(Paris) Oil and gas giants fund global sport to the tune of $5.6 billion through 205 sponsorship deals, according to a study published Wednesday by the New Weather Institute, which denounces “sportswashing.”
Published at 7:08 p.m.
According to this study called Dirty Money: How Fossil Fuel Sponsorships Are Polluting Sportsfootball, motor sports, rugby and golf are the most sponsored with support from groups such as Aramco ($1.3 billion), Ineos ($777 million), Shell ($470 million) and TotalEnergies ($340 million).
The oil states of the Near and Middle East are taking up more and more space in the financing of sport, regret the authors of this study published while the summer of 2024 was the hottest ever recorded on the planet.
To arrive at their results, the authors of the study searched for all the agreements signed in sport by companies linked to fossil fuels, large emitters of greenhouse gases. They identified 205, of which only 41 specify their total amount.
To fill the data gap, the authors then made estimates based on comparisons with similar agreements whose amounts are known for the same sports category or in other sectors (electronics, alcohol, transport), from the SportBusiness database and publicly available sources.
The world of sport is no longer spared from questions from the public, politicians or athletes themselves about the impact of this activity on global warming.
Quite a symbol, in 2023, TotalEnergies, sponsor of the Rugby World Cup, had for example had to keep a low profile in the Parisian areas intended for fans. The group had already given up being a sponsor of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in 2019, following a letter from Mayor Anne Hidalgo addressed to the Olympic Organizing Committee (Cojo).
“Fossil fuel air pollution” and extreme weather “threaten the very future of athletes, fans and events from the Winter Olympics to the World Cups. If sports are to have a future, they must divest themselves of the dirty money of big polluters and stop promoting their own destruction,” Andrew Simms, co-director of the New Weather Institute, said in a press release.
