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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host Rich Helppie. Today we've got Brian Hess, we're going to be talking about sports washing. Now this is not the sports washing like need to shower up after the game. It's got a lot of economics that are wrapped into it and quite a bit of history as well. It's about using an athletic event on behalf of perhaps unsavory governments or characters, originating in 1936 Germany where Adolf Hitler wanted to use the Olympics to showcase what they've been doing. Today now we have the Saudi Arabian government investing in LIV Golf and martial arts and maybe looking at some other things. Sports is a huge business; the NFL alone over 16 billion. When we finally total up what's coming out of NCAA football, I think we're going to be surprised. Soccer leagues around the world are worth billions as well. So joining us as our guest to talk about this is Brian Hess. Brian, welcome to The Common Bridge. Thanks for coming on.
Brian Hess
Thanks for having me, Rich. That was a great history of sports watching and it really does show that we're almost at a century of authoritarian regimes using sports to influence global politics. I'm really excited to show how this is really starting to impact American sports fans today.
Richard Helppie
Sounds good. Well, Brian, our audience, our listeners or readers or viewers, they'd like to know a little bit about your background. Where were your early days spent and what kind of education and/or job experience did you have that brought us to this point today?
Brian Hess
I'm a lifelong Virginian. I grew up in Northern Virginia, went to Virginia Tech, which is where I really fell into my sports fandom here in the DC area and (Virginia Tech) Hokie football. I started working in Northern Virginia, because I knew I wanted to influence policy, I wanted to work and protect consumers. I found Sports Fans Coalition, which was able to combine my love of sports and my love of politics and policy, and really take on some really big challenges. Our organization was founded in 2009 and I took over in about 2017. We've taken on Ticketmaster and their monopoly and trying to break them up. We've taken on publicly financed sports stadiums, sports blackout rules; really anything that really does impact the sports fan experience here in America. We are there making sure that the fans voices are heard and that's really where we enter into the sports washing debate right now.
Richard Helppie
So what's the name of the organization and how can people get more information? What's the website? How else can they learn more?
Brian Hess
We are Sports Fans Coalition, our website is sportsfans.org. You can visit there and see all of the different things we're working on across the country, including state legislation, federal legislation, policy-making. All that information is there on the website.
Richard Helppie
Great, and what's the funding source for your organization?
Brian Hess
We are funded by a number of partners who share our vision of a fan friendly marketplace and a fan friendly experience and want to put consumer protection at the forefront.
Richard Helppie
Who might some of your top donors be?
Brian Hess
We're frequently donated by StubHub. That's one that we're oftentimes linked with, and we've been working with them for many years to ensure that fans have transparent marketplaces on ticket resale. They support all-in pricing, we support all-in pricing. We both support transferability tickets, that season ticket holders can feel free to invest in their fandom and resell their tickets when they can't attend one of the 80 some games from basketball or hockey or baseball games.
Richard Helppie
I see, okay, well I'm big sports fan myself and season ticket holder still for my beloved Detroit Redwings and like to watch the University of Michigan play. We've had a couple good years in a row. That business is changing dramatically. What exactly is sports washing and why is it important that people should know about this?
Brian Hess
It's starting to enter the common parlance. It really took off around the PGA LIV merger when Saudi Arabia created a competing golf league, but in general, it's when a regime - specifically one with bad human rights records or some other bad reputation they want people to ignore - use sports as a way to make them look good. They could use it to encourage tourism for people to come to their country to try to wash over bad conversations or bad dialogue happening around what they've been doing. When you talk about Saudi Arabia specifically you can't not talk about them murdering Jamal Khashoggi, The Washington Post journalist. They don't want you having that conversation so they try to make themselves look good with things like Formula One racing, tennis, golf and now MMA. You can also look at Qatar, they wanted the World Cup there and they built these huge arenas and stadiums for it. But they did so on borderline slave labor and all kinds of human rights abuses to build that. They don't want you talking about that, they want you talking about the World Cup.
Richard Helppie
I see. So sports has been a unifying force around the world for millennia, the Olympic Games, right? The Olympic Games brought [together] people that were at war, or nearly at war; people could meet together on the playing field. I'm trying to understand why would Saudi Arabia wanting to bring tennis players in, for example, be detrimental? I mean, wouldn't that perhaps be a way to moderate some of their behavior, like killing journalists, which I think we can say is a bad thing?
