O&G Majors Have Dumped At Least $5.6 Billion Into Sportswashing - Racing, Football, Even Snow Sports

Fossil fuel companies pumped at least $5.6bn (£4.2bn) of sponsorship money into motorsports, football, golf and even snow sports in an effort to “buy social licence to operate”, according to a new report. Almost no major spectator sport remains untouched by oil and gas money, according to research carried out by the New Weather Institute (NWI), a climate thinktank, which traced more than 200 sponsorship deals between sports teams and the industry.

In addition, sports stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua have all been successfully recruited to spend time in the Middle East as part of sponsorship deals, the report says. It comes as concern grows about the fossil fuel industry’s increasing efforts to launder its global standing through “sportswashing” – a practice, long used by nation states, of building associations with sporting events to improve tarnished reputations. In 2023, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, said: “If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by 1%, then we’ll continue doing sportswashing.”

According to NWI’s Dirty Money report, Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, was the biggest single investor in sports sponsorship identified by NWI’s report, handing out almost $1.3bn across 10 deals. The petrochemical company Ineos was second, with $777m in sponsorship deals; Shell had sponsored sports to the tune of $470m; and TotalEnergies, France’s leading oil company, had $340m in deals.

The report said: “Fossil fuel companies are seeking to associate their product, whose air pollution alone is estimated to kill over 5 million people a year, with sport’s immense social capital and positive health impacts. “They do this for many of the same reasons that tobacco companies sponsored sport before it was largely banned – to portray themselves in a positive light and normalise their activities in the eyes of billions of sports fans.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/18/fossil-fuel-companies-sponsor-billions-in-global-sportswashing-deals