MARTIN SAMUEL: Why sport is a bigger deal to Saudi Arabia than you think

Salma al-Shehab was a PhD student at Leeds University, where she was conducting exploratory research about new techniques in oral and dental medicine and how they could be applied in her native land, Saudi Arabia.

In December 2020, she travelled there on holiday, intending to return to Britain with her husband and two children. She is now serving a 34-year prison sentence.

Al-Shehab’s crime was to ‘cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security’. She did this by following Twitter accounts of Saudi dissidents in exile, and sometimes retweeting their messages. She also appeared to support the case of Loujain al-Hathloul, a Saudi feminist activist who was previously imprisoned and claims to have been tortured for supporting driving rights for women. She now lives under a travel ban.

Al-Shehab’s initial sentence, passed down last year, was six years. Then she appealed. On Monday, as the world’s media was arriving for the heavyweight title fight between Oleksandr Usyk and Anthony Joshua, a special terrorist court changed that to 34 years. When the prison term ends, al-Shehab is banned from travelling for that length of time again. She is 34. When her complete sentence ends, she will be 102 years old.

On Wednesday in Jeddah, Ramla Ali, the British-Somalian boxer who along with Crystal Garcia Nova will feature in the first sanctioned women’s fight in Saudi Arabia on the Usyk-Joshua undercard, was asked about al-Shehab.

Ali is a women’s rights activist through her own non-profit, all-female self-defence group called Sisters Club which helps vulnerable women. She has worked for UNICEF and has agency as a model who has been on the cover of Vogue.

This week she conducted a boxing clinic for young local women — but she claimed never to have heard of al-Shehab. Ali added she supported a country that was trying to effect change for women’s rights. She even said she had seen women on Jeddah’s beaches wearing bikinis.

And, it could be said, this is what sportswashing does. It normalises, it makes extremes acceptable. If Ali did see bikini-clad women, it will only have been on a handful of private beaches. Bikinis are certainly not acceptable in public spaces.

Yet, if Saudi Arabia is attempting to clean a very problematic international profile, is sport going to succeed in that? Al- Shehab’s sentence was without precedent for a peaceful activist but, undoubtedly, it received wider attention juxtaposed with the high-profile international boxing event that will take place in the kingdom on Saturday.

Indeed, it could be argued that since the Saudis entered the world of elite sport there has been greater attention on the suppression of dissent in the country than ever before. If the aim of sportswashing is to clean the public profile, it is hard to see how the strategy works.

This week, the golfer Patrick Reed began a defamation lawsuit against the Golf Channel and its commentator Brandel Chamblee worth £623million. Reed has recently signed to the Saudi-backed LIV tour and Chamblee — a long-time critic — stated the player ‘would have no problem playing golf for Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and Vladimir Putin’. It’s quite the tirade.

Reed’s statement counters: ‘This is false because Mr Reed has never aligned himself with a tyrannical, murderous leader.’

For the lawsuit to be defended, then, the Golf Channel must argue fair comment, linking the Saudi state and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud with tyrannical repression and, no doubt, the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It doesn’t matter who wins in court, it does not matter whether the comparisons are even fair, the fact that they are made at all surely suggests very little is being polished by Saudi’s entry into the world of golf.

For sportswashing — a western term — alternatively read Vision 2030. This is the Crown Prince’s projection of his country as a modern, young, successful and vibrant society, built on a new openness to the world and a break from the conservative past, with 70 per cent of the population under the age of 35.

It will also have been inspired by seeing other Middle East states thrive through association with sport. Abu Dhabi led the way, making Manchester City a superpower and its City Football Group a smart concept others are now following. Qatar has done the same with Paris Saint-Germain and will next host the World Cup in November.

Yet is this successful sportswashing? Reputationally, Qatar has suffered through an association with corruption around the World Cup bidding process, and the appalling treatment of cheap immigrant labour used to build the tournament’s infrastructure.

As for Abu Dhabi, more significant than the acquisition of football clubs is surely its decision to align the working week with the western world, Monday to Friday, with a Saturday-Sunday weekend, breaking with the tradition across the Islamic Gulf of Sunday to Thursday, and a Friday-Saturday weekend. This shows where the United Arab Emirates wishes to position itself — with the one foot in Europe that Lebanon used to have.

Involvement in sport may make trips east part of the fabric of global competition but nobody looks at Eddie Howe’s revitalised Newcastle, and forgets the 81 executions that took place in Saudi Arabia on March 12 this year. So there is more to it.

Saudi doesn’t need to sportswash because it has influential friends just as it is. President Joe Biden visited in late July, shortly before the Crown Prince flew to Europe and was entertained by French president Emmanuel Macron at Elysee Palace. These exchanges took place post-Khashoggi, post-81 executions, and with al-Shehab already languishing in prison for spreading alleged insurrection to 2,597 Twitter followers, and 159 on Instagram.

As for Saudi’s relationship with the United Kingdom, suffice to say when the Public Investment Fund wished to apply pressure in its bid to buy Newcastle, the successful back-channelling went right to the top, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Saudi Arabia is the West’s most important ally in this region; they don’t need to buy Kieran Trippier for Newcastle to make it so.

What they do wish is that this status remains when the oil reserves are exhausted in approximately 60 years. They have seen the soft power that modernisation through sport brings. They have seen what it has done in the UAE and Qatar.

