How should we think about sporting events hosted by nations who have routinely engaged in gross human rights violations? Take the case of a World Cup being hosted by a country whose government has systematically detained and disappeared individuals, silenced political dissidents, and invoked national security to justify deploying the military against its own people.
The case I have in mind is, of course, that of the 1978 World Cup in Argentina.
In 1976, after several years of instability and turmoil, a military junta took over the South American country. What followed was one of the deadliest military dictatorships of the 20th century: Elections were suspended, political opposition was violently suppressed, and the state launched a campaign of terror against its citizens (the primary targets of which were students and journalists). Between 1975 and 1983, 30,000 people were forcibly disappeared. And by 1978 (the year of the World Cup), 22,000 had already been reported missing.
The World Cup parade didn’t skip a beat. Despite growing international concerns over potential human rights abuses, Argentina retained its right to play at home, and the junta quickly set to work tidying up for visitors. At first glance, the decision seems puzzling. Why would a regime in the midst of perpetrating mass atrocities invite the world’s attention by hosting its largest sporting event?
Economic incentives provide the most obvious explanation. Hosting the World Cup promises an increase in tourism, global media attention, infrastructure investment, and the prospect of enhanced economic growth. Yet this explanation sits uneasily with the Argentine case. Far from generating an economic windfall, the junta spent an estimated $521,494,931 preparing for the tournament, with little prospect of recouping those costs. So, what gives? If not economic gain, what did the regime hope to achieve?
The answer lies, at least in part, in the political value of spectacle. The World Cup offered the regime an opportunity to project an image of national unity, normalcy, and international legitimacy that stood in stark contrast to the violence upon which its rule depended. That contradiction reached its fullest expression in the tournament’s final game between Argentina and the Netherlands. On June 25, 1978, Argentina took the field before a capacity crowd, defeating the Dutch 3–1 after extra time to claim the country’s first World Cup title. The victory unleashed scenes of national celebration across Argentina and was heralded internationally as the crowning moment of the tournament. Yet the match itself was played in the Estadio Monumental, located only a few blocks from the Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), one of the junta’s most notorious clandestine detention and torture centers. While hundreds of thousands celebrated Argentina’s triumph, prisoners inside ESMA were being tortured by the very regime whose victory the world had gathered to applaud.
The contrast between these two images exemplifies what has come to be known as “sportswashing’: the strategic use of sporting events to reshape the public image of a state. Sportswashing operates by borrowing the symbolic prestige of international sport. By hosting events already associated with peaceful competition, hospitality, and international cooperation, governments invite audiences to transfer those associations to the host state itself. In Argentina’s case, the World Cup thus allowed the junta to present the nation as a legitimate participant in an international community organized around precisely the values its own political practices violated.
Sportswashing, however, is hardly unique to Argentina. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, authoritarian governments have repeatedly turned to international sporting events to rehabilitate their public image. The paradigmatic example remains the 1936 Berlin Olympics, hosted by Nazi Germany. In preparation for the Olympic Games, the Nazi regime temporarily removed antisemitic signs from public spaces, relaxed the visible enforcement of anti-Jewish policies, and carefully staged Germany as orderly, peaceful, and welcoming to foreign visitors. Fascist Italy employed the 1934 World Cup somewhat differently. Rather than concealing fascism, Mussolini transformed the tournament into a celebration of the regime itself, surrounding the competition with fascist ritual and presenting Italy’s eventual victory as evidence of national strength and political vitality. More recently, Russia’s 2018 World Cup projected an image of efficiency, hospitality, and international engagement despite mounting criticism following the annexation of Crimea, while Qatar used the 2022 tournament to present itself as a modern, globally connected state amid sustained scrutiny of migrant labor conditions, allegations of corruption in the bidding process, and restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights.
In each of these cases, authoritarian governments used heavily curated sporting events to sanitize—and thereby legitimate—their public image. Where the World Cup serves this function, a further question arises: How ought spectators respond? Might there be a moral case for boycotting the tournament?
