If you follow Formula 1 or the highest levels of European soccer, you’ve probably heard the phrase “sportswashing” a lot in recent years. It’s come up with the recent sale of Newcastle United as well as the addition of Qatar to the Formula 1 race calendar. The idea behind it, essentially, is that of a repressive nation using the ownership of a sports team or the hosting of a high-profile athletic event as a way to gloss over some of the less pleasant parts of the current regime.
Now, a sportswashing controversy has embroiled one of the most famous soccer players of all time. That would be David Beckham, who recently signed an endorsement deal with the 2022 World Cup — which will be held in Qatar. The event has been criticized for years already — and given that the last two men’s World Cups, in Brazil and Russia, were not without humanitarian concerns of their own, that’s saying a lot.
As The Telegraph‘s Tom Morgan reports, Beckham signed a deal to be one of the ambassadors for next year’s World Cup — all of which is “said to be worth £15 million a year,” and which could last for a decade.
Morgan’s article cites a number of branding experts who make a convincing case that Beckham’s association with Qatar — a nation where homosexuality is illegal and a copious number of migrant workers have died over the years — threatens to adversely affect Beckham’s public image. Or, as Conrad Wiacek of the analytics firm GlobalData told The Telegraph, “[B]rands may look to distance themselves from any hint of controversy.”
Beckham might be a massive presence in the world of global soccer, but he isn’t the only one — and it’s not hard to see some companies looking elsewhere in the coming years.
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