Sportswashing Meaning and Examples: What the Term Describes

Sportswashing means using a sports event, team or competition to improve a damaged reputation or to play down negative attention. Dictionary.com defines the verb sportswash as rehabilitating a bad reputation, or downplaying negative press, by staging or sponsoring a sports event. Human rights organisations apply the word mainly to governments they accuse of using sport to deflect attention from abuses.

The desk · Reviewed 11 October 2026

What does sportswashing mean?

Dictionary.com records the verb as first used in the period 2010 to 2015 and notes that it was modelled on greenwash. Britannica, as quoted by the Human Rights Research Center, describes the practice as the use of an athletic event by an individual, government, corporation or other group to promote or burnish a reputation, especially amid controversy or scandal.

Human Rights Watch's Minky Worden has called it a new term for a really old practice: using popular sporting events to cover up or whitewash serious human rights abuses. Wikipedia's entry adds that the practice can take the form of hosting events, buying or sponsoring teams, or taking part in a sport.

The Human Rights Research Center presents the term as modelled on greenwashing, which describes companies masking environmental harm. Its article was published on 3 October 2023 and is itself a secondary summary, so the Britannica wording above is a quotation at one remove.

What purposes does sportswashing serve, according to critics?

In a 2025 Human Rights Watch podcast, Worden described two purposes. One is domestic, rallying nationalist engagement in countries that do not hold regular elections. The other is wider, enabling large-scale abuses during preparations for an event.

These are the arguments of one organisation and not a legal test. The term is a label applied by critics, and the sources reviewed here do not contain the responses of the governments named in the examples below.

Worden said the term first appeared in The Economist; the podcast gives no specific article, so this page records it only as her statement. Dictionary.com's example sentence refers to an energy company sportswashing away images of oil-covered wildlife, which shows that the verb is also applied to corporations and not only to states.

Which examples are named by sources?

Human Rights Watch's podcast names a range of cases, from the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the 1974 boxing match in Zaire to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, the 2018 men's World Cup in Russia and the 2022 men's World Cup in Qatar. The Human Rights Research Center's 2023 article gives overlapping examples and adds the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, which it places in the period of the military junta's Dirty War.

The podcast also frames the Cold War boycotts of the 1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles Olympics as an attempt to limit Soviet sportswashing, and it lists Saudi Arabia's planned 2034 World Cup bid and its investments in LIV Golf, Formula 1, boxing, horse racing, WWE and tennis. The Research Center adds that Qatar has owned Paris Saint-Germain since 2011 and that South Africa was excluded from the Olympics from 1960 to 1992 over apartheid.

The table lists examples together with the organisation that named each one. Naming an event as an example reflects that organisation's assessment, not a finding by a court or sports body.

How has the term been applied to club ownership?

In April 2020 Amnesty International UK's director wrote to the Premier League chief executive warning that the league could be made a patsy by the Saudi government if it did not scrutinise the proposed takeover. Amnesty used the word sportswash in July 2020 when a consortium including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund withdrew from a bid for Newcastle United. Amnesty's Peter Frankental called the deal a blatant attempt by the Saudi government to sportswash its human rights record and urged a rule change so that the Premier League's owners' and directors' test properly scrutinises the human rights records of prospective buyers.

The Human Rights Watch podcast later noted that the Public Investment Fund took an 80 percent stake in the club in October 2021. Amnesty's request in 2020 concerned league rules on ownership, which shows that the term is applied to club ownership as well as to event hosting.