They want to be players, too. They don’t want to lose ground. Just as Abu Dhabi is envious and concerned by Qatar’s advancement, so Saudi looks at its neighbours and fears being left behind. So it is matching them, team for team, grand prix for grand prix.

It was involved in the expansion of football’s Club World Cup; it was behind the proposal to adjust the FIFA World Cup to every two years from four. And boxing is the jewel in Saudi Arabia’s sporting crown. This positioning in the region would appear to be more important than reputational cleansing.

Sportswashing is a modern concept and a modern word that is being wildly, almost glibly, applied. Most recently, it was used in connection with the 2022 Commonwealth Games, the United Kingdom indulging in sportswashing to disguise the harm done by its historic colonisation around the globe.

Yet the Commonwealth Games began as the British Empire Games in 1930 and were largely the creation of a Canadian sports writer, Ontario-born Bobby Robinson, of the Hamilton Spectator. Equally, for many of the 92 years since, Britain has expressed pride in its empire and, rightly or wrongly, considers it to have done much that is good.

The idea that the Commonwealth Games endures as a shield ignores this, just as it never occurs to those in the arrogant West that the Gulf states might think what we call subjugation is actually law and order.

World Cup hosts Qatar appear genuinely perplexed that everyone needs to be drunk in the street to watch a football match. They do not consider their own society backward or intolerant as a result.

One of the biggest problems faced by modernisers in this region is often that the general public are conservative and resistant to change. Any hint of embrace of western tolerance on LGBT issues, for instance, invariably risks a backlash.

So, sportswashing? It wasn’t so long ago that a sheik in Dubai wanted to stage the Tyson Fury-Wladimir Klitschko rematch for 120 friends on his yacht, with no broadcast or media allowed, and a purse paid from a $1m entrance fee per person. Where’s the global burnishing in that?

In many ways, Usyk-Joshua is the undercard. The real fight is for who wields most influence in the region, when the earth’s natural resources run out.

If Saudi Arabia truly cared what the West thought about crime or punishment, it wouldn’t leave two boxers to transport its message to the world.

Ukraine flag shames Cincinnati 

Not content with hoodwinking fans who bought tickets to see Emma Raducanu play Serena Williams on Monday, only for the match to be switched to Tuesday, the organisers of the Western and Southern Open in Cincinnati also confiscated a Ukrainian flag carried by a woman attending the event on Sunday.

The spectator was first confronted by umpire Morgane Lara during a match between two Russian players, Anastasia Potapova and Anna Kalinskaya. Lara then summoned a security guard who told the woman the police would arrive if she did not leave.

Later, the same security guard pursued her and insisted the size of the flag breached ground regulations — despite this not being the issue courtside.

The tournament stood by their rules in a statement, but said the conduct of Lara was a matter for the WTA Tour.

The All England Club attracted much criticism for their stance on Russian players this summer. It’s fair to say, though, they’re worth 10 of this lot.

Sorry Gary, but the BBC results weren’t for you

Gary Lineker defended the BBC decision to stop giving the classified results in Sports Report. He says he hasn’t listened to them in 30 years. 

Then again, for much of that time he’s either been playing or preparing for work in the Match of the Day studio.

The results weren’t really aimed at those sitting at Broadcasting House with 11 monitors.

This fixture is exactly the sort Liverpool need

The argument is that Liverpool at Old Trafford on Monday is the last fixture a troubled Manchester United need. Then again, the challenge could be considered counter-intuitively. 

Liverpool have nine injuries — ranging from rarely required reserve goalkeeper Caoimhin Kelleher, to midfield linchpin Thiago Alcantara — plus Darwin Nunez suspended. And Manchester United always get themselves up for a game against their great rivals, just as Liverpool did when they were underdogs in the Ferguson years. 

The one problem is that this was exactly what was said a year ago when, on October 24, United hosted Liverpool on the back of a month without a league win, including four goals shipped at Leicester. 

The result: Manchester United 0 Liverpool 5. Some teams are beyond inspiration, no matter the circumstances.

Ronaldo’s interview has been planned with convenient timing

Cristiano Ronaldo says he will reveal the truth behind a summer of fevered transfer speculation in two weeks’ time, conveniently after the window has shut. 

So if he’s still with Manchester United — where everyone knows he doesn’t want to be — Ronaldo can pretend it was all media invention, and if he’s found a way out he can advance some self-serving excuse to suggest this was the last thing he hoped would happen.

And the biggest insult is he thinks we can’t see through it.

Ofgem is a case-in-point that football’s answer is not Government regulation 

Another day, another triumph for the concept of Government regulation. Christine Farnish, a non-executive member of Ofgem’s board, has resigned, saying the body ‘gave too much benefit to companies at the expense of consumers’, as household bills start to rise by £400 annually. Never forget that Government regulation is still seen in some quarters as football’s way forward.

And what a recommendation Ofgem have been.

Tantamount to corruption if Taylor is not on a Chelsea game as soon as it is reasonable 

Let’s get one thing straight. Clubs, and managers, do not get to pick their favoured referees. Thomas Tuchel can moan and Chelsea’s fans can sign all the petitions they like. Anthony Taylor should be back on one of their games as soon as it is reasonable.

Anything else would be tantamount to corruption.