Whither “Sportswashing”?
On World Cup, UNGA and a New Intelligence

SEPTEMBER 2026

“Sportswashing,” a term of art that peaked with World Cup Qatar in 2022, never sat right with us. For one thing, it misread the broader geopolitical cues. Worse, by treating it as some exotic phenomenon, the province of a few conspicuous overseas actors, it let domestic versions of the same machinery go unexamined.

So for us, the real story of this summer was not price gouging, visa chaos, or the general Trumpiness of it all. All outputs, all foreseeable. Rather, it was the fingerprints of a marketplace establishment—and the sublayer of image makers, reputation managers and influence peddlers in particular—whose dated playbooks and worldviews preconditioned our fraught American moment.

This was a World Cup of, and for, the Davos set, the Global Citizen consensus. Right down to the Tom Brady and Muppet cameos.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because many of the same protagonists took the stage in New York City last week for UNGA and Climate Week. Predictably, some even reheated the well-worn “power of sport” narrative. There’s real value in convenings (to be sure, we produce and attend our share), but too much of what goes down is public affairs pageantry—relics of an era that also delivered us “trust” and “purpose” with a straight face. That the proceedings play out each year against a backdrop of open labor exploitation on an urban scale, with no hint of irony, is enough to warrant skepticism.

We need reinvention, not retread. Leadership, not lazy shtick. The corporate dogma that helped get us here must give way to a new intelligence, one that embraces issues and risk sophistication as a tenet of strategy, not communications bolt-on.

Fifteen years of establishment own goals have made the alternative plain enough. Sport, for its part, hasn’t escaped this dysfunction, it’s become one of its clearest expressions.

Conscientious business leaders recalibrating for what’s next could do worse than revisit Trevor Noah’s read on the Nike-Kaepernick moment back in 2018. The football diehard and Liverpool lifer’s point to a late-night audience doubled as a caution to every CEO and boardroom: no manufactured reality survives a close look.

Santiago, a consultancy, publishes Kit Magazine