Why do we reserve the term ‘sportswashing’ for repressive regimes and not, say, Coca-Cola?

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When the new NWSL team Bay FC hit the pitch this year, women’s soccer wasn’t the only thing they introduced to San Jose. There were three things on the backs of the jerseys: a player’s name, their number, and a big logo of Sixth Street, a private equity giant with an estimated US$75-billion under management – and no obvious reason to be advertising to consumers.

This came after another private equity firm, Arctos Partners, slapped its logo on the front wing of Aston Martin’s F1 car. Like Sixth Street, which is the majority owner of Bay FC, Arctos had bought a piece of the Aston Martin team last fall, so it has a legitimate connection to the sport. Still: Why the advertising?

For some years now, sports traditionalists have been raising the alarm over what’s known as sportswashing: A repressive regime getting involved in professional or amateur sports – buying or sponsoring teams, or playing host to marquee events – in hopes that some of the reflected glory will blind people to its sins.

Gulf nations went shopping in Europe and scooped up a bunch of soccer teams, Qatar played host to the World Cup, Saudi Arabia threw away billions to start up LIV Golf. Has it made a difference to their reputations? There’s surprisingly little research on its effectiveness.

But is there a fundamental difference between the intent of sportswashing and all other sports-adjacent marketing, such as the sponsorships by banks that would rather we not talk about their ties to arms manufacturers? All advertising is designed to make people feel positively toward a product or service. As Bing Crosby crooned, “You’ve got to accentuate the positive/Eliminate the negative …”

As an industry, private equity has been gobbling up more control of the world’s economy, including the sports industry, over the past decade. Maybe Sixth Street and Arctos are just trying to get ahead of a backlash they believe is coming.

When the Paris Games unfold next month, we’ll be seeing a flurry of ads from Coca-Cola. One of the first global marketers, the company’s advertising has long cast its flagship drink as a lifestyle brand that reflects a youthful, socially connected, fun-loving, active spirit.

Coke first paired up with the Olympics in 1928, sending 1,000 cases of the stuff to Amsterdam, where it was lustily consumed by athletes and fans alike. The company’s first official Olympics sponsorship was for the 1936 Berlin Summer Games – coincidentally the ones Adolf Hitler tried to use to sportswash his hogwash theory of Aryan supremacy. (To be fair, relations between Coke and the Fuhrer were evidently frosty: A health nut, he insisted each bottle sold on site carry a label warning of its caffeine content.)

But put aside that bit of corporate unpleasantness, and you’re still left with the fact that a single 12 oz. serving of Coca-Cola alone contains more added sugar than the American Heart Association recommends adults consume in an entire day: Hardly part of a healthy Olympic athlete diet. The drink belongs to a class of beverages whose consumption has been linked to cancer, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, tooth decay, and other negative health outcomes.

Is it a stretch to suggest the company may in fact be more harmful, from a global public-health perspective, than Saudi Arabia or Qatar or any other repressive (or frankly murderous) nation? Is there a fundamental difference between Coke’s multi-billion-dollar annual global marketing spend – its takeover of the world was so profound that by the 1950s the achievement was dubbed Coca-Colonization – and Saudi Arabia throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at a bunch of golfers?

Sportswashing is in the eye of the beholder.

For years, the Women’s Tennis Association was one of the strongest holdouts against the sportswashing wave, unable to resolve the split among its members between those who believed the tour shouldn’t do business with regimes that are repressive and hostile to LGBTQ individuals, and those who argued that engagement with authoritarian countries might help change them. In April, the WTA signed a deal with Saudi Arabia. The tour’s annual finals will be held in Riyadh for the next three years.

If you’re hoping the next generation will turn the tide, there’s some bad news.

In February, Sportico published the results of a Harris Poll that asked Americans about their attitudes on the influx of Middle Eastern sovereign wealth money in global sports. The poll found a sharp generational divide – and not, perhaps, the way you might expect: While only about 28 per cent of boomers or Gen-Xers (age 43+) believed the oil money was a good thing, 61 per cent of millennials and Gex-Z (age 18-42) who were surveyed gave it a thumbs-up.

There was a similar split when fans were asked how they’d feel if their favourite sports team made a deal with Qatar (59 per cent of the younger generations were in favour vs 30 per cent of the older generations), United Arab Emirates (57 vs 28 per cent), or Saudi Arabia (57 vs. 25 per cent). For what it’s worth, those three countries are at the bottom of the Freedom in the World indicator, as measured by the Washington, D.C.-based non-profit Freedom House, which notes they are characterized by “entrenched authoritarianism.”

You can read this one of two ways, I suppose. Maybe the under-43s are naïve, and they just don’t understand how awful those regimes are. Or maybe they’re cannier observers than you think, they’ve noticed the cynicism and deadly compromises with which other, supposedly purer, countries operate, and they just don’t see much of a difference. Play on.