Keyword – Saudi Arabia

Varga, Tibor Szabolcs:

(E)sportswashing

Investigating Saudi Arabia’s activities in the e-sports industry

It is an emerging practice in sports that states directly buy up clubs, event organisers, media companies and international championships. They transform their control over these into political, cultural and economic capital so that they can achieve their goals of nation branding and economic diversification. The press calls this practice ‘sportswashing’: which expression is a pejorative label for non-Western sportsbased geopolitical activities in countries with a record of human rights violations. However, research on sportswashing remains problematic until it can be put into the context of the known political frameworks and be thus separated from judgments based on Western values. Hence the use of the term ‘politicalcultural funding,’ as opposed to the one burdened by value judgment, may bring useful insights in the analysis of Saudi Arabia’s expansion in the e-sports industry, which began in 2020.

Keywords: e-sports, Saudi Arabia, sportswashing, human rights