Should Saudi Arabia host the Women’s World Cup?
Saudi Arabia scored a major PR victory earlier this year when it became the only bidder for the 2034 men’s World Cup, all but guaranteeing it will host the event. Not content with one World Cup, it also seems to have its eye on hosting the women’s event in 2035. The Saudi Arabia Football Federation vice-president, Lamia Bahaian, recently told Sky Sports that “everyone would be welcome” if the country did host the tournament, and people should put aside their concerns about playing there.
Securing the Women’s World Cup would be quite the coup for the kingdom. Earlier this year Visit Saudi’s attempts to be a major sponsor of the Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand were quashed after backlash from activists, who cited concerns about the country’s dreadful women’s rights record. Going from being unable to sponsor the Women’s World Cup to hosting it in just a couple of years would be a huge boon to the country’s image.
So will it happen? It certainly might. Earlier this year the Guardian revealed that Saudi Arabia has spent at least $6.3bn (£4.9bn) in sports deals since early 2021 in what many people believe is an attempt to distract from its violations of human rights. And all that sportswashing is working brilliantly. “Previously, sports figures and brands had rejected offers to engage with Saudi Arabia due to its well-documented human rights abuses,” the rights group Grant Liberty told the Guardian. “However, there has been a worrisome shift in moral stance, as lucrative deals are now being accepted despite the ongoing and deteriorating violations.”
Let’s be clear very here: the reason Saudi Arabia’s sportswashing efforts are so effective isn’t because they are particularly novel or clever. They are effective because an awful lot of people in the west are desperate to take the kingdom’s money without it being too awkward. It suits the west very well to pretend that Saudi Arabia is modernizing its attitude towards women and improving its human rights record because Saudi Arabia is a lucrative trading partner. It buys billions of dollars of weapons from the UK and the US. And, of course, it’s also the biggest exporter of oil in the world.
Because Saudi Arabia is a profitable ally, an embarrassing number of media outlets in the west are happy to regurgitate the country’s talking points about its modernization. When the country lifted the world’s only ban on women drivers in 2018, for example, American journalists fell over themselves fawning over how progressive Prince Mohammed bin Salman was. “He is emancipating women, introducing music and cinema and cracking down on corruption, in a land with 15,000 princes,” the introduction to what was essentially a puff piece on CBS’s 60 Minutes proclaimed, for example. All this as the kingdom was cracking down on the female activists who pushed for the ban on driving to be lifted and locking them up in jail.
None of this is to say there hasn’t been progress on women’s rights in Saudi Arabia. There has been – and that should be celebrated. Women were only allowed in sports stadiums in 2018, for example, and now there is a Saudi Women’s Premier League. But while progress must be recognized, there is still a lot to be troubled about. In March, for example, Saudi Arabia codified a law on personal status (charmingly it was issued on International Women’s Day) which formally enshrines male guardianship over women. While Saudi government officials described the law as “progressive” it is anything but. Per Human Rights Watch, it “codifies discriminatory practices and includes provisions that facilitate domestic violence and sexual abuse in marriage”.
The kingdom is also engaged in a draconian crackdown on free speech. Mohammad Alghamdi, a retired teacher in his mid-50s, was recently sentenced to death for tweets criticizing the country’s leadership. Guess how many followers he had? Ten. Just 10. Similarly, a Saudi woman with just over 2,500 followers was sentenced to 34 years in prison last year for having a Twitter account and for following and retweeting dissidents and activists. Allowing Saudi Arabia to host the Women’s World Cup while it simultaneously locks women up for criticizing the regime would be a shameful farce.
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• This article was amended on 18 December 2023 to clarify a reference to the Hannah Arendt prize. The ceremony planned for 15 December at Bremen city hall was cancelled when the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which sponsors the prize, and the Senate of the city of Bremen, withdrew. At the time of this article’s publication, the award had been reported as “suspended” while new arrangements were made. It later emerged that the presentation to Masha Gessen had gone ahead on 16 December at a small ceremony elsewhere.