Brian Hess
Yes, we can agree that killing journalists is a bad thing. We haven't seen it actually moderating that behavior and we think there's actually a more sinister geopolitical influence game behind it that it doesn't quite moderate, but tries to get others to disregard some of their infractions and some of the bad behavior that they engage in around the world. We see that really, really closely, actually, in my home of northern Virginia, in Alexandria, Virginia, with the arena deal - Governor Youngkin trying to get the Washington Wizards and the Capitals to move to Alexandria, Virginia, outside of DC and give them a $1.3 billion subsidy to do so. What was not reported was a lot of those investors are investors in Saudi's Professional Fighting League (PFL), and Saudi Arabia would have directly benefited from Virginia taxpayer dollars. That's where this is starting to get into. This isn't just about washing over their reputation, but it's actually about currying favor with our political elite.
Richard Helppie
Sovereign wealth funds have been around for a long time; the Chinese Communist Party has one, Saudi Arabia has one, I'm presuming Qatar has one. So they're in our banks, they're in our construction industries, they're in our shipping industries. They're making our food, owning our farms, in our pharmaceutical industry. What's different about a sovereign wealth fund wanting to invest in stadiums versus some of the other places that they're so prevalent in?
Brian Hess
My concern from Sports Fans Coalition's perspective...and look, we've been leading the fight across the country against publicly financed sports stadiums as well. We don't believe taxpayer dollars should go to subsidize billionaires' sports arenas. Sports stadiums are terrible economic investments. That gets worse when really you're looking at the ownership structure of these teams or the investors involved in that and taxpayer dollars are going offshore to support these regimes. That's where it gets really harmful to fans because we're actually now talking about our taxpayer dollars, not just a foreign, sovereign wealth fund investing in a business. This is investing American tax dollars that we don't get the benefit from.
Rich Helppie
What would be a good policy response here? Are we talking disclosure? Are we talking divestment? We've got TikTok potentially being forced to change its ownership. What are some of the remedies that you're proposing and where and how are you making those proposals?
Brian Hess
First and foremost I would say it starts with disclosure. Fans deserve the right to know who's behind their teams. You actually saw what that response can look like with DC United not too long ago. They, at the home opener for the games, protested DC United's involvement with Saudi Arabia because the team went and visited the country. So fans clearly don't like this. Washington Post did a poll that showed most fans don't want foreign wealth funds investing in their teams, they want them homegrown. They want them local. So disclosures are an important first step. The TicTok ban you mentioned is an interesting policy solution that I would love to figure out how we apply that to sports specifically. I think that's one of merit. But it also starts with...when you're talking about taxpayer dollars, if the government is giving a gift to a sports team, whether that's a stadium or an arena or anything, the government can condition that gift on certain behavior. They should start conditioning that gift on full divestment from sovereign wealth funds.
Richard Helppie
Isn't that kind of a quaint notion that the team is going to be owned locally and that the average citizen would be able to listen about the team on the radio, they'd be able to view it on television, they'd be able to afford to take their family to a game or two every year? This has gone on now 40 plus years where publicly financed stadiums are drawing tax dollars out of hard working everyday people and then selling media packages that that average homeowner can't afford, and forcing them to become fans. I always thought it was a bad business model because you're not going to be able to build up loyalty. Isn't this just a natural extension about where sports and lobbying have converged?
Brian Hess
It seems that way. When you look at the media rights, the biggest frustration that fans have are [that] I just paid a yearly subscription to MLB's app but yet when I want to watch the Washington Nationals here in the Northern Virginia area, I can't watch them on the app because Masson, the regional sports network, has the contract. But I don't have cable because I'm a millennial and I'm a cord cutter so I can't watch Nationals unless I go to the game, which, I go to as many as I can, but I can't go at all. So you see a lot of those frustrations. Same with hockey, with basketball. You have these arcane and arbitrary in market/out of market contract/rights distributions that end up hurting the taxpayer. Because you're right, if I built your stadium, I should be able to go to that game or watch that game, especially back in the day when sports were free over the air broadcasts, which fortunately, football still has most of their games on broadcast. But that's quickly leaving towards things like Peacock, Amazon, and the streaming world. So it does get kind of frustrating for the fan; you're taking my tax dollars and then making it harder for me to enjoy my fandom.
