IN NEED OF A GOOD WASH

Google the term "sportswashing" and one is inundated with bons mots from every corner of the journalistic world, images of Chelsea, Newcastle, City, of gleaming glass facades, sheikhs in pressed white robes alongside shots of bloody-nosed kids emerging from bomb craters in far-off places. There are happy faces carrying plastic pints and wearing tea towels on their heads. There are time worn images of fake money with (fake) Sheikh heads on the notes. A true cornucopia of the joyous and the hideous.

These were the images of Paris St Germain, of City, of Newcastle. These were the pictures used to show the interference in British and continental European culture by regimes in places where democracy does not exist as we know it, where the culture includes activities we deem crude and cruel, where proxy wars are waged and mealy-mouthed statements are meant to cover over cracks.  

Then something changed.

In one fell swoop, the images began to portray good old Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea owner who has had an easy ride in West London for the last 20 years, of bomb-wrecked European cities and lines of refugees heading away from places that some of us have travelled to in order to watch football matches. This was different, the argument goes, the horrors brought close to us courtesy of Vladimir Putin's skewed visions of Imperium.

Metalist Stadium, Kharkiv, 18th September 2019 before Shakhtar v City. Photo by Mike Hammond 

Our common moral compass has been tilted again. Demands are being put on us all as football supporters that we did not sign up for in our scruffy-knees halcyon days, when Colin was king and the only thing that mattered was whether you had a swap of Peter Osgood or not.

You cannot now move within a mile or two of our Premier League football grounds without being caught up in the tangled web of global geo-politics, internecine wars, labyrinthine plot and counter-plot in the thermic battle for hearts and minds. If you just like the way Kevin de Bruyne squirts a diagonal pass, you're out of luck, because, with that admiration comes profound moral and cultural responsibility. You cannot leave it at that, as Eddie Howe has found out. 

If you sidestep the isssues of Tommy Tuchel's inherent decency ("I'll definitely stay to the end of the season..."), Guardiola's smirking "war face" or Eddie Howe's kharki gunship parked up in the St James' VIP slots, you run the concomitant risk of smelling of the same used cordite as the fellows laying waste to our grand scheme of global interconnectivity in places like Mariupol and Sumy this morning.

All of a sudden the moralising of Jamie Carragher (never trust the words of a man who spits at people, my Gran would have said) and Gary Neville (fresh from a chicken-jerky of an experience at the Russia World Cup) is the go-to drip-feed for our times. We are moralised to from every corner, by cod-experts knee deep in Wikipedia clips. 

Dear @skysports I tuned in to watch a football match and listen to football analysis not listen to these two poundshop geo-political experts.

Absolute nonsense.

— Burt (@DiskoIntel) March 14, 2022

If you support one of the above-mentioned clubs in the Premier League, you are automatically lumped into a brazen group of "weaponised apologists", who mimic, copy and swallow for a living. You, apparently, no longer have a say, because you are doing the sportswashers' job for them. You are part of the Conn. Dangling your Emirati flags and wearing your tea towels, you are rinsing the blood of savage regimes and helping them become part of our everyday landscape. 

Well, yes and no. Sportswashing is a fabulous term. Washing your smalls in public is no longer the done thing. Washing your reputation through Newcastle United cannot be as simple as all that, can it? Do you want the increased scrutiny that being the owner of a Premier League club will bring you? Really? And if it is more layered, more subtle than that - which it will need to be - do the positives really outbalance the negatives, as suggested by Miguel Delaney in the Independent, itself Russian owned? 

Does the high quality, if we agree it is high quality, of the journalism in that paper also accelerate a sportswashing process?

Before their interest in Parisien football, how much was known of migrant workers' rights in Qatar? Had anyone a single clue about child camel races in Abu Dhabi before Sheikh Mansour dug into the cookie jar ahead of his trip to Moss Side? Good that we now know, but what to do with this knowledge? Stop going to the game? Take a placard (there are enough of those already)? Speak out? Insist on a statement from the team's manager? Worry about being weaponised? Feel slightly dirty?

