A study published Wednesday by the New Weather Institute association denounces a large-scale and increasingly advanced “sportswashing”. Not really a surprise, but this note has the merit of quantifying the phenomenon, observed for more than 10 years now.
According to the study, oil and gas giants fund global sport to the tune of €5 billion, through 205 sponsorship deals. Football, motorsports, rugby and golf are among the sports at the forefront, with backers such as Aramco (€1.17 billion), Ineos (€700 million), Shell (€420 million) and TotalEnergies (€305 million).
Summer 2024 was the hottest on record
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 called “Dirty money: how sponsorships by fossil fuel companies pollute sport.” And this while the summer of 2024 was the hottest ever recorded on the planet.
To arrive at their results, the authors 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.
“A threat to the very future of athletes”
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. In 2023, TotalEnergies, sponsor of the Rugby World Cup, for example, had to keep a low profile in Parisian fan zones. The group had already given up on being a sponsor of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in 2019, following a letter from Mayor Anne Hidalgo addressed to the organizing committee.
“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.
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