed his affairs with white movie stars, to calm their insecurities and become an acceptable hero for whites.

In recent years, the only athlete who’s come close to Brown’s steadfast individualism in the face of racism was Colin Kaepernick, whose insistence on kneeling during the pledge of allegiance before National Football League games got a distinctly mixed response from Brown. He liked the young quarterback, he said, but as an American couldn’t abide the desecration of the flag (another instance of Brown’s late-in-life cluelessness).

As Zirin aptly put it in his biography Jim Brown: Last Man Standing, his seeming paradoxes were those of a “flawed” figure who was “heroic but not a hero.”

LeBron and Brittany

LeBron James, Brown’s current successor as the model of a modern Black athlete, has proven a far more consistent figure. Already marked as the future of basketball in high school, he’s orchestrated his career in a remarkable fashion, moving to better teams and dictating his own terms in the process. Along the way, he’s also built up his business interests — always with a core of hometown friends — and expressed his opinions openly. While at the Miami Heat, he led his teammates in a protest against the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager, Trayvon Martin.

Not since the days of Muhammad Ali had such a big star been so willing to take such a controversial stand. The basketball superstar with whom LeBron is most often compared as a player, Michael Jordan, was known for avoiding anything that might harm the sale of his sneaker brand. LeBron on the other hand even called President Trump a “bum.”

He was indeed courageous, but of course, he could do that. Global capitalism had his back. It’s even more courageous to take a stand when true risk is involved. So, perhaps a hopeful harbinger of future athletic heroes — regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation — were the members of the predominantly Black Atlanta Dream team in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) who, in 2020, wore T-shirts endorsing Raphael Warnock, the Black Democratic opponent of Georgia Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler. It was a gutsy move, since Loeffler, a white woman who had disparaged the Black Lives Matter movement, just happened to be the Dream’s co-owner.

It was, in fact, particularly gutsy because WNBA players are among the most vulnerable in big league sports, playing in a relatively small league that pays relatively low salaries — the average is $147,745 while eight players in the National Basketball Association make $40 million or more annually. That’s why so many of those women play internationally during their off-season. It’s why WNBA star Brittney Griner was en route to a Russian team when she was arrested and detained for 10 months after vaporizer cartridges with less than a gram of hash oil were found in her luggage. (She was finally released in a prisoner exchange last December.)

Although widely admired as warm and friendly, before her incarceration in Russia, Griner seemed to have something of Jim Brown in her personality. She was active with her Phoenix Mercury teammates in protests against the police murders of unarmed Black people and insisted that the national anthem should not be played before sporting events. Since returning from Russia, she’s been active in campaigns to release others who have been wrongfully detained. A lesbian, Griner and her partner were arrested in 2015 for assault and disorderly conduct in a domestic violence case. They subsequently married and divorced.

She may well be LeBron’s successor in the evolution of the Black athlete. At the least, her mission statement, as described in a 2019 interview with People magazine, is both humble and complete. She said: “People tell me I’m going to break the barrier and trailblaze. I just kind of look at it like, I’m just trying to help out, I’m just trying to make it not as tough for the next generation.”

These days, that’s heroic.

Copyright Robert Lipsyte 2023

Via Tomdispatch.com

Professional golf – and increasingly world sport – is caught in a sand trap. Not the familiar hazard between fairway and green, but the Middle Eastern desert producing enormous quantities of fossil fuels.

The resulting riches are being diverted into sport, disrupting its traditional Western dominance.

The latest example is the dramatic announcement that LIV Golf, the rebel circuit led by retired Australian golfer Greg Norman and backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, has merged with the (US) PGA and (European) DP World Tours after two years of trench warfare.

While today’s big story is LIV Golf, Saudi Arabia’s involvement in sport will generate many more money-driven, politics-heavy headlines.

Welcome to the ‘party hole’

There are echoes here of Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket and Rupert Murdoch’s Super (Rugby) League. An aggressive, well-funded competitor takes on the sport establishment, promising to shake up a sclerotic game, bringing in new money and younger fans with lashings of razzmatazz.

Embed from Getty Images
OSAKA, JAPAN – JUNE 29: U.S. President, Donald Trump (L) meets Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud (L) on the sidelines of the second day of the G20 Summit at INTEX Osaka Exhibition Center in Osaka, Japan on June 29, 2019. (Photo by Bandar Algaloud / Saudi Kingdom Council / Handout/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

LIV Golf offers shorter stroke play contests and a competitive team format. This April, Australia got a taste of it in Adelaide. Large, raucous crowds turned up, witnessing innovations like a “party hole” complete with terrace, bars and a DJ.