Richard Helppie
Indeed, I grew up a long time ago and we could go watch a Detroit Tiger baseball game for 50 cents if we sat up in the bleachers, and took the bus there, bought a bag of peanuts outside and had a great afternoon. Even doubleheaders on Sunday, scheduled doubleheaders; I don't know where we found time to watch six hours of baseball but it did happen. Now we're in an age where the pitch clock is making baseball games over in a little more than two hours. So the underlying contest is changed, the reserve clause came in 50 some years ago - that changed the way players were contracted, the merging of the public interest and the private interest in the ownership has changed...It seems to me that your objection is...is it all sovereign wealth funds? Or is it Saudi Arabia in particular that you're alarmed about?
Brian Hess
It's all sovereign wealth funds from nations that have authoritarian regimes or bad human rights records. That includes Qatar, that includes China. Saudi Arabia right now seems to be the most prolific, they seem to have cracked the code and have been able to fly under the radar. They just spun out the PIF, their sovereign wealth fund, spun out a sports specific SRJ Investments and shortly thereafter - this was about last summer - they invested 100 million dollars in Professional Fighters League (PFL) which is a competitor to UFC and the MMA circuit. Professional Fighters League's early, early adopters and investors were Ted Leonsis of the Washington Capitals and Wizards and Governor Glenn Youngkin. They directly benefited from this investment shortly after the 100 million dollar stake was bought in PFL. PFL acquired Bellator in order to try to compete with UFC, who's the big dog in the MMA industry. Bellator was owned by Paramount Viacom and so they've acquired that. That transaction was completed last month without any scrutiny from Department of Justice in terms of anti-trust, without any scrutiny from Cepheus for foreign investment, any scrutiny from members of Congress; it just quietly sailed through. That could be because MMA is a relatively niche sport in the United States. Still, they also had their loud LIV PGA battle. So they've learned from it, but they're also expanding in tennis and Formula One. They've seemed to crack that code to pick these niche sports that allow them to fly under the radar, acquire broad investments that are also owned by political elite. What our fear becomes is, as these tentacles spread, they have better relationships with governors, with wealthy individuals in state capitals across the country, that can help spread their political agenda and not in a transparent way.
Richard Helppie
I have to think that the people that are in Washington are sophisticated, that there are people in the State Department that are up to speed on this, and they're not making it an issue. And so I have to surmise that they're benefiting from it. What do we know about that at this point?
Brian Hess
In terms of government officials?
Richard Helppie
Yes, you're aware of Saudi Arabia spreading its tentacles, presumably we have a desk at the State Department that's keeping tabs on everything that that regime is doing and they're aware of this and they're not taking the steps that they could take to prevent those tentacles from spreading. Why would the State Department not be alarmed about it?
Brian Hess
Well, I don't know the inner workings of the State Department or who there would be looking into this. I know they are good public servants and so I don't know. But I think Congress needs to start raising the alarm and letting the State Department know like, hey, maybe the State Department needs to start investigating these kinds of sports washing regimes beyond just Saudi Arabia, but China, Qatar, and elsewhere.
Richard Helppie
We started out talking about that the endgame was that people wouldn't know that they were using tax dollars, co- joining those with sovereign wealth funds from countries that don't observe the same human rights and freedoms that we do, and that that's penetrating the country further. If we stay on Saudi Arabia, what about female athletes in Saudi and how they're being treated and how that might relate to our country?
Brian Hess
There are some improvements happening around women athletes in Saudi Arabia. In, I believe it was 2018, they started being allowed to go to sporting events as a family, both mom and dad and the kids. They recently opened up a women's fitness center. But to your point, Saudi Arabia does not have a history that is good on women's rights. It was only a couple of years ago that women could even drive a car so they don't have that history. Maybe to your point, with an investment from PFL and with women MMA taking off, there could be some development there. But for the most part we are more concerned about what the other side of that coin looks like when it comes to Saudi Arabia's influence over American politics.
Richard Helppie
Well, if you think about the parallel, the Biden administration just gutted Title IX, which protected female athletes in this country in terms of being able to compete against other women and we've seen just the front end of that. Does this look like places like Saudi Arabia, paving the way for administrations like the one we have today to remove the rights of women?
Brian Hess
I don't think those are two parallel points. The other thing I would like to point out with President Biden is he actually signed the Equal Pay for Team USA Act in 2023, which gave women Olympians equal pay. This includes the women's soccer team, the women's hockey team, but also USA fencing, USA sailing. Actually, that bill is hanging on the wall right here.
Richard Helppie
But to that point, like if you look at the Canadian team last year, they could be getting paid but they had a man on the women's team. And so now we're going to pay them equally but their going to have to compete against biological men. Wouldn't the money actually seemed to accelerate that?
