In simpler times, “player power” in sports reflected the wider society’s industrial relations. When players banded together against their employer, it was to demand fairer pay and conditions. The origins of that pay – cancer money (cigarette sponsorship), pollution money (oil sponsorship), chronic illness and domestic violence money (alcohol sponsorship) – were not up for discussion. Money was money.
Alinta Energy’s sponsorship of the Australian Cricket Team is to be cut short.Credit:AP
The player power that is bursting the stitches of the sporting world this week also mirrors social change. Australia’s male cricketers don’t like the emissions record of energy company Alinta, and the company’s national team sponsorship is to be cut short. Australian netballers don’t like their code’s sponsorship association with Hancock Prospecting, particularly over the late Lang Hancock’s offensive comments on Indigenous Australians, and have collectively resisted wearing the Hancock logo. And then there were those Manly Sea Eagles rugby league players who boycotted the club’s rainbow jersey for “religious reasons”.
The dollar they earn, which was once colour-neutral, now has a specific hue and a certain scent, which they are deciding to take or leave according to their principles.
Cummins told The Age’s chief cricket writer Daniel Brettig: “More so than ever before you’re seeing players’ personalities and interests and passions shine through and have a bit more of a say than maybe in the past. I think the most obvious, front-of-mind things you can see is who we partner with. So I hope that when we think of who we want to align with, who we want to invite into being part of cricket, I hope climate is a real priority.”
Note the language. International cricket, a wealthy sport peopled by wealthy professionals, has the freedom to “invite” companies in. This balance of influence has arrived in a flash: Just four years ago, when Australian cricket was a beggar rather than a chooser after the ball-tampering episode in Cape Town, Alinta was one of the few corporate names that did not feel its reputation was tainted by the association. Perhaps it knew more than it was letting on.
There have always been sponsors whose name is unacceptable to sport. Twelve years ago, a minor-league Australian football club, St Kilda City, was blocked from accepting jersey sponsorship from the California Club sex parlour. It has been the sports club or institution that had the resources and controls to assess the appropriateness of the sponsorship. Even where those controls manifestly failed – such as when the London Olympic Games was sponsored by British Petroleum just two years after the company’s catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil spill – the responsibility rested with the sporting body, not the individual players. What is new is the one-out actions by sportspeople taking principled positions as conscientious objectors.
The high-principled movement does not belong solely to sportspeople paid well enough to decide whether to invite their sponsors in, and nor is it purely woke in its politics. The netballers are in no economic position to dictate terms, yet they are expressing their principles with courage, when they know it might cost their game financially. The “Rainbow Seven” at Manly, like other sportspeople who have refused to wear certain logos and uniforms because of conflict with their beliefs, cannot be accused of jumping on a popular bandwagon.
Where any wagon’s rubber hits the road, however, is in the question of consistency. Once sportspeople (like anyone else) take an ethical stand, they might be setting a bar for themselves that is fiendishly complicated, not to mention high and getting higher.
Cummins, for instance, has also been promoting the leadership claims of his teammate David Warner, currently banned from captaincy for life over his involvement in the 2018 cheating scandal. The principle of aligning with climate-friendly companies is weightier than the principle of upholding a life ban for cheating. Cummins has also represented the Kolkata Knight Riders in the Indian Premier League. Its sponsors don’t include big polluters, but they do number several Indian-based clothing manufacturers. Are the conditions of those workers unimportant? Are all Australian representatives now inspecting the clean hands of all their IPL sponsors?
How big is cricket’s carbon footprint anyway? The Saudi oil company Aramco is a sponsor of the International Cricket Council, which runs this month’s World T20 Cup in Australia. Is the ICC to be carbon-audited, cleansed of blood money? You can almost hear Greg Norman and his Saudi-backed golfing pariahs sputtering about hypocrisy.
Which is the big pain about opening a can of wriggling principles. Once they’re out, you don’t know where they’ll end up. Cummins and the cricketers are entitled to their stance, and their ethics can be widely applauded. As individuals and a group, they are taking seriously their status as community role models. They’d just better think things through and do their homework, before someone else does it for them.
Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.
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