On November 18, Cristiano Ronaldo attended a White House dinner alongside Saudi Arabian Crowned Prince Mohammad bin Salman and US President Donald Trump.
Ronaldo, who has played club football in Saudi Arabia since 2023, had not seemingly been in the USA in nearly a decade following a legal case from 2009 in which Ronaldo faced allegations of rape. The charges were dropped in 2019 and the lawsuit was dismissed in 2022, clearing the way for his return. But what does the timing of his reappearance mean?
“President Trump is keenly aware of the symbolism of hosting the World Cup during the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and as we saw at the Club World Cup he seeks to closely associate himself with the glitz and glamor of the tournament,” Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Middle East fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told DW.
“This has played out very visibly with FIFA President Gianni Infantino, so it is no surprise to see Cristiano Ronaldo be drawn into the triangular Trump-Infantino-MBS orbit, given the significance of Ronaldo to Saudi Arabia and the importance of the Saudi relationship both to Trump and to FIFA.”
Saudi Arabia have been criticized for using sport as a way to distract attention from the country’s human rights record.
Indeed, earlier in November Ronaldo attended a tourism event in Riyadh, reiterating the role he wants to play in the country’s World Cup in 2034.
“I want to be part of Saudi Arabia’s efforts to host the World Cup,” Ronaldo said. “I believe in the tourism vision in the kingdom.”
As a result, some see Ronaldo’s attendance at the White House as not just unsurprising but in fact as part of Ronaldo’s job.
“He’s paid by the team to be window dressing, right? He’s not there to be an all-star player. He’s there to be pretty and stand in front, draw attention and lend his football credibility to whatever politician he’s standing next to, whether it’s Gianni Infantino or Donald Trump or MBS,” Aaron Ettinger, a professor at Carleton University in Ottawa and a specialist in US foreign policy and international relations, told DW.
“He’s not there to give his opinion. He’s just there to be Cristiano Ronaldo.”
Ettinger believes this is sports diplomacy rather than sportswashing.
“It falls under the broad umbrella of sports diplomacy where you use prodigious sports in order to accomplish geopolitical gains,” Ettinger said. “It’s not that complicated, right? It’s just perhaps unnerving to see Ronaldo looking unnaturally, 40-years-old, standing next to all of these figures.”
Sportswashing not working in current climate
Ronaldo’s attendance may also signal the start of more visits to America from famous footballers in order to generate buzz ahead of the tournament next summer.
Interest still seems lukewarm, partly because elite-level soccer, as it is called in America, is lower down the list of popular sports than it would be in most of the rest of the world. Ettinger believes something else is also at play.
“The political mode here in 2025 in North America is not exactly ripe for harmony,” Ettinger explained. “Coming from Canada, yes, there is moderate to high-level excitement building about the World Cup and it’ll get there, but right now we’re more worried about Donald Trump annexing the country and destroying our economy.
“If we step back, that suggests that the sportswashing elements to all of this is not really working. It’s not really normalizing. It’s not having the preferred effect of laundering the reputation of Saudi Arabia in the eyes of North Americans,” Ettinger continued.
“It’s successful in getting the economics of putting on the games and it may even have the effect of properly normalizing economic relations with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, but it’s not improving the reputation.”
What about Trump and the World Cup next year?
The 2026 World Cup starts in just over 200 days. The World Cup in Saudi Arabia is just under a decade away. In both cases, it would be a surprise if more examples of sports diplomacy or sportswashing did not appear. Ettinger believes that Trump is doing something else with sports, though. Indeed his current research is connected to this very question.
“My sense is that Donald Trump is using sport to fight the culture wars,” Ettinger explained. “One of the famous Breitbart sayings is that politics is downstream from culture and if sports is culture, you can engage politically by appealing to young male UFC fans or NASCAR fans or yelling about Colin Kaepernick. And so Trump has found a way to find the vein in sports that appeals to his right-wing radical base.”
Soccer though, poses a challenge for Trump. This is a sport he is outside of, not necessarily that familiar with. Ronaldo’s presence in the White House, along with Trump’s increasingly close relationship with Infantino, shows the US president has leading figures to help him.
Edited by: Chuck Penfold
