Big Oil Has Spent $5.6B in Global ‘Sportswashing’ Sponsorship Deals: Report

Fossil fuel companies are spending billions on sponsorship deals with some of the world’s biggest sports entities in an attempt to ‘sportswash’ their role in climate change.

Manchester United’s new part-owners Ineos, FIFA’s primary sponsor Saudi Aramco, and Ferrari’s century-long partner Shell are among fossil fuel giants that are using their deep pockets to distract from their role in fuelling the climate crisis, according to new analysis.

The world of sports has been acutely impacted by global heating, yet the biggest perpetrator of climate change is sinking its teeth into this industry through sponsorship money to “buy social licence to operate”, the authors from the New Weather Institute (NWI) say.

The fossil fuel sector is responsible for 75% of all emissions, but some of the industry’s biggest operators are injecting funds into popular sports teams and athletes to “divert attention from their role in fuelling the climate crisis and harming human health”, a practice dubbed “sportswashing”.

NWI looked at 205 active sports deals involving Big Oil, dating back to 2011 and amounting to $5.6B, though the authors noted that there may be many undisclosed agreements. Of these, only 41 came attached with a monetary value, underlining the lack of transparency in these sponsorships.

The Big Four sportswashers and their largest beneficiaries

Titled Dirty Money, the report identified Saudi Arabia’s national oil company Saudi Aramco, British petrochemicals giant Ineos, London-based oil major Shell, and French oil producer TotalEnergies as the Big Four sportswashers, together responsible for nearly $2.9B in sponsorship deals.

Virtually no major sport remains untouched by Big Oil, with sportswashing penetrating everything from football, motorsports, rugby union, tennis and cricket to golf, ice hockey, badminton and athletics.

Football benefitted from the highest number of deals, with 59 active agreements worth $994M. But motorsports sponsorships had the highest value, with 40 deals bringing in $2.1B.

Saudi Aramco, the world’s most profitable company, is also the biggest sportswasher, involved in 10 deals worth $1.3B, including a $100M partnership agreement with FIFA. The corporation is responsible for 4% of the world’s emissions since 1965.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos, meanwhile, has poured in $777M across seven deals. Its partners span New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team, the Mercedes F1 team, and football club Tottenham Hotspur.

With deals like a seven-year partnership with the Africa Cup of Nations (a football tournament) and the official sponsorship of the 2030 Rugby World Cup, TotalEnergies is involved in 12 active agreements that have a cumulative investment of $340M.

And finally, Shell is the most engaged of the so-called Big Four, with 12 active deals and a total financial commitment of $470M. This includes its long-running deal with Ferrari (which began in the 1920s), an eight-year sponsorship of British Cycling, and a partnership with the New Orleans Saints American football team.

“Air pollution from fossil fuels and the extreme weather of a warming world threaten the very future of athletes, fans and events ranging from the Winter Olympics to World Cups,” said NWI co-director Andrew Simms. “If sport is to have a future it needs to clean itself of dirty money from big polluters and stop promoting its own destruction.”

The Gulf is engulfing the sporting world

The report also looked at fossil fuel giants’ investments in individual athletes. Sports superstars like Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua have been “successfully recruited” to spend time in the Middle East as part of sponsorship deals.

These players have carry huge influence – 15 of the 20 most-liked posts on Instagram were from sportspeople, with Ronaldo and Messi alone making up 14 of those. The former currently plays for Al Nassr, which is based in Riyadh, while the latter has been an ambassador for Visit Saudi in a three-year, $25M deal.

Gulf States – and particularly Saudi Arabia – are stepping up their pursuit of sports sponsorships. The country scores eight out of 100 in the Freedom of the World report and is among the world’s highest greenhouse gas emitters. Saudi Aramco ranks in the bottom 10% of the Climate Action 100+ companies, with only 13 others lobbying more actively against climate policy, the report says.

Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, said last year: “If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by 1%, then we’ll continue doing sportswashing.”

“Fossil fuel companies are seeking to associate their product, whose air pollution alone is estimated to kill over five million people a year, with sport’s immense social capital and positive health impacts,” the authors write. “They do this for many of the same reasons that tobacco companies sponsored sport before it was largely banned – to portray themselves in a positive light and normalise their activities in the eyes of billions of sports fans.”

And this all comes before you factor in acquisition deals, which were not included in the report. The Saudi Public Investment Fund has spent $2B on the breakaway LIV Golf series and $415M on its takeover of Newcastle United, while Qatar expended nearly $230B on the 2022 World Cup. Outside the Middle East, Ineos recently acquired a 27.7% stake in Manchester United, which is worth around $1.6B.

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres recently called oil and gas producers the “godfathers of climate chaos” as he urged countries and companies to ban fossil fuel advertising. In this vein, the NWI report calls on sports organisations and governing bodies to introduce tobacco-style bans on fossil fuel sponsorships, while actively seeking more planet-friendly sources of funding and embedding sponsorship deals in ESG goals.

It also asks for full transparency on sponsors’ emissions data and climate action measures, and recommends stakeholders to conduct due diligence on donors’ climate records and screen out contributions from those not in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

“If sport is used as a billboard to promote the very companies, products and lifestyles that fuel climate breakdown, it becomes at best an obstacle to climate action, and at worst fans the flames of a heating plane,” the authors say.