LIV lured leading golfers such as Australia’s Cameron Smith with enormous contracts, in his case worth A$140 million (US$93.4 million). In response, the main tours banned LIV-signed golfers from most of their tournaments. Inevitably, it ended up in the courts, with LIV suing the PGA Tour for restrictive practices, and the PGA countersuing for inducement to break contracts.

Peace suddenly broke out this week via a joint news release announcing the tours and LIV Golf would morph into a collectively owned, for-profit entity. This came as a shock to tour golfers in an ostensibly player-run organisation, who found out via Twitter.

Even Greg Norman – a pivotal but deeply divisive figure – was apparently blindsided and discarded.

With Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan as chair and PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan as chief executive, the so-far unnamed entity must heal some deep wounds. Golfers who refused massive LIV contracts and believed Monahan’s defiant rhetoric feel sold down the river. It will take more than boosterist words from golf’s inner circle to placate them.

Golf’s turmoil is symptomatic of the impact of huge injections of capital into sport from outside the US and Europe. It does not only come from the Middle East. The Indian Premier League, both men’s and women’s, has comprehensively refashioned the economy of world cricket.

China has invested huge sums in soccer, and Beijing is the only city to have hosted both the Summer and Winter Olympics.

But the Middle East is where commercial sport is seen as the future of a post-carbon economy. Last year, Qatar hosted the men’s FIFA World Cup and is steadily supplementing its sports infrastructure, while the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have committed large sums to motorsports and cricket.

Saudi Arabia is making the biggest impact on global sport through its A$10 trillion (US$6.7 trillion) Vision 2030 plan to diversify its economy under leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (also known as MBS).

Money and image

Human rights come to the fore every time such non-Western countries host a major sport investment or buy a major sport property. A 2021 report by human rights group Liberty found Saudi Arabia had recently invested more than A$2 billion (US$1.3 billion) in sport. Much more since has been spent on sports such as football, golf, motor racing and cricket.

In the world game, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund bought English Premier League club Newcastle United, and has recruited superstars such as Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema to the Saudi Pro League.

The sight of a laughing FIFA President Gianni Infantino seated alongside MBS at the Qatar World Cup opening ceremony fuelled suspicions that the kingdom’s bid for the 2030 men’s World Cup has the inside running.

Sport investment is clearly part of the country’s economic agenda, but also its political positioning. Such sportswashing is a method used by illiberal regimes to cover up the ugly face of repression. Despite some loosening of controls over women in Saudi Arabia in areas like driving cars, MBS undermined his claim to be a moderniser when 81 people convicted of crimes ranging from murder to “monitoring and targeting officials and expatriates” were beheaded on one day in March 2022.

Critics of the sportswashing concept argue that it’s imprecise, and moreover is a routine feature of national and corporate public relations all over the world. It is also used selectively, despite countries like Australia having their own deficient human rights records regarding First Nations peoples and refugees, and trading freely with repressive nations.

But sport attracts greater scrutiny because it is carried on television screens, not container ships. This profile was clear when Infantino was forced, after an angry response by players, to abandon plans to make Visit Saudi a major sponsor of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Saudi tourism may have missed out this time, but Saudi capital will continue visiting many more sports and countries.

David Rowe, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Research, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

According to a report by Bloomberg on Monday, Savvy Gaming Group, a subsidiary of the kingdom’s sovereign Public Investment Fund (PIF), is seeking not only game projects to acquire, but also to develop and publish its own.

“We are now more of an e-sports company than a games company,” Savvy Gaming Group CEO Brian Ward was quoted as saying. “What we’re doing this year is focusing more on game publishing and development. We would like to use those investments to begin to work with these companies and ask how we can work together on publishing in [the Middle East and North Africa], run their esports businesses or develop new IP together.”

Savvy has already made multibillion-dollar investments in gaming giants such as Tencent, Activision Blizzard and Nintendo. It is the largest outside stakeholder in the latter, having increased its stake in February, and now owning 7.08 per cent, up from 6.07 per cent at the start of the year. It also has taken over two of the largest e-sports brands.

Luke Stephens Live: “Saudi Arabia Investing $37 BILLION In Gaming”

In September 2022, Savvy announced plans to set aside $13.3 billion to acquire “a leading game publisher to become a strategic development partner.”

