Saudi Arabia uses various sports to try to make itself look not horrible.

Now Saudi Arabia is coming for cricket – just another step in the grandest sportswashing campaign in history. The country is an autocratic monarchy run on the fundamentalist principles of Wahhabist Islam. Laws of ‘guardianship’ mean that women cede control of their lives to male relatives.

No that’s not the right way to put it. Women don’t cede anything, they’re not given the chance to cede anything – laws of “guardianship” mean they never have control of their lives at any time.

The legal system uses prison, torture or execution against political dissent and anyone outside proscribed sexual or gender norms. The Saudi-led war in Yemen killed hundreds of thousands. The engine driving all this is Saudi Aramco, the biggest oil company in the world, the single biggest driver of our climate crisis, source of over 4% of global carbon emissions since 1965. Its only plan for the future is to increase production.

So the kingdom wants a better reputation – not by addressing its failings, but by marketing. It has deduced that the best path is through high-profile sport, with its vast international audience and its remarkable ability to generate goodwill.

Who cares that Saudi Arabia wouldn’t recognize a human right if it bit them on the ass, they like sports. Male sports that is – obviously there’s no such thing as female sports.

Unsurprisingly the prospect of Saudi cash motivates plenty of apologists. They like to claim that criticism stems from racism, cynically using the language of equality to defend a project whose foundation is discrimination. It is true that every society has power structures that feed and benefit from inequality. It is also true that this reaches a different level when codified in law. Nations that recognised this when isolating apartheid South Africa are much less inclined to bother on gender grounds.

Reminds me of the Pharyngula commenters accusing me of “Islamophobia.”

It is that wealth, with an economy valued into the trillions, that emboldens Saudi sportswashing. Their one failure so far was sponsoring this year’s Women’s World Cup, an attempt abandoned after players and federations pushed back. This isn’t just shameless, like Aramco producing 13.6 billion barrels of oil last year while installing recycling stations for drink bottles at cricket grounds in the name of sustainability. There is something perversely aggressive about targeting events where all the competitors are women and so many are gay, as a country where their gender makes them second-class humans and their sexuality is a crime. Saudi marketers don’t care: they’re already bidding to host the 2026 Women’s Asian Cup.

It must be tricky trying to play football in an abaya and a niqab.