Brian Hess
Well, you and I probably have different opinions on transathletes and whether they should be competing in the gender of their identity.
Richard Helppie
In the Division III track and field, a fella just won, and shattered, the records for women athletes in three or four events. I've been around long enough to understand what the situation was pre-Title IX, and watching the dramatic change in the opportunities for women with Title IX, and gutting Title IX is not going to lead to a good outcome. I was just drawing the parallel that you have a situation in Saudi Arabia where female athletes are being disadvantaged and we've just introduced that into our country. To me, it seems like an obvious parallel, but maybe it's not.
Brian Hess
I wouldn't call that gutting Title IX, personally but we can have...
Richard Helppie
Okay, all I would just do is encourage you to read what the policy is. There's no other conclusion that can be reached were the access to the playing field, access to the locker room, access to all the facilities and the money, scholarships and paychecks and things - you can't miss it. Look, even the best female athletes, Serena Williams, I've had the opportunity to watch play and she's not only one of the greatest athletes of this era, but potentially of all time, in her sport of tennis. She is truly an amazing player. She says she would do no better than 200th on the men's tour, and that Andy Murray and any of the others would take her out 6-0, 6-0, 6-0. So there is a difference and the people that are actually in the arena are saying it, but our government is going in a different direction. Our program, oftentimes we ask people to get in touch with their members of Congress and make a request. So if you were going to get a message to our listeners, readers and viewers and tell them look, here's the message you need to take to your senators and your congressional reps, what would be the message you'd want them to carry?
Brian Hess
It would be sound the alarm, write letters, send letters to the PFL, to Bellator, to PGA LIV and their merger. Contact them and demand to know how involved Saudi Arabia is in these things. What kinds of conditions they are putting on things, what do they want and start just raising that awareness. We need to call for congressional hearings to investigate this kind of work. And we do know that Senator Blumenthal has been a champion of this with the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the Senate. He's been trying. He has subpoenaed the Saudi Arabian investors, including Alma Mayon, who has been called a central figure in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and other members of MB's regime. They are trying and they're being stonewalled. Other Saudi Arabian officials have threatened to imprison Saudi employees of American companies if they comply with these kinds of subpoenas. That's not okay, we need to let every member of Congress know that and call for these people to be pulled in front of congressional hearings.
Richard Helppie
Do you have a media arm with your organization that some of the more widespread media might be able to pick up this story? I mean, you're in Washington; Washington Post would come to mind, any of the major legacy broadcasters or cable channels, are they interested in the story at all?
Brian Hess
We are a small operation, I am one of only a few people who works for and represents the coalition so we don't have a big massive media arm to get all the kinds of press and everything that we need. We do talk to the Washington Post, we do talk to other reporters and for the most part, people are just...kind of have a fait accompli, like, this is just happening, sports washing is a thing, we all know it sucks, there's not a whole lot we can do. I push back on that narrative because I do think there's a lot that American sports fans can do. The whole premise of our organization was that when you organize the fan voice, you can impact change and we have done that time and time again. The idea that we just have to accept this, that sovereign wealth funds are going to be the only organizations or institutions that can afford to invest in sports teams now because they've all become multi-billion dollar businesses, I don't think that's the case. I think we can push back and demand transparency and prevent some of the worst parts of this from actually coming to fruition in American politics.
Richard Helppie
An argument might be just boycott, don't go to the games, don't buy the packages coming off cable or streaming, don't buy tickets, don't buy fan labeled memorabilia, etc, etc. But with tax dollars going in, and say you're just not a sports fan at all - of any sport - you're still paying for it. What would be the message to reach people described like that who say, look, sports is fine for people that want to be in athletics but why aren't we doing that for the symphony and the ballet and art museums and those types of things rather than funding another form of entertainment that happens to be athletics? How do you reach that group of people?
Brian Hess
We reached that group of people in Alexandria this past year fighting the arena move for the Wizards and the Capitals into the city. They were concerned about the quality of life and a lot of the people we worked with to oppose that deal were not sports fans. They just don't want their tax dollars going somewhere that doesn't invest in their community. When we're talking $1.3 billion in taxes, that's $1.3 billion that could go to schools or road construction or even little league parks to promote athletics at the youth level, which we need more of in this country. Then when you flip that coin and you look at DC, right after the deal in Alexandria fell apart, Mayor Bowser swooped in, offered Ted Leonsis 515 million dollars over three years. The day after that she cut teacher pay, she cut other kinds of social services, because she had a budget shortfall. I wonder where that shortfall came from.