Responding to accusations of “games-washing” to improve the kingdom’s reputation and human rights violations, Ward said, “We have on our executive team members of the LGBTQ community and women… [and the company would] absolutely hire an LGBTQ or Jewish person to lead a game studio in Saudi Arabia.”

Via Middle East Monitor .

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

(The Conversation) – Boxing purists may argue over the sporting value of a fight between a reality TV star and a former YouTube prankster. But the commercial value of the massively hyped event in February 2023 was clear for both the contestants (Tommy Fury and Jake Paul shared a prize purse worth over US$13 million (£10.7 million) and the country which staged it – Saudi Arabia.

For while Qatar’s hosting of the Fifa men’s World Cup grabbed the world’s attention in 2022, its larger, noisier neighbour is now muscling in with even bigger sporting plans.

Saudi Arabia’s financial might – and the level of its ambition – are like Qatar on steroids. The kingdom is widely expected to launch a joint bid for the 2030 Fifa men’s World Cup, and is desperate to increase its presence in international sport.

So far, it has been pretty successful. In football, Saudi Arabia was recently chosen to host this year’s Fifa Club World Cup and will stage the Asian Cup in 2027. The country’s tourism authority has also reportedly signed a deal to sponsor this year’s Fifa women’s World Cup in Australia.

Then there is the ownership (via the country’s sovereign wealth fund) of Newcastle United FC, and suggestions that Saudi Arabia was interested in bidding for Manchester United and Liverpool. One of football’s most famous stars, Christiano Ronaldo, is currently playing for the Saudi Arabian club Al Nassr, where he is said to earn around £500,000 a day.

Away from the football pitch, there were rumours of a Saudi-backed bid to buy Formula 1, as well as interest in wrestling, cycling and golf.

The scale of Saudi Arabia’s investment is clear enough. But it is worth remembering that this hugely expensive outlay is not for reasons of vanity or largesse. It is a carefully constructed strategy in response to the kingdom’s pressing economic, political and social challenges.

Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (commonly known as “MBS”) understands the value of sport being deployed as a policy instrument to secure the long-term future of the Gulf state.

For while Saudi Arabia has vast wealth at its disposal (its wealth fund holds assets worth over US$600 billion, much of it is derived from oil and gas. And as the world strives to move away from carbon fuels, the Saudi economy finds itself overspecialised and exposed to risk.

Investing in sport overseas is one way of addressing this vulnerability, and diversifying the economy. But it is the scale of Saudi Arabia’s domestic spending on sport that sets it apart, as seen in the construction of Qiddiya, a sport and entertainment mega project designed to attract inward investment and overseas tourists.

The transformation process is also political. At home, the Saudi government continues to be mindful of events across the Arab world that led to popular protests in 2010 and 2011. With almost 70% of its population aged under 35, fears of social unrest are tangible and real.

By focusing on the promotion of sport, entertainment and leisure, MBS and his officials are specifically addressing the interests and demands of Saudi Arabia’s young consumers as a means of averting disaffection among them.

Through the likes of Newcastle United ownership and a stake in the McLaren F1 team, Saudi Arabia is also seeking international legitimacy and wants to project soft power and build diplomatic relations.

Fitness levels

Public health is another issue in Saudi Arabia, with increasing levels of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. As is the case in many other countries, sport is being deployed as a policy instrument to encourage a healthier lifestyle.

The use of sport across all these issues, combined with the scale of state spending on it, is not without its critics of course. Domestically, more conservative members of the population remain concerned about the changes that have been instigated, such as allowing women to participate. Others have noted how large state influence on economic activity stifles creativity, enterprise and overall growth.

Internationally, Saudi Arabia is regularly accused of sportswashing its way out of human rights concerns – an attempt to distract from regular executions, the war in Yemen and the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Others contend that, despite the country’s supposed transformation, the rights of women and girls are still being denied, and that dissidents are being suppressed.

Yet within the kingdom there is considerable excitement about the country’s emerging status as a sporting superpower – and MBS looks unlikely to stray from the path he has set. The country’s considerable spending power makes it appear certain that Saudi Arabia will soon become one of the biggest players in international sport, delivering a knockout blow to the kingdom’s many critics.

Simon Chadwick, Professor of Sport and Geopolitical Economy, SKEMA Business School

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Human Rights Watch ) – Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is attempting to “sportswash” the country’s egregious record of human rights violations through a new global golf tournament that begins later this month.

