Sportswashing – you do it too

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N’Golo Kanté is best known for being one of the best box-to-box midfielders in the world. He’s second-best known for his car.

Like all world-class pros, soccer players delight in showing off their ridiculously expensive vehicles. There’s a whole YouTube genre in which they drive them into and out of whatever practice facility they do their weekday 9-to-5. Tricked-out Range Rovers feature heavily in England. Ferraris are big in Italy.

Manchester City wild man Mario Balotelli was notorious for abandoning his Bentleys around town, forgetting where he’d left them and then just getting another. Eventually, the parking tickets would tip into four figures and a club functionary would be sent to pay the bill and retrieve the lost conveyance.

Kanté is at other end of the spectrum. He drives a Mini Cooper. He bought it for less than $20,000 when he signed for Leicester eight years ago. He’s still driving it today.

At one point, he told teammates he was thinking of ditching a car altogether and jogging several miles to and from practice instead. They talked him out of it.

Kanté was an example – just about the only example – of a twentysomething athletic rock star whose head had not been completely turned around by money.

Though still youngish (32), Kanté is beset by recurring injuries. That makes a man vulnerable to approaches.

Sensing weakness, the Saudis showed up this week with a truckful of money. Kanté missed most of last season and isn’t healthy now, but they have offered him a reported $140-million a year to play at Al-Ittihad. Because Saudi Arabian residents pay no income tax, it’s as though he’s getting double that amount.

There are good reasons not to go. If he does, it’s the end of Kanté’s elite career. He may never feature in the French national set-up again. It will be the last of him as a major concern.

Then there’s the ethical question. This is sportswashing and the Saudis are handing Kanté a mop. In addition to playing, he’ll be expected to sell Saudi Arabia’s bid to play host to the 2030 World Cup.

Whenever people accuse the regime of something, someone in it will turn around and say, ‘Look at this lovely fellow over here. He’s only person in the whole country driving a 10-year-old, two-door hatchback and he doesn’t think we’re that bad.’

You’ve got all of that on one side, and weighed against it on the other all you have is the money.

Kanté has taken the money.

It’s hard to blame him. In his position, I’d take that money, too.

There’s only one type of person who can be taken seriously on this issue – one who’s been made the offer. We rarely hear from that person. Sportswashing is a conversation dominated by people who’ve never been asked to become a cleaner.

Would you take a million bucks a year to do front work for organized crime? Nothing too awful. Just paperwork.

Ask me at a dinner party and I’ll tell you an honest answer – it depends on the car allowance.

No, of course I’m not going to do that. It’s too risky. I have an elemental fear of being forced to sleep in a bunk bed.

But come by my place and show me that million in a bag and I’ll start thinking about summers on a lake somewhere. Just promise me it isn’t dangerous and that no one will get hurt. In other words, lie to me. Then we’ll see.

The amazing thing about jobs that require questionable ethics is that, despite the fact that no one you know would ever sink to doing them, they are always filled.

You don’t see the legal community out there going, ‘We’re having real trouble finding young, morally dubious types who want to make seven figures screwing over the working man. We may need the government to start a program promoting the values of evil.’

Someone will always do that job because someone was offered real money to do it, not asked a theoretical question at a backyard barbecue, thus giving them the chance to fluff their moral feathers in front of their peers.

There was something absolutely delightful about watching the way western journalists handled the most recent World Cup in Saudi-adjacent Qatar. To a man and woman, they were all appalled by the country’s record on foreign workers’ and LGBTQ rights. A million columns were written on the topic.

Did that stop any of them from going there and having a grand old time on the Qatari dime? What are you, mad? Of course not.

If you went to a pool deck in downtown Doha at any point during that tournament, it was rammed with conscientious objectors. Everyone agreed to leave their editorial stances at the door.

We are all of us shocking hypocrites. Not bad people necessarily, but morally double-jointed. Capable of bending a lot of different ways.

That’s why we want this stuff going in every which direction. We want to shake our fist at the state of things when the Saudis buy the Newcastle soccer club or LIV Golf. We also want to watch the new, vastly improved Newcastle soccer club and all the greasy goings-on at LIV Golf.

We want the players to amuse us with their Caligulan lifestyles. We also want to jeer them when they choose luxury over practicality.

We cheer the exceptions that prove the rule, when a Rory McIlroy refuses to talk to the Saudis. But it’s not St. Francis and his vow of poverty, is it? It’s easy to be principled about money when you’ve got a nine-figure nest egg. Give me just a few million and you won’t believe how principled I can be. Very, and loudly, just like McIlroy.

The rest of us are trapped between two people – the people we are and the people we think we are. We talk up the fellowship of mankind while grabbing as much as we can for ourselves. We can’t even have a cogent argument about these issues any more, because it risks making our hypocrisy embarrassingly apparent. So we yell slogans instead.

This is why sportswashing works. Because the athletes participating in it know that if they don’t take that money, a thousand others will. Even the ones criticizing them for doing it. Especially those ones.

If everyone would take the money, then it’s no longer really an ethical question, is it? It’s just a matter of common sense.