According to this study called “Dirty Money: How Fossil Fuel Company Sponsorships Pollute Sport”, football, motor sports, rugby and golf are the most sponsored with backers such as the Aramco groups ($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.
205 agreements signed
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 fan zones. The group had already given up in 2019 on being a sponsor of the Paris-2024 Olympic Games, following a letter from Mayor Anne Hidalgo addressed to the Olympic Organizing Committee (Cojo).
