Is FIFA’s sponsorship deal with a Saudi-owned oil giant really ‘a middle finger’ to women’s soccer?

Athletes’ voices are a necessity in the matrix of good sports governance, a message reinforced at last week’s annual Australia New Zealand Sports Law Association conference in Sydney, attended by some of the world’s best – and busiest – sports lawyers.

The timing was perfect.

It came just days after more than 100 professional female soccer players signed a letter to the sport’s global governing body, FIFA, urging them to reconsider a sponsorship deal with Saudi-owned oil giant Aramco.

The signatories, including five Australians, described the deal as “a middle finger to women’s football”, and “a stomach punch to the women’s game”, which has “set us so far back that it’s hard to fully take in”.

Just how it set back the juggernaut of women’s soccer was not sufficiently explained.

“FIFA might as well pour oil on the pitch and set it alight,” the authors continued. Emotional stuff.

Soccer in Saudi Arabia

Aramco has been targeted by the athlete activists because it is one of the world’s largest fossil fuel polluters contributing to climate change.

However, that message was almost lost in the two-page letter that focused far more on Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, its imprisonment of women’s rights activists, and its harsh laws against same sex relationships – which can result in the death penalty.

The players rightly referred to women’s soccer globally as providing a safe space for the LGBTQIA+ community, which in turn has contributed to the recent phenomenal growth of the women’s game.

But the authors either chose to ignore, or were not aware of, the phenomenal growth of the women’s game in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia itself, and the role it is playing in empowering women across a broad range of sectors who less than a decade ago were not even allowed to drive.

Saudi Arabia’s current 2024-2025 semi-professional women’s soccer season is underway boasting more than 200 players from 20 nations. The season features ten teams playing 90 matches at the senior level, while more than 77,000 girls play at schools across the nation.

It is easy to claim, as many have done, that this is purely an exercise in sportswashing.

But that ignores that soccer is also helping to facilitate a fast-moving cultural shift in Saudi Arabia, and the region more broadly, while being careful not to attract the attention of some of the ultra-conservative religious leaders who remain committed to the region’s more traditional ways.

One of the teams in the Saudi Women’s Premier League is the Eastern Flames. It was originally established in 2006 with players from the Aramco community.

Despite significant hurdles for women to play sport at all, the team survived and flourished and has been elevated into the professional league.

It would be interesting to know how many of the players who signed the letter to FIFA knew of the Aramco community and how, against the odds and prevailing culture at the time, they’ve built a club from the grassroots and turned it into a Super League team.

What about the LGBTQIA+ community?

“Imagine LGBTQIA+ players, many of whom are heroes of our sport, being expected to promote Saudi Aramco during the 2027 World Cup, the national company of a regime that criminalises the relationships that they are in and the values they stand for”, the letter states.

In a global sporting world, “values” often come into conflict, particularly when conversations of inclusion and religion appear in the same sentence.

While the LGBTQIA+ community is often highlighted as a group that has benefited from soccer’s inclusive agenda, it should be recognised that members of that same group inside Saudi Arabia have no doubt benefited also.

Unlike the west, though, where exhibitions of gay pride are accepted and sometimes celebrated, in conservative Gulf societies outward displays of affection by any couple or group (including heterosexuals) are forbidden.

Those inside the LGBTQIA+ community in conservative nations have warned those in the west that their public criticisms may have adverse consequences – making them a target when they needn’t be.

In their societies, sexuality is a matter for behind closed doors, away from the authority’s public gaze.

Issues closer to home

If the letter’s initial intention was indeed to raise the issue of fossil fuel and climate change, we needn’t look as far as the Middle East. There are environmental concerns worldwide, including in Australia which, with New Zealand, hosted the most recent and widely celebrated FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2023.

Earth.org recently reported that Australia’s fossil fuel exports contribute to global emissions more than any other country aside from Russia – owing particularly to the footprint of coal exports.

Australia has also been singled out for its role in what the small island nation of Tuvalu has described as a “death sentence” if Australia goes ahead with its planned fossil fuel expansion alongside other Commonwealth heavyweights, the United Kingdwom and Canada.

Many of the players who signed the FIFA-bound letter are high profile athletes from those very nations. Yet they expressed no such concerns in 2023, despite Australia’s fossil fuel industry and climate change impact.

The athletes’ voice can be a powerful tool, as history has shown. Its value though stems not from how loud it is, but how well informed it is.