The Saudi-funded LIV Golf’s 2023 tournament will kick off on February 24 in Mexico and then move to Arizona, Florida, Australia, Singapore, Oklahoma, Washington DC, Spain, the United Kingdom, West Virginia, New Jersey, Chicago, Miami, and Saudi Arabia with the championship taking place in Jeddah on November 3.

The Public Investment Fund (PIF), controlled by Saudi Prime Minister and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, known as MBS, owns a reported 93 percent controlling share in LIV Golf, raising serious concerns about the role the league may be playing to burnish Saudi Arabia’s image to “sportswash” ongoing abuses committed by Saudi authorities.

While the kingdom hosts these glamorous events, the Saudi government has intensified the crackdown on peaceful dissent and ramped up executions. Many Saudi activists and dissidents remain on trial or in prison receiving long sentences and some tortured.

Court documents reviewed by Human Rights Watch reveal that in 2017, one of MBS’s advisers ordered Yasir al-Rumayyan, then the PIF’s “supervisor,” to transfer 20 companies into the fund as part of an anti-corruption campaign. It’s possible these companies were “transferred” from their owners without due process. One of the companies transferred to the PIF was Sky Prime Aviation, a charter jet company that owned the planes used by Saudi agents to travel to Istanbul, where they murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate.

Professional golfers listed as participating in the 2023 tournament include Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson, Cam Smith, Sergio Garcia, Abraham Ancer, and Carlos Ortiz.

Human Rights Watch wrote to LIV Golf in August 2022, urging the league to develop a strategy to mitigate the risk of laundering the reputation of the Saudi government. There has been no answer or indication that LIV Golf sought to develop such a strategy.

The Crown Prince is rolling out ever more sporting events: sponsors should insist on human rights protections and disclosure and use LIV Golf events to demand human rights reforms. 

Via Human Rights Watch

( Tomdispatch.com ) – The echoes still linger from that national sigh of relief last month when Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, slammed into cardiac arrest during a game on January 2nd, was declared out of danger. It was a justified sigh. A vibrant young life had been spared.

But was that really what the nation was relieved about? If football fans had been so invested in the health and safety of the players, why were some 23.8 million of them watching that game in the first place?

By now, everybody should be aware of the incremental deadly damage inflicted on players’ brains in any game, so why will 200 million or more of us be watching the Super Bowl on February 12th?

That may be one of those unanswerable “Why do fools fall in love?” questions, but just thinking about it seems like a worthwhile exercise in everyday sociology. So here are my questions in response: Is it because we’ve evolved into people indifferent to the pain of others? Or maybe because many of us, as part of an evolutionary survival response, are hardwired to enjoy violence?

And while I’m at it, let me ask you one other question: Should we do something about it — like cancelling football?

Jacked Up

I think most of those who saw the Hamlin hit and heard the news about his recovery were sighing with relief not for him but for themselves, given the guilty pleasure of watching someone “jacked up” — an old ESPN phrase all but banned these days but still descriptive of one of football’s major thrills and horrors. I doubt anyone was rooting for an actual kill shot. Still, I suspect that, however unwittingly, many viewers were longing for the sensation that might accompany one, followed quickly by the usual cathartic release of a player lurching back onto his feet and being helped off the field, while giving his teammates a thumbs-up. (I’m okay, bros, so you’re okay, too!)

But is everyone really okay, especially us spectators? And what, if anything, happens next? A day after the Hamlin hit, a talk-show host asked me what I thought might result from Americans viewing the prospect of death in such an up-close-and-personal fashion on their favorite TV show.

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Just more talk, I replied, and then added, perhaps a little too quickly and glibly, “Ask me again after the next school shooting.”

I heard a reproving grunt, but there was no time left to unpack that remark. Now, weeks later, it seems obvious to me what I meant. As with mass shootings, whose aftermaths are similarly riveting to TV viewers — by the time you read this, there will have been more than 50 of them since Hamlin went down that day — nothing meaningful is ever proposed to truly diminish the violence.

And I do wonder what erosion of the spirit takes place when nothing is done time after time after time, whether we’re talking about those never-ending all-American slaughters (and the guns that go with them in the most weaponized country on the planet) or football’s endlessly commercialized brutality. I also can’t help wondering what normal has come to mean to us? Little surprise, then, that the war in Ukraine is beginning to seem like a distant geopolitical video game rather than an immense human tragedy.

