TOM EATON | Why not use a Tottenham shirt to launder SA’s reputation?

I write this in the full knowledge that it could end my career and wreck my closest relationships, but I don’t think that Lindiwe Sisulu’s alleged plan to “sponsor” Tottenham Hotspur to the tune of almost R1bn is the worst thing she’s ever suggested. In fact, it’s such an adequate idea that I’m starting to doubt she even thought of it herself.

To be clear, I’m ready to assume the absolute worst of literally anything this person says or does. In this case, however, there are a few facts we should consider before we have a collective aneurysm over the details outlined in the Daily Maverick’s exposé.

The first is that Sisulu vehemently denies this was her plan, insisting via a statement on Wednesday afternoon that the idea has been floating around since 2017. As I said, it seemed too good — or at least not terrible — to be hers.

So why is it not terrible? Well, that’s fact number two, namely, that “sponsor” is a posh way of saying “buy advertising space”.

Sisulu, or her predecessor, or SA Tourism, or all of them, weren’t planning to give Tottenham Hotspur R1bn and a short motivational speech. Instead, they were buying the right to advertise Brand South Africa, whether on the team’s kit or at its home ground. Unfortunately, thanks partly to Sisulu and her cabal, R1bn only buys about £14m worth of space, which is to say probably an Elastoplast-sized logo in the armpit, but still, getting your brand into the Premier League is not nothing.

Which brings us to the third fact.

The reason it costs so much to get your advert in front of eyeballs in a major sports event is because adverts work so much better when they’re linked to sport, an activity during which we switch off our critical faculties and allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by projection and emotion. It is a completely childlike space, in which heroes and villains are real things, and moving variously shaped balls across variously long lines takes on epic meaning and carries immense emotional weight.

There’s a reason it is considered unethical to advertise to children. In a childlike state, with our adult faculties suspended, we are highly vulnerable to the messaging of advertisers, who can gild their tawdry little products in the golden fairy dusty of fantasy. A Rolex on a crypto trader is a kitsch piece of overpriced jewellery; Rolex as the official timekeeper of Wimbledon is a certificate of pedigree. If you were watching cricket in the 1980s, your rational brain will know that Benson & Hedges was a brand of smokes, but your inner child will still believe it was actually Adrian Kuiper klapping Clive Rice into the night sky.

In theory, copying Rwanda’s “Visit Rwanda” deal with Arsenal — perhaps “Pull In Here By South Africa” — is a very good way slipping SA into the subconscious minds of billions of football fans.

In theory, copying Rwanda’s “Visit Rwanda” deal with Arsenal — perhaps “Pull In Here By South Africa” — is a very good way slipping SA into the subconscious minds of billions of football fans. Certainly, when the news broke on Wednesday, Twitter was full of people defending Sisulu and pointing out the success of the Rwandan campaign.

What they were unwittingly revealing, however, was the fourth and perhaps most dangerous fact at the centre of this story, namely, that when countries start using sport to market themselves, bad people get away with bad things.

The response to the story has been almost unanimously appalled, with most people accusing Sisulu and the ANC of pissing away yet more money that could be spent on the poor. The Daily Maverick no doubt spoke for many when it fired out a furious newsletter with the subject: “A billion bucks for WHAT????”

But with respect to all those angry people and to the team at the Daily Maverick, the answer to that question should be patently clear: sportswashing.

You’ll have seen plenty of it lately, from Olympics in Russia and China to World Cups in Qatar or breakaway golf tours in Saudi Arabia, as oppressive or corrupt regimes display the benefits of using the fairy dust of sports fandom to hide their malevolent policies and failures.

And it’s working brilliantly. Once, dictators had to create entire genres of propaganda to convince the outside world that their countries were lovely. Now, they only have to pay a few unscrupulous sports stars to show up and the outside world will change its own mind without so much as a single torchlit rally. Just put Cristiano Ronaldo or Phil Mickelson in a press conference in Saudi Arabia and billions will immediately forget this is a country that murders journalists.

Which brings me back to those South Africans praising the “Visit Rwanda” campaign and holding up that country as a shining example of what SA might still become. Right there, we saw why it makes sense for a corrupt and failing state to spend a mere £14m on putting itself on a Tottenham shirt. After all, put your name on an Arsenal shirt for long enough and people will start to ignore then forget the fact that you are a dictatorship where political dissent and critical journalism can be fatal.

Could that money have been spent better? Of course it could. But don’t think for a moment that it would have been wasted, as would have been the case with the R22m flag. Whoever wanted to get this done understands that sportswashing is the reputation laundry of the future. They knew exactly what they were doing. And they know it works.