Let us understand boycotting as involving the intentional abstention of one party (be it collective or individual) from interacting or cooperating with another party. As Linda Radzik notes, we can distinguish types of boycotts by identifying who is withdrawing, what forms of interaction a party is withdrawing from, from whom they are withdrawing, and why they are doing so. In this piece, I will focus on boycotts carried out by private individuals as a response to acts of injustice.
For a boycott to have moral force, it is important that those who are boycotting would be otherwise willful participants or consumers of the product or event that is being boycotted. I will have more to say about this shortly.
I think the moral case for boycotting the World Cup is intuitive. Faced with injustice, we have a dual obligation not to participate and to intervene to stop it. Regarding the first of these, there is a case to be made for the existence of a moral duty not to support the endeavors of an unjust regime, regardless of whether we are subject to its laws or not. We might fulfill this duty by abstaining from traveling to that country or from buying products exported from there. The existence of such a duty will be grounded on a more general duty not to support evildoers—either an individual or a larger corporation. We may, for example, have a duty to abstain from buying at a store that exploits its employees.
The boycott of the World Cup does not stem from the fact that the event itself is unjust (although there is much to be said about how some countries—e.g., Russia or Qatar—secured their bid as hosts). Instead, insofar as countries involved in committing acts of injustice use the World Cup (or other sporting and cultural events) to boost their image in the international sphere with the hopes of attracting potential foreign investors or placating international criticism regarding their unjust practices, boycotting the World Cup is precisely meant to avoid aiding that country in achieving its aims.
We also have a duty to intervene when an injustice is taking place. Although this second prong of our dual obligation concerning injustice is admittedly more controversial, I nonetheless think that a case for it can be easily made. Let’s think about it in the following way. Imagine that a man who we know has committed a particularly grave crime is receiving a lifetime achievement award for his performance in a particular industry. We might reasonably conclude that this award is an opportunity to clean up his image before the general public—by drawing our attention to his professional achievements, he is thereby hoping to distract us from the accusations raised against him. Once again, we need not conclude that the award itself is unjust but rather that in this case it is being used as a mechanism by which this person is attempting to hide or mitigate the fact that he is a criminal. By refusing to attend the award ceremony, we are not only withdrawing our cooperation in his effort to clean up his image; we are also taking positive steps to interrupt this effort. We can do this even if the award ceremony takes place without hiccups. Fundamentally, boycotting also includes communication to the general public. As Radzik tells us, “Boycotters announce their activities and their moral criticism to the general public. This publicity typically attempts to persuade more people to join the boycott.” In this way, boycotting functions as a form of counterspeech, that is, as a form of communication that attempts to counteract the potential harmful effects of another speech.
Given that sport events like the World Cup or the Olympics are platforms for repressive regimes to present a friendlier image to the world, thereby distracting the general public from the various acts of repression, oppression, and persecution taking place, boycotting can have the effect of shining a light on the practices that such a regime wants to distract the international community from. In this way, boycotting is not necessarily intended to harm the host’s economic gains or its ability to host the event. We should instead see boycotting as a form of protest intended to raise awareness about the injustices taking place in the host nation and counteract the harmful effects of sportswashing.
Although the case for boycott may strike us as intuitive, matters are significantly more complex than initially assumed. For starters, most fans cannot attend the World Cup in person, even if they want to. Although much has been written about the exorbitant prices for this year’s World Cup, previous editions’ tickets have not been cheap, either. Taking into account the fact that a ticket to a World Cup match does not include plane tickets, lodging, or food, most people simply choose to watch the event on the TV. So, could a person actually claim to be boycotting the event if they did not plan on going anyway? Surely not. It also does not make a difference if a person wanted to go but couldn’t afford it. If boycotting is to have any moral force, a person must be boycotting an event that they were originally planning to attend and were able to afford. Otherwise, boycotting would be no more than a euphemism for self-righteous virtue signaling.
