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English football club Manchester United is embroiled in two sticky situations right now that are splitting fans into two camps I am going to call “The Moralists” and “The Sportalists.”
The first issue is that the club, considered one of the most valuable brands in the sporting world, is for sale. For over a decade, United fans have hated the American owners who bought the club with leveraged debt and have since overseen a long period with little success on the field and a frustrating approach to on-and-off-field development. Now, however, a more ominous cloud is looming: Oil Money. The most likely buyer is a Qatari banker with close connections to the state. While such an owner would surely open the floodgates of opportunity in terms of new player signings and stadium improvements, many fans are not pleased with Qatar’s record on human rights. They accuse the Qatari owner of being a proxy for an evil government that wants to indulge in “sportswashing[*],” which is a vague term for laundering dubious behavior through the glamor of sport. It also doesn’t help that United fans have spent the last decade accusing their cross-town rivals Manchester City – who were transformed from a third-rate club into dominant champions shortly after they were purchased by Abu Dhabi oil billionaires in 2008 – of profiting off of blood money. So you have The Moralists claiming that they can no longer support the club if it’s bought by LGBTQii++-unfriendly oil barons, and you have The Sportalists excited by the prospect of ending a humiliating decade by unleashing the clubs innate financial power with additional oil-funded swagger.
The second issue is similar, but concerns a player rather than new prospective owners. One of the club’s brightest young stars, 21-year-old Mason Greenwood, who scored his first professional goal for the club at the age of 17, and who has the tools to become one of the best strikers in the world, hasn’t played for the club in a year. His girlfriend accused him of rape accompanied by an an audio recording of Greenwood making menacing threats along with video recordings of her bruises and other wounds. Criminal files were charged and Greenwood was suspended pending the outcome of the trial. A year later, and it looks like that trial is not going to happen. The charges have been dropped and the couple has reconciled. This is not stopping The Moralists, however, from insisting that Greenwood should never play for the club again, that the evidence was clear regardless of trivialities like legal conviction. The Sportalists, on the other hand, are reluctant to lose a remarkable on-field asset, especially when the team has been thin in the attacking department. Even accepting that the team is currently playing well under a new manager and has another star, Marcus Rashford, scoring for fun, a talent the likes of Greenwood is not something to be casually tossed away. Would his return stain the brand, and/or derail the current rebuilding project? Does it matter that current league leaders Arsenal are currently fielding a star with his own closet full of rape allegations albeit without criminal charges?
I don’t spend much time worrying about morality in entertainment. I am fully in the “separate the art from the artist” camp. I watch soccer to watch good soccer just like I watch Woody Allen and Roman Polanski movies for their rare artistry (and I will defend Allen against all charges; not so much for Polanski). I am a Sportalist. Maybe Sportalists are the “silent majority,” but Reddit fan groups are awash with moral superiors declaring that if either Qatari or Greenwoodian presences are allowed to sully United in the near future, it will be the end of the historic club as we know it.
Sportalists are downvoted into oblivion in the corners I frequent. The Moralists, meanwhile, argue that Qatar/Greenwood will trigger fans who are sensitive to LGBTQi++/Sex Abuse issues. News has been leaking that the Manchester United women’s team is categorically opposed to Greenwood’s return, while the men’s team is split. It’s worth remembering that some of Manchester United’s players have been friends and co-workers with Greenwood for four or more years, so it might not be as easy for some of them to cut ties so cleanly without some equivication.
Both of these issues are interesting as examples of clear moral arguments pitted against pretty clear sporting benefits, mirroring the Culture War dynamic of, depending on how you look at it, Virtue Signaling Busybodies vs.Blissful Ignorants, or, Higher Consciousness vs. Lower Desires. Wokeness vs. Commerce.