As for Abramovich, we had heard of Russia alright. We had heard of the oligarchs and how they had split the rich pickings of the disintegrating Soviet Union for their own gain after the drunk-in-command Boris Yeltsin had let everything slip. But did any of that stop London filling its boots at every possible opportunity? Cash in hand purchases of 4 million pound Knightsbridge mansions by teenage Russian heiresses; diamond encrusted Lamborghinis ripping it up through Holland Park and every private school from Eton to Westminster lapping up the freshly ironed roubles. The owner of the Independent entering the House of Lords. We bowed, we scraped, we held the double doors open.

@sgevans

Yes, because the goal isn't just PR or something so simplistic. There are multiple layers to it. They're further embedding themselves in the infrastructure of states/culture, and even re PR - the immense benefits greatly outweigh minimal criticism.

— Miguel Delaney (@MiguelDelaney) March 15, 2022

The multiple layers referred to in the tweet above are like the shells of a Matryoshka doll. The inside of one reveals another identical to the first but smaller and so on through to the eye of the storm, where you find nothing but the same stale air on offer in Chelsea's press releases. It is perhaps more like peeling an onion, as each layer removed reduces you to tears. Perhaps Qatar are pleased with their involvement with Paris St Germain. has it balanced out positively? They're in too deep now to extricate themselves with any alacrity. 

Meanwhile the great and good have this week landed on the unlikely figure of Eddie Howe to further their arguments. It looks increasingly like poor pasty-faced Eddie is in fact the chosen conduit for the opinions of the journalists themselves, who want to hear the manager of *Newcastle United declaring the same moral code they are pushing themselves. Howe bats the not-exactly-football questions concerning beheadings in Saudi Arabia with low-beat non-sequiturs, but what is it that we actually want? Perhaps a discourse that follows a path something similar to this:

Outraged journalist: So Eddie, Beheadings. Good or bad?

EH: I thought we held our own in the first half to be fair.

OJ: But what about Saudi Arabia, Eddie. How could you?

EH: | /// begins long winding official state sportswashing speech from PIF containing various vacuous and nebulous ideas of common good, mutual gains and greater exposure to well watered golf courses \\\ |    

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Is this what we want? For Eddie Howe to be held to account for Saudi Arabia's state genocide by proxy in Yemen? For him to mirror our outrage over the global meanderings of belligerent states and statelets? Simon Bird, taking things to their logical if exhausting conclusion in the Mirror, opined, "Eddie Howe has a choice to make in the coming days which will define whether he is a man of principle or a patsy to his Saudi paymasters..."

This is the same Saudi Arabia were Boris Johnson is currently drilling for oil. Suddenly, poor Eddie is being held to greater account than the Prime Minister of the country. It's an eye-watering step or two on from arguing where to play Joelinton to maximise goal-scoring opportunities. It would even be easier to answer the Jonjo Shelvey Question than mire ourselves in this. But mire ourselves we must. Because the Independent and the Mirror have decided. We are all complicit. We have lost the ability to think independently. We spout any bullshit "our" paymasters feed us (I haven't received the cheque yet, but never mind about that). We are puppets. We are weapons. Our silence speaks volumes. Our utterances dirty the air. We are damned if we do and damned if we don't. If we open our mouths one more time, we should be carried away by hormonal chaps in ribbed rubber war suits and massive black helmets. 

   

"And that, of course, is why those who have followed Abramovich, whatever his motivation, have bought clubs. Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi and the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia have bought Manchester City and Newcastle United, respectively, partly to gain a foothold in the U.K. but also to massage the reputations of their states. That includes taking on a section of their fans as willing propaganda foot soldiers. You might think that fans would be outraged at their clubs being used in that way, venerable institutions become weapons in a tawdry game, but if an owner can provide the funds to sign the players who might bring success, anything goes...." Jonathan Wilson in Sports Illustrated, 11th March 2022  You can read the whole article here.

The beginning of the end of the simpler times