LeBron James’ visit to Saudi Arabia is a sports baptism

Last week, NBA superstar and Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James was spotted spending time with his business team in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There, he scouted some basketball prospects, hung out with Saudi Culture Minister Badr bin Abdullah Al Saud, and — because I don’t think anyone would fly halfway around the world just to pretend to scout the Saudi national team of training—and probably did a few other things involving food, business deals, luxury hotels, and other pursuits of the wealthy.

Just weeks after James visited Saudi Arabia joke He plays in Saudi Arabia after a series of high-profile, high-priced signings in the country’s booming football league. Over the past two years or so, the Saudis have poured as much money as they can into sports, particularly golf and football, in a bid to diversify.

For the Saudis, this pursuit makes perfect sense. If a country founded by an exploited subspecies of immigrants has a lot of liquidity, there’s no better investment than a few palms painted in a FIFA front office to bring the World Cup to town, as they did this year Just like it did in December.Rich people fly in from all over to see your petro-state at its most beautiful; Sports media pundits rave about how well you did the tournament; Everyone leaves with a big smile on their face; Local contractors take photos Belly, chubby and happy leaving the new football field have

put up.

Closer to home, imagine you are a real estate mogul in a major American city. You want what every major property owner wants: rezoning that gives you building opportunities; police to protect the value of your land; and the abolition of anything like affordable housing programs that might prevent you from finding as much housing as you could. rent. Well, guess what, the Olympics are an attractive tool for you to mask your ambitions by demonstrating civic pride and international cooperation; mention that when you support the police’s ambitious goal of having more tanks This is a joy.Or hey, if you just real Now that you have money, do you want the local government to give you money to build something? Buy a sports team and threaten to leave town! It’s the ultimate fun!

When you’re cheating, or you’re just working on building a civil society that can actually intimidate the rest of the world, sports can help you do the job. Lefty sportswriters call it “sports cleansing,” often referring to the unseemly process of hiding violence or exploitation behind the excitement of sports, using the dull buzz of fans to maintain some distance from society’s nightmarish problems.

In many ways, the Saudi royal family’s risky behavior in investing large sums of money in sports is akin to sports money laundering. After all, Saudi Arabia is one of the most repressive countries on earth, with draconian laws governing women’s lives, a deeply exploitative foreign worker program, and a penchant for capital punishment that would make Texas blush. They hand bone saws to reporters, engage in horrific violence abroad, and collude with other authoritarian regimes to manipulate oil prices. They are exactly the kind of wealthy, amoral political structure that might benefit from a good sports purge.

That is, if anyone cared in the first place. Saudi Arabia’s investments in sports are not a bid for respectability: they are simply asset acquisitions in an attempt to diversify an economy based on a single oil base. Because what else can they achieve but improve their image on the world stage? We are already tied to their vast oil reserves; they have good relations with almost every wealthy country on earth; and their royal treasury is rolling in. International affairs columnists desperately want to give these dictators the benefit of the doubt, even if they have done nothing to earn it. They have so much oil and money that the entire global monetary and political establishment just shrugs and ignores the guilt one might feel in supporting a cabal of billionaire warmongers.

President Joe Biden has sought to publicly temper his enthusiasm for U.S.-Saudi relations since taking office. Then, conflict broke out in Russia, gas prices skyrocketed, and he basically said “just kidding” and showed up at the G20 summit with the Saudi crown prince. For the first time in decades, the United States remained silent on its relationship with Saudi Arabia and its vast oil reserves, only to be rebuffed at the first sign of trouble. The Saudis didn’t do it at the Olympics, or on their fat Cristiano Ronaldo payday: they did it with sheer force, rebuffing the oil giant’s implicit threat.

After James visited Saudi Arabia last week, I saw a headline on the sports website Outkick that read: “LeBron James shows up in Saudi Arabia, presumably to sell out America.” The problem with this implication is that even though James Can Sell ​​out America, we have been sold out. Shortly after Donald Trump left office, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund paid the equivalent of $2 billion in bribes to Jared Kushner’s hedge fund, citing accusations that his father-in-law had cheated him for four years. Back to the office (hopefully).So what is LeBron James

What would the former president’s son-in-law do to damage America’s relationship with oil barons that the former president’s son-in-law couldn’t do?

If I were more gullible, I would speculate that James came to sign an agreement with the Saudi Basketball League or something. But he’s not.He is just a very rich man and going to Saudi Arabia to do deals is what rich people do because there are a lot of money Swim there. Is it cool, or moral, or right? No, of course not! Sports washing is a dirty business.But what the Saudi royal family did was not eliminate Sports washes because they are clean enough in the eyes of the most powerful people in the world. Obviously there’s an important moral reason to divest from fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but a second, less dire reason for total divestment is so that LeBron James doesn’t think of a business trip to Riyadh as just some normal rich person activity.