We’re in the middle of a summer of sport. The UEFA Women’s Euros. India’s cricket team is touring England. Silverstone. Wimbledon. The FIFA Club World Cup. It’s all happening.

Of course, sport is also big business. A lot of this is about drumming up more and more money for franchises – and sometimes about burnishing the reputations of questionable companies, countries or club owners. We call it ‘sportswashing’ when the glamour and excitement of of elite competition is used to mask the wrongdoing of its wealthy investors.

Take the Club World Cup. Tomorrow, Chelsea meets Paris Saint-Germain in the final. The odds have Chelsea losing, but the club will still leave with around £80m, which is £20m more than it paid for the striker who fired the team into the final.

Chelsea qualified for the tournament after winning the UEFA Champions League. That was only possible because of piles and piles of cash that the club’s previous owner – Roman Abramovich – poured into the team to boost it into the world’s elite.

Abramovich scooped Chelsea up in 2003, during the golden era for wealthy Russians turning Britain’s elite into their butlers. The journalist Catherine Belton reported in her book Putin’s People that Vladimir Putin himself ordered Abramovich to buy Chelsea, something he denied at the time. It was an invaluable tool for softening the West’s perception of Russia.

But in 2023 we exposed how Abramovich made tens of millions of pounds in off-the-books payments to help Chelsea rocket through the ranks of European football. It raises serious questions about whether the club broke the Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules that are meant to keep the sport, well, fair.

The cash landed with chairmen of other football clubs, people close to the successful manager Antonio Conte, and also related to signings of star players like Samuel Eto’o and Willian. Documents even suggest Abramovich secretly funded a legal bid to overturn FFP.

Under Abramovich, Chelsea went on to win the Champions League, the highest honour in European club football, twice.

Abramovich was forced to sell Chelsea in 2022 after the UK sanctioned him in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But Chelsea was already where it needed to be and the club’s new owners are still benefiting from all these shenanigans.

Chelsea, which says it’s cooperating with all investigations transparently, was fined this week for overspending on its squad (a cost the club can almost cover from their Club World Cup winnings, even after they've paid for that striker). And the Premier League is still investigating our revelations and other similar allegations. I’m not holding my breath, though – we’ve yet to see the league take serious action against one of the top clubs.

But leagues elsewhere are less timid. In the Netherlands, we revealed that Vitesse Arnhem was secretly bankrolled by Abramovich. The club was swiftly docked 18 points by the Dutch football association, which recognised what a major breach of the rules it was. After all, Vitesse and Chelsea could feasibly have played each other while Abramovich funded them both.

The penalty meant that the club, one of the Netherlands’ oldest, ended up being relegated from the top league. Just this week the Dutch association ruled it would start next season in the second division on minus 12 points, because it had failed its reporting requirements once again.

Such clear action is impressive, but the overall story is tragic. Twenty-five years ago, I was drawn in by Thierry Henry’s wizardry to support Arsenal. My son was delirious when our local Crystal Palace won the FA Cup in May. But Crystal Palace may now miss out on a historic chance to play in Europe, because its owner also held a majority stake in the French club Lyon. It’s yet another example of the megarich messing with the things my kids and I love doing on the weekend.

And it’s the kids supporting Vitesse I think about now, who’ve watched their club fall without any real clue as to how or why it happened – all because one of Putin’s people gobbled it up and spat it out when it was no longer any use to him.

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Did you know?

Queen Elizabeth II's personal solicitor, Mark Bridges, simultaneously acted as a trustee for at least five trusts managing assets for Rifaat al‑Assad – uncle of the ousted Syrian dictator – and his relatives.

Find out more

Although there is no suggestion of any regulatory wrongdoing by Bridges, our revelations raise perennial questions about London’s role as a clearing house for questionable foreign wealth, and the ease with which rich foreign politicians can shift assets through the UK and its overseas territories.

Spanish prosecutors believed that Rifaat’s wealth had swollen to more than half a billion pounds by 2019. He was convicted in French courts the following year of having acquired his fortune through crime and corruption.

Read more here. 

The fun part about scratching below the surface of the sports world is that you start seeing the conflicts, corruption and sportswashing everywhere. And I’m not even talking about Chelsea’s Qatari-owned opponent Paris Saint-Germain.

A quick glance at the sponsors for the Women’s Euros takes you to Amazon. That reminds me of our investigation into how low-paid workers in Bengaluru, India, were monitoring Amazon’s warehouse packers in California via video. Workers in both locations have reported exploitative work conditions.

We interviewed 33 current and former Amazon employees to reveal that the workers in India, who were helping train Amazon’s internal AI systems, were working under such punishing targets that their health was deteriorating significantly. (Amazon told us at the time that we had “selected a handful of anecdotes to paint a misleading picture”.)

Many on our team are relieved that England’s title defence is back on track after a terrible opener. The English Football Association is widely seen as a firm backer of women’s football. It helps having a sponsor like TV-maker LG Electronics, which reportedly pays the FA millions a year so it can link the two brands.

But think for a minute about the dozens of men and women gathered in southern Xinjiang, China, before they were put on coaches and driven more than 2,000 miles to Yangzhou city in Jiangsu, a coastal province north of Shanghai. Our recent investigation into forced labour showed that the group was heading to a factory run by Elec & Eltek, a circuit board manufacturer, which supplies LG.

They were part of a cohort of thousands being sucked into China’s forced labour transfer scheme, moving ethnic minorities from Xinjiang to factories in China’s eastern industrial heartland. Those factories supply the brands which make many of the things we consume every day: trainers, cars, chicken nuggets, you name it.

I’m not saying don’t watch England play or don’t enjoy it. I will. But sports are increasingly important when it comes to big money and geopolitics, so it’s worth understanding what’s going on.

A fun little game to play is spotting those big brands sponsoring the event and searching for their names on our website. If you're watching the Wimbledon finals this weekend, you could see what you find about Barclays. If you're an F1 fan, try looking up Aramco. It’s amazing how many you’ll find there and what secrets they have that they’d rather you don’t know about. But that’s what we’re there for 🙂. Enjoy the summer of sports – and also make sure you know the full story.

Join us live next week!

Speaking of China, next week there’s an opportunity to hear exactly how we traced workers from mountain villages to factories thousands of miles away. In this event, I’ll be sitting down with the investigative journalist Daniel Murphy to discuss how we investigated the forced labour behind the products we use everyday — from the trainers we walk in to the electric cars we drive.

Daniel and I will go through how the leads emerged, how we managed to turn years of evidence into a story, and the challenges we faced to get to the heart of these injustices.

There will also be an opportunity for you to ask questions.

The inside scoop on Chinese forced labour will take place virtually, on Zoom, on Thursday 17th July at 5pm. Places are limited to 50 people so don’t delay!

Our community of Insiders were the first to get invited to this, but we're extending the invite to all of our amazing readers this month. If you'd like to join as an Insider and access more events like this, then please sign up today.