Oil and gas giants are funding 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.”
According to this study entitled “Dirty Money: How Fossil Fuel Company Sponsorships Pollute Sport”, football, motorsports, rugby and golf are the most sponsored with backers such as the Aramco Group ($1.3 billion), Ineos ($777 million, Shell ($470 million) or TotalEnergies ($340 million).
Oil states are increasingly present
The oil states of the Near and Middle East are increasingly taking up space in the financing of sport, lament the authors of this study published at a time when the summer of 2024 was the hottest ever recorded on the planet.
To arrive at their results, the authors of the study looked for all the agreements signed in the sports field by companies linked to fossil fuels, major emitters of greenhouse gases. They identified 205, of which only 41 specified their total amount.
To fill the data gap, the authors made estimates based on comparisons with similar deals whose amounts are known for the same sporting category or in other sectors (electronics, alcohol, transport), from the SportBusiness database and from publicly available sources.
The world of sport is not immune to global warming issues
The world of sport is no longer immune to questions from the public, politicians and athletes themselves about the impact of this activity on global warming. A symbol in 2023, TotalEnergies, sponsor of the Rugby World Cup, has had to remain discreet in the Paris fan zones. The group had already renounced its sponsorship of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in 2019, following a letter from Mayor Anne Hidalgo to the Olympic Organising Committee (Cojo).
“Fossil fuel air pollution” and extreme weather “threaten the very future of athletes, fans and events from the Winter Olympics to World Cups. If sport is to have a future, it must divest itself of the dirty money of big polluters and stop them from furthering their own destruction,” Andrew Simms, co-director of the New Weather Institute, said in a press release.
Source: BFM TV
