"When you search 'PSG human rights' on TikTok, what you get isn't an answer," said Lauren Choi, a 20-year-old student at Columbia University in the United States. "Instead, you get Ousmane Dembélé nutmegging someone, an influencer's matchday vlogs, and 30 seconds of a fan reacting to team highlights,” she added. “The results you were looking for, like the human-rights issues surrounding the club, are twenty posts down, hidden between memes and short-form videos. No information was censored, but the answer is very hard to reach."
Unflattering information about human rights, in other words, is easy to bury on social media. But the more revealing pattern among young fans is what happens when they aren't buried at all: many know exactly who owns the team they support, and what that owner has been credibly accused of, and cheer anyway. In most of these cases, the owner is the state, and the team—often referred to as “clubs” when referring to soccer teams—-are controlled by sovereign wealth funds that answer to governments.
That some fans would support the team even though they are aware of noteworthy accusations that the team’s owners are receiving is the result of what critics call sportswashing: the use of sport to improve a country's image and pull attention away from human-rights abuses, political repression or scandal in that nation. States have done it at least since the 1936 Berlin Olympics. What has changed over time, though, is the scale, the money, and the platform.
The money poured into sportwashing has been substantial. In October 2021, a consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund, bought an 80 percent stake in Newcastle United for more than £300 million. Paris Saint-Germain has been controlled by Qatar's sovereign wealth fund since 2011, and Manchester City is owned, through a private investment vehicle, by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi's ruling family and a vice-president of the United Arab Emirates. Within Saudi Arabia, the PIF holds 75 percent stakes in the country's four biggest clubs, and between the 2021-22 and 2023-24 seasons, the Saudi Pro League's estimated market value rose from about €370 million to €970 million. The kingdom has also earmarked $2.3 billion for football sponsorship alone.
The governments, however, reject the sportswashing label. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the U.A.E. describe their investments as economic diversification and sports development. The Saudi purchases are framed as part of Vision 2030, the kingdom's plan to broaden its economy beyond oil. The ownership vehicles also distance themselves from the states: the Abu Dhabi United Group, which controls Manchester City, says it is separate from the Abu Dhabi government, though documents have indicated the government manages its accounts.
For the fans these investments reach, who owns the team—and who they have been accused of harming—is rarely what defines whether they should support that team. James Park, a 19-year-old student attending UC Berkeley, could name no owner of his favorite NBA team beyond "an American businessman, I guess.” He had never heard the word "sportswashing." He said it would take his team losing, a major scandal or his favorite players leaving—not a human-rights story—to make him walk away from his top-pick team. That indifference to who signs the checks is, in a sense, the baseline: for most fans, the owner of the team is background noise.
Among supporters of Gulf-owned teams awareness runs higher, but the conclusion is often the same. Jay Nam, a 19-year-old Northwestern student who supports a Qatar-owned club, defined sportswashing readily as "when a group tries to cleanse their image through sports, like by hosting the World Cup," and knew precisely who owned his team. Choi, who supports a Saudi-owned club, did too.
Neither, though, dropped their favorite teams. "I felt uncomfortable that the owner of the club I support was violating human rights," Nam said. "But that didn't really change much, because I was a fan before they came, and they are not the reason I support the team." He added: "We just fell in love with the club, and controversies aside, that's where our love for the game comes from. A controversial sponsor or owner shouldn't change that."
That pattern—knowing, caring a little, and continuing to give their support to the teams they already committed to supporting—tracks with what researchers have found. Vitaly Kazakov, of the University of Manchester, found that fans are often keenly aware of the human-rights concerns surrounding host nations and tend to care about them, but that the "feel-good factor" of the sport usually overshadows the rest. Many people, he found, would not have known or cared much about migrant workers' conditions in Qatar had the country not hosted the 2022 World Cup—and yet, the tournament still served its purpose, because the engagement persisted even among the fans aware and against the exploitations.
If loyalty is what holds existing fans, the feed is how states reach for new ones. Those under the age of twenty-five are less likely than older audiences to watch traditional sports media and more likely to follow creators, and influencer deals, sponsored "creator trips," gaming sponsorships and livestreams have become standard image-building tools. By its own account, the U.K. agency Influencer ran 26 creator trips to Saudi Arabia for the Saudi Tourism Authority between 2022 and 2023, flying more than 300 creators and generating over 23 million engagements; citing a GWI survey, it says 60 percent of viewers reported they would consider visiting. The figures are the agency's own, and the campaign sold tourism rather than football. But it illustrates the model: rather than censor an unflattering story, flood the feed with everything else.
Some athletes, however, have found ways to reveal what the states strategized to hide by sportswashing. Esports players have worn Pride flags at competitions in Riyadh, where same-sex relationships are criminalized, and other athletes have used kit designs and pre-match gestures to convey messages of protest, LGBTQ rights, and freedom of expression — messages they cannot raise at official news conferences. It wasn’t just the athletes who protested. The Human Rights Watch, two days before FIFA was scheduled to vote for the venue for the 2034 World Cup, criticized publicly that the Saudi bid failed to commit meaningfully to key labor protections.
But sportswashing, in all its power, seems quite influential. The protests by athletes and a credible international organization remained largely symbolic. They did not move venues or rewrite contracts, and Qatar's labor record did not prevent Saudi Arabia from being awarded the 2034 World Cup host in December 2024. The documented concerns over migrant-worker exploitation and the criminalization of same-sex relationships remained as what they always had been: concerns.
The 2034 World Cup is expected to be built largely by young migrant men recruited from South and Southeast Asia. Trade unions from 36 countries have since filed a complaint with the International Labor Organization, demanding a formal commission of inquiry into labor rights in the kingdom ahead of 2034.
The children who are 11 today—few of the very people whose social media feed will be crowded by sportswashing—-will be among the prime fans in 2034. Many of the workers building the stadiums are not much older. The workers, however, are not in the spotlight, and a feed optimized for short bursts of engagement gives them little reason to surface there.