Richard Helppie
I'm one hundred percent aligned with you that the priorities are a hundred percent misaligned. And this is coming from a person that's played just about every sport, that is a fan, and I'm a little troubled by some of the things creeping in but I wasn't even aware of this issue and the level that it's gone on. It's not trending in the right direction. So are there ways to increase transparency? What is the appropriate role for our politicians to prevent this sports washing from going on?
Brian Hess
When it comes to the politicians, it's going to be letters, congressional hearings, asking these businesses, these sports franchises to explain how they're invested in, who their other investors are, and the ownership stakes in foreign investment. The other place that makes us more opaque is a lot of the investments are actually done through hedge funds, such as Rise to the Rest of the Revolution Fund, which was a Glenn Youngkin and Ted Leonsis fund, where you've got to go a few steps to find out that oh, hey, look, Saudi Arabia is in this fund as well. So it's about asking those questions and demanding those answers. And then whenever these billionaires come and ask for gifts - because they love doing that - say, okay then, let's talk about your foreign investment; divest all of your foreign investment, divest these particular foreign wealth funds and then we can have a conversation about what subsidy you claim you need. That's where Congress can actually have the hook and fight back.
Richard Helppie
Great. Well, I think that everything you're doing makes a lot of sense. I know that people would say, well, we're going to build a stadium and that's going to be an economic boon. In 1975, I think it was, the Detroit Lions built a stadium in Pontiac, Michigan and I'm thinking, okay, there's going to be ten football games out there every year and somehow that's going to revitalize the city of Pontiac. It has now been torn down and guess what didn't happen but there was all of that momentum behind it. I think people are able to see through that a little bit. City of San Diego, they were asked to, I think, put up $4 billion for the Chargers and they looked at it and said, you know, not worth it. And the NFL's San Diego Chargers are now the Los Angeles Chargers so I see some push-back here. Greater Phoenix, Arizona was just asked to invest public funds, didn't do it. Now their National Hockey League franchise is moving up to Utah, but it seems like there's always a municipality or a state that is willing to prostitute itself in order to bring that franchise in and get that stadium. Sounds to me like you're proposing, hey go ahead and do that, but draw the line at no foreign investment in that project.
Brian Hess
Well, no, I would never say go ahead and do that. We holistically believe publicly funded sports stadiums are a bad idea especially because oftentimes these stadiums end up in higher ticket prices for fans, makes it harder for fans to get to, there are a whole slew of reasons why we're opposed to that. I would never say do it. But it is something that lawmakers need to start looking at and realizing, hey, there are more people getting this money than just paying off this team and their extortion scheme. There are people behind the scenes outside of American providence and outside of American jurisdiction that are going to benefit from this.
Richard Helppie
So Brian, as we come to the end of our talk today, what didn't we cover that perhaps we should have talked about that you want to leave with our audience of The Common Bridge?
Brian Hess
I think if anyone's going to take away anything from this, they really need to understand that Saudi Arabian sports washing, Chinese sports washing, Qatari sports washing is getting more and more prominent throughout the West. It's not just an American problem, Saudi also has a stake in European soccer, Formula One, it's going to get worse until fans start standing up. The PFL/Bellator merger that we talked about - funded basically by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund - is kind of this tipping point now. It flew under the radar, no one really gave it the scrutiny it deserved, and that's going to embolden them to do it more and more and more and more. The next thing you know, your local hometown team might be the Saudi Arabian team, might be the Chinese team. It's going to go from these niche sports to football, to basketball, to hockey, to baseball - and it's not far off so now's the time to call Congress and tell them to start investigating this, put a stop to this. It's time to end sports washing in America.
Richard Helppie
I think that's a great way to wrap up this session. Perhaps we'll have you back in about a year and let's talk about what's going on with the NCAA and how they would play into this because you can kind of anticipate that convergence.
Brian Hess
Oh yeah, and especially with name, image and likeness rights NCAA is a hot policy area to talk about.
Richard Helppie
We've been talking today with Brian Hess, we've been covering the little known issue around sports washing and its implications for our democracy, the responsiveness of our political class, and how it's being treated in the media. He's given some very specific examples of what people might consider doing in order to arrest this trend. And so with our guest, Brian Hess, this is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
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