We might say, then, that the case for boycotting the World Cup (or any other sporting or cultural event) is grounded on a dual obligation not to participate in an injustice and to intervene when one is taking place. One cannot claim to be boycotting an event that one did not originally plan to attend or that one was unable to attend for financial reasons. Boycotting entails a personal sacrifice for the sake of raising awareness about acts of injustice.
This framing raises a question of whether we can speak of boycotting an event that we were planning to watch on television. Watching the World Cup on TV is completely different to attending it in person. Doing so does not immediately benefit the host country—the broadcasting revenue goes to the networks, the sponsors, and the organizing committee (in the case of the World Cup, to FIFA). Moreover, worldwide events like the World Cup tend to help the local economy, even if one’s country is not hosting the event. With this in mind, the moral incentives to boycott the event become less salient (perhaps even moot). If we understand boycotting as grounded on a dual obligation not to participate in an injustice and to intervene when one is taking place, watching the World Cup on the TV does not necessarily preclude us from complying with these moral demands.
In general, whether we are watching the World Cup, the local news, or scrolling through social media, we have a standing responsibility to engage with the broadcast critically. We should not, in other words, take everything that is presented to us at face value but with a certain critical distance. We have a responsibility to be aware that what is being presented on the TV might only be a fraction of what is actually taking place in the country that is hosting the World Cup. Furthermore, since the point of boycotting is to shine a light on the injustices taking place at the host nation, we are perfectly able to do so at home by pointing out the flaws or omissions by the network broadcasting the event—a moral responsibility that we have regardless of whether we are watching the World Cup or the local news.
On this line of reasoning, then, it would be permissible to watch the World Cup even when it is hosted by a morally suspect nation. But this conclusion rests on a narrow understanding of what might make spectatorship morally troubling. Following arguments surrounding the impossibility of “separating the art from the artist,” one might argue the circumstances under which a work is produced can bear on its value as an object of appreciation. Even where engaging with a work provides no material benefit to its creator, many nevertheless judge the work differently once they learn something of the artist’s moral or political track record. The work’s aesthetic (and, consequently, moral) value, so the argument goes, has been compromised by the conditions of its production. If that intuition has any force, then something similar might be said of Argentina’s World Cup (or any World Cup hosted by a nation engaged in acts of injustice): Owing to its moral rap sheet, the junta’s role in producing the tournament alters the moral-aesthetic character of the spectacle itself. Whether understood simply as entertainment—or, more ambitiously, as an event capable of generating catharsis, communal unity, or other forms of aesthetic experience—the tournament’s aesthetic potentialities were diminished by the moral failings of its authors.
Consequently, the impossibility of separating art from artist seems to provide a decisive argument against watching the World Cup even on TV. This view, however, places the avid football fan in an awkward position. In her essay, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?,” Claire Dederer suggests that the separation of the art from the artist is not as straightforward as we might initially think. After all, our attempt to separate a work of art from the moral misdeeds of the artist is a practice that we perform only when we, qua audience, have a certain relationship with the artist and their work. Something similar seems to happen with the World Cup—and football more generally. For an occasional viewer, on the one hand, refraining from watching the World Cup on TV due to moral misgivings about where the World Cup is being hosted might be nothing more than a simple moral exercise. On the other hand, for the avid lifelong fan, turning off the TV for the same reason implies a greater sacrifice. Thus, the latter must perform moral acrobatics in order to justify watching the World Cup.
This asymmetry suggests that our attribution of moral weight to distinct practices, including cultural, sporting, and musical events, will vary across individuals, even if we share a moral baseline. After all, the avid football fan does not dispute the importance and urgency of the injustices taking place at the country where the World Cup is being hosted. Thus, different people will assign a different moral value to the World Cup. While some might find it entertaining and fun, the event does not matter beyond these considerations. For other people, however, the World Cup will be valuable beyond its entertainment factor. To be more specific, an avid football fan might place the tournament in a much more central position to their conception of the good life. If this is the case, then, it is imperative to construct a moral theory that is sensitive to these variations.
Mauricio Rebolledo
Mauricio Rebolledo is a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University. His research focuses on political philosophy, specifically issues concerning legitimacy, political corruption, and criminal governance.