[*] About “Sportswashing:” I don’t really understand this accusation. It seems to me that by buying a high profile entertainment service, the Qataris are bringing more attention to their human rights issues rather than hiding them behind the sport. If anything, I would expect a gradual adoption of western attitudes the more the Qataris are involved with western business people in western settings. At the very least, their human right records are not likely to get worse should they become owners of Manchester United, so from a utilitarian perspective, this argument seems moot. In what scenario does Qatari ownership of Manchester United make their human rights abuses worse? Someone rich enough to buy the organization already has the resources to do whatever they want, so I fail to see how it enables increased evil. It reeks to me of a selective quest for unattainable purity, which is a form of self-destruction.
Sporting benefits...for Manchester United.
I don't know where you discuss soccer, but that's an important element imo of why "sportalists" would get downvoted in sporting spaces. If it's a Man U forum it's one thing. But if one is supporting injections of oil money on a general sporting forum (e.g. /r/soccer) then it should be expected that the vast majority of fans loathe that argument because the vast majority of fans not only don't benefit but their teams are hurt by it. Why would they support the trend?
The hatred of oil/foreign money's impact in English football is not just about morality or concern for Qataris or whoever - hell, I could argue that's secondary*- it's arguably a bad thing for the fans of every club ; even rich ones like Man U because they now need to spend more to compete with clubs that now have few financial constraints for reasons that have nothing to do with footballing success.
To say nothing of the fact that it can lead to direct cheating - e.g. Manchester City, who has faced two probes on both an English and European level for outright cheating rules designed to stop any random billionaire or sovereign state from over-spending relative to a club's finances in order to gain an advantage. Given that other, less monied clubs with worse lawyers HAVE been punished, this naturally creates a lot of resentment.
The other thing to factor in is that this sort of thing just completes the delocalization of clubs. Taking them from local entities to global conglomerates with no true loyalty - so you're more likely to end up with situations like America where clubs threaten to move at will and blackmail their cities to get enticements to stay. Given some of these clubs have been in these regions for a century, this worries some Englishmen.
Why does this matter to fans of other teams? Well, just recently the top teams in England almost seceded to join some new European league that would provide them with more money with none of the risks involved in the current Premier League or UEFA Champion's League (where money was divided based on performance). Doing so would have diluted the competitiveness of both leagues and potentially harmed the revenue for everyone else.
This is only true if you believe that the impact of people who have deliberately set out to counter sportwashing are a) inevitable and b) of as great a magnitude as the benefits of having someone like Leo Messi - a hero to hundreds of millions of kids- promoting your country.
Put it to you another way: what would you bet on? People hating Nike cause of sweatshops or people loving Nike cause of Jordan?
They adopt the minimal norms that allow them to do business with the West. But, precisely because they're buying in at a commanding position, they don't necessarily need to adopt the rest, especially locally (perhaps this is an unwelcome reminder to Western liberals about what the actual essential norms for global trade are and that they don't include supporting gay rights). Third World populaces are also well-practiced at adopting what they like from Western countries and leaving the rest.
There's also an argument that it causes corruption of Western values internally. If you are a moral crusader who is insistent on certain values, you must know that you have limited impact on the Saudis at home. But it must be worrisome to see even a superficial adoption of their traits in the West.
The idea that trade will make us all more similar was supposed to work in the other direction!
* Roman Abramovich is widely seen as opening the floodgates and most people hated him for the perception that he bought a title. The fact that he could be accused of looting Russia only added some support to the general resentment.
If anything, the "sportwashing" argument here serves as a convenient way to criticize foreign billionaires without actually reconsidering the basic structures that created this problem. With private ownership it's inevitable that local owners would give way to even richer foreign ones. In other countries many or even most clubs (I believe this is the case in Germany) are fan owned or owned by member associations and so one billionaire can't unilaterally do everything. This is not the case in England and nobody seems inclined to impose something like mandatory fan rule (you'd think it would be easier now, with Brexit) . So better to blame foreigners and "sportwashing".
EDIT: Annnd johnfabian said it far more succinctly. I need an editor :|
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