Whatever righteous chatter went on after the Hamlin hit, it mostly had to do with chastising the sportscasters of that Monday Night Football game between the Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals because they kept wondering aloud whether it would resume or be rescheduled. Granted, they weren’t exactly sensitive to the immediate crisis, but beating up on those particular barkers seems unfair. After all, what message has the National Football League (NFL) ever broadcast other than the game uber alles, whether it came to assassinations or brain injuries?

It took NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell an hour even to announce that he was postponing that game (which was, in fact, never resumed). By that time, it seemed obvious that the players and coaches had made their own decisions: they were too gutted to keep playing.

Turning Point?

I’ve also wondered if that specter of sudden death could become a turning point in the history of what’s arguably America’s most popular and perilous pastime. Might it serve as a “wake-up call” that could lead the game toward safer conditions or, as we head into the latest Super Bowl, will it simply confirm three already existing lines of thought: that we accept football as inherently dangerous; that its danger actually enhances its reality as more than a game (and the thrill of it all); and that we need to embrace that danger or risk the loss of football’s importance in a society in which so many men increasingly feel they’re losing ground to women.

The obvious fact that few women play on male high school or college teams and none in the NFL is critically important to its allure. Count on one thing: there will be female Seal team snipers before a woman will be allowed to take a televised Hamlin hit on a football field.

That the Hamlin hit itself was not spectacular only added to the aftershock. In fact, it looked all too routine. The 24-year-old safety had just positioned himself to stop Tee Higgins, the Bengals ball carrier, when Higgins ran into him, ramming his helmet into Hamlin’s chest. That hard hit, doctors have since speculated, triggered commotio cordis, a rare event in which the heartbeat cycle is knocked off rhythm. Oddly enough, such a result would be more likely in baseball or lacrosse if a struck ball directly impacted someone’s chest wall. Commotio cordis can indeed be fatal in rare cases if the blow lands precisely in the vulnerable instant between heartbeats, which is what seems to have happened here.

Hamlin fell backward, got up, then collapsed like a broken toy.

Medical personnel quickly swarmed onto the field and started administering CPR. His Bills teammates and then the Bengals, too, began to close ranks, embrace, hold hands, pray, even cry. They knew it was serious and were undoubtedly reminded that it could have happened to any of them. It surely brought their worst fears to the surface, the ones they normally are in denial about.

As Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post pointed out soon after that hit, such violence is, in fact, baked into the game in a way that’s almost too routine to pay much attention to most of the time. As she vividly described it:

“You want to feel what NFL players do on an average play? Run full speed into a wall mirror.

“And while you’re lying on your back trying to regain your senses, consider the following math problem: Two large NFL players, who cover 40 yards in less than 4.5 seconds, collide, causing each to decelerate to zero. Roughly how much force do they — their skin, their bones, and their organs — endure on just a single such play?”

The college and professional players willing to endure such regular pain and damage for love and/or money, understand that possible injury or even death underpins the very reality of football. In fact, in some gruesome fashion, that’s what makes football seem authentic. It transforms players into valiant avatars of manhood instead of glorified stuntmen or, as in most sports other than the martial arts, merely entertainers who might still get hurt if they didn’t watch out.

Does Football Equal Manhood?

In fact, that very connection of football to manhood, whether you’re talking about the toxic masculinity critics decry after every varsity-related rape allegation or the mythical traditional heroism trumpeted by the sport’s boosters, has been critical to its success. The NFL sells the sport as a symbolic, vicarious version of warfare, something particularly significant for a male population that no longer faces obligatory military service (at a time when that same military has become at least slightly more welcoming to women). And don’t forget the way the sport helps contain the nuclear energy of millions of teenage boys. The image of them running loose through the slums and small towns of America has surely helped facilitate the approval of so many high-school football budgets. In later years, those tamed youths never seem to lose their sentimental attachment to the father figures who taught them obedience to authority and the supposed values of inflicting and absorbing pain on the field.

Such feelings were evident among the millions of fans who followed Hamlin into intensive care and thrilled to his first reported words to his doctors when he regained consciousness (written because he was intubated): “Did we win?” And they were no less satisfied when he could again speak to his teammates, even if from his hospital bed. “Love you, boys,” was what he said — the perfect words for the hero of the story. It was a week before he could be moved from Cincinnati back to a hospital in Buffalo, nine days before he could go home with internal damage that will require a long rehab. In the weeks that followed, his popularity became monetized and his personal charity, which reportedly had raised only modest thousands of dollars, soared into the millions in a few weeks.

