Washington Spirit partnership with Qatar is troubling


Recently the Washington Spirit announced that the club is taking part in a cultural exchange with Qatar, and that a delegation from the team left for Qatar on December 12 for a one-week stay, during which they’ll do things like tour the Qatar Foundation’s Education City, hit an event with the Qatar women’s national team, tour the National Museum, and put on a soccer clinic with Best Buddies. According to the club announcement, this is part of the United States-Qatar Year of Culture (they’re unveiling the 2021 Year of Culture logo too), and continues on from an event on February 7 when several Spirit staff and players participated in the Qatar National Day of Sport in Washington, D.C.
“Sportwashing” is a term that encompasses the use of sports to help improve the reputation of an entity with a poor reputation, usually due to things like human rights violations. Put on a gaudy international tournament where the only things the cameras see are bright, happy fans and players in glitzy stadiums, boost your rep on the world stage. Get a women’s team that often champions equality in multiple arenas to visit your country and ooh and aah over your World Cup prep, and let yourself look like a champion of quality by extension. That’s how it works in theory, anyway.
In reality, most soccer fans are probably all too aware that the 2022 Qatar World Cup is awash in allegations of human rights violations. For years, watch groups like Amnesty International have released reports about the working and living conditions of millions of migrant workers in Qatar, including those building stadiums for the 2022 World Cup.
AI has published several articles detailing the abuse of migrant workers , including unethical recruitment practices, non-payment of wages, lack of recourse for rights violations, and non-encorcement of labor laws. A Guardian investigation in 2013 revealed forced labor on a World Cup infrastructure project and conditions that “amount to modern-day slavery,” as workers had documents confiscated and the inability to leave their place of work while also amassing huge debts to recruitment agents while not being paid wages. Another Guardian investigation in 2019 said that despite laws limiting work to no more than five hours during the summer period due to high temperatures, migrant workers told the Guardian they were still being forced to work in the heat “for up to 10 hours a day.” As recently as August of this year, Human Rights Watch reported that despite some reforms over the years, wage abuse is still widespread , leading to “workers starving due to delayed wages, indebted workers toiling in Qatar only to get underpaid wages, and workers trapped in abusive working conditions due to fear of retaliation.”
Qatar also has laws that discriminate against women and LGBTQ individuals , such as not allowing women the same level of divorce rights as men, limiting inheritance by women, and generally forbidding men and women from “illegal or immoral actions” in the same section forbidding sodomy among males.
The pressures to bring more money and attention to women’s soccer are very real in an industry that (correctly) has long complained of being undervalued, and a partnership that seems to be more in the vein of publicity/diplomatic relations isn’t quite the same as taking money to slap a logo on a billboard. Similarly, I’m not going to lay the blame for this at the feet of players who are getting paid low five figures in a league where job stability is an extreme rarity, although I certainly think it’s fair to ask them to reflect on their values. But I am going to hold Steve Baldwin responsible, and I am going to say that if the club is going to do things like have a Pride Night or champion women’s sports or even believe that their workers deserve to be treated humanely, then they at least need to be aware of the extreme dissonance that arises when partnering with a country whose abuse of workers and overall human rights violations are very well publicized.

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