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When we talk about sportswashing, the conversation usually lands on geopolitics: authoritarian regimes using football clubs or Grand Prix races to launder their international reputation. Saudi Arabia buying Newcastle United. Qatar hosting the World Cup. China staging the Winter Olympics.
But there is a second, equally serious dimension to sportswashing that receives far less attention: the use of sport to obscure environmental damage. And the actors here are not only states. They are some of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies — and the sports governing bodies that take their money.
What is Sportwashing?
Sportswashing, in its original sense, is the use of sport’s emotional power and global visibility to redirect attention away from harmful conduct. The same mechanism that allows a government to rehabilitate its human rights image also allows a corporation to rehabilitate its environmental one.
Sport generates goodwill at a scale almost nothing else can match. When a fossil fuel company’s logo appears courtside, trackside, or on a shirt worn by a global superstar, it does not appear in the context of oil spills, lobbying against climate regulation, or decades of documented emissions. It appears in the context of excitement, excellence, and human achievement. That association is precisely what is being purchased.
Shell (one of the largest corporate emitters in history), held liable by a Dutch court in 2021 for its contribution to climate change, has spent tens of millions annually on sports sponsorship: motorsports, American football, basketball. The environmental record does not change. The public perception is managed.
Formula 1
The sport has marketed a “Net Zero 2030” target prominently across events, broadcast and brand communications. It has no binding commitment to this target, no independently audited delivery plan, and no penalties if it fails. Its “sustainable fuel” roadmap, presented as the sport’s environmental pivot, remains largely theoretical. Meanwhile, the sport continues to expand its calendar, adding races in Gulf states that pay promoter fees of $40–60 million annually precisely because hosting an F1 race in Bahrain or Saudi Arabia tells a different story about those countries to a global audience.
Gulf nations have a financial incentive to retain fossil fuels as the basis of both their economies and F1’s operations, and a reputational incentive to associate themselves with the sport’s glamour rather than their role as oil suppliers. F1 enables both simultaneously while marketing itself as a sport on a journey toward sustainability.
FIFA and the Aramco partnership
In 2024, FIFA announced a four-year partnership with Aramco — the Saudi state-owned oil company, and one of the single largest contributors to global carbon emissions in history — worth an estimated $100 million annually. Aramco is now a Major Worldwide Partner of FIFA, with full sponsorship rights for the 2026 Men’s World Cup and the 2027 Women’s World Cup. This is the same FIFA that pledged in 2021 to halve its emissions by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2040. It is the same FIFA whose Qatar 2022 “carbon neutral” claim was ruled unsubstantiated by Switzerland’s advertising regulator in 2023. And it is the same FIFA that is now asking sustainability professionals to take seriously a tournament sustainability strategy that does not address spectator travel — the source of 87% of the tournament’s projected emissions.
The Winter Olympics
The Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics was presented in many quarters as a model of environmental responsibility: 100% certified renewable electricity, reduced construction footprint, a high-profile commitment to sustainability. The IOC pointed to it as evidence that major events could be designed differently. Then Greenpeace pointed out that Eni — one of Italy’s largest oil and gas corporations — was an official premium partner of the Games. The same Eni whose annual fossil fuel emissions, according to Greenpeace’s calculations, could melt enough glacier ice to fill 2.5 million Olympic swimming pools. The same Winter Olympics whose mountain venues are being directly threatened by the accelerating glacier retreat that burning fossil fuels is causing.
What can be done?
The test for any major sporting organisation claiming environmental leadership is the same test that applies to any corporate sustainability strategy: does the commitment constrain the decisions that actually drive impact, or does it only apply to the ones that are easy to address?
When the answer to that question is honest, sport has the potential to be a genuine platform for environmental leadership. It reaches billions of people. It shapes culture. Researchers consistently find that athletes have significant influence on sustainable behaviour choices among fans. Sportwashing, in its environmental form, is greenwashing with a much larger audience. And that audience is paying closer attention than it used to.
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