Too bad that money wasn’t for him. Like many players who get seriously injured in their first years in the NFL, Hamlin’s contract undoubtedly isn’t set up to cover long-term benefits or a pension, which means he may be way underinsured for what could lie ahead.

The Inspirational Narrative

Damar Hamlin had been a fringe second-year player on the Bills who blossomed when he suddenly replaced an injured starter. His emergence coincided with the team’s spectacular season. It ended three weeks after that hit with the spectral presence of Hamlin waving and making a heart with his hands from a snow-dusted luxury box window as the Bengals beat the Bills in the playoffs, sinking their Super Bowl dreams.

Nevertheless, the narrative remained inspirational, focusing on the NFL’s quick medical response and Hamlin’s “miraculous” recovery.

As the Nation‘s Dave Zirin noted in his Edge of Sports column, however, this is anything but

“a feelgood story. It should be an opportunity to discuss how players are often treated as expendable extensions of equipment and not as human beings. It should be an opportunity to debate the sport of football itself and whether it is safe for human beings to participate in it… Instead, they want us to discuss how inspirational Damar Hamlin is for his teammates and for fans across the country. But a near-death experience should never be seen as joyous, and it is a revelation of the NFL’s nihilism that this is the product they are expectorating back at us.”

Okay, so where do we go from here? Has the time finally come to make a choice, as you should have done with your other indulgences? You’ve quit tobacco and probably should quit alcohol. Now, as the Super Bowl looms, is it time to turn your back on football? Or would you prefer to “man up” and leave any qualms about its violence in the dust of (all too recent) history. Will you embrace it as who you are and what you want?

I know which way I’m heading — I’ve been heading there for a long while. In all honesty, I think there’s no middle way, no way to keep watching the game as a witness with reservations or to pretend to be a concerned sociologist rather than one of its enthusiasts. Sorry, it really is time to either get over it or get out.

These will, of course, be individual decisions because there’s simply too much money involved in the sport to expect positive public-health decisions by the government (local, state, or federal). After all, entire cities are held hostage by stadium deals; international media companies are under contract for years to come; and the interlocking business and personal relationships of several dozen billionaire Republican team owners rule the roost. Perhaps the most telling proof of football’s long-term power is the way it’s made its financial peace with the gambling industry. Sixty years ago, several of the league’s biggest stars were suspended simply for betting on games. How quaint that now seems, as the NFL has bedded down with that industry to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

So, calls for the banning of football would be a distinctly quixotic gesture designed to make us feel righteous and nothing more. Skip it. Even demanding radical reform by softening the game through rule tweaking to turn it into the equivalent of flag or touch football is now unimaginable. Besides, the NFL is ahead of you on that. In its support for the no-tackle game of flag football lies the same capitalist foresight that alcohol and tobacco brands showed when investing in the marijuana industry.

But all is not lost. If we’ve learned anything from football, it’s that trying harder, playing hurt, and never giving up is the essence of the sport. The game, they like to say, is never over till it’s over. Beyond turning your back on football, the single most significant thing you can do is to keep your kids from playing the game, not just to protect them but also to pinch off the pipeline of more fungible bodies, even as the far safer alternative of soccer waits on the sidelines. (Forty years ago, I wouldn’t allow my son to play high-school football and he’s still not happy about that. Tough.)

Otherwise, you can just accept the seeming consensus that football reflects American values of aggressive domination as surely as America refracts football into a model of muscular Christianity — and (as indeed I will) without significant shame or guilt enjoy the Super Bowl, sometimes a great game, but never one to die for.

Copyright 2023 Robert Lipsyte

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I’ve known Bob Lipsyte for so many years and I’ve always loved his work. Today, I thought I’d remind you that, for a $125 contribution to this website ($150 if you live outside the U.S.), you can get a signed, personalized copy of his book SportsWorld: An American Dreamland and lend a much-needed hand to TomDispatch. As Gay Talese said of it: “Brilliantly written and sharply articulated, this classic text is an insightful and important journey into the heart of American sports and by extension, American society.” Nation sportswriter Dave Zirin called it Lipsyte’s “underappreciated masterpiece. Ahead of its time in every way. Nothing less than the most important sports book ever written.” With that in mind, just visit our donation page and go for it! Tom]

Via Tomdispatch.com