Aramco cricket deal again proves sport will ignore reality for revenue

Three years ago, Aramco, the oil giant predominantly owned by the Saudi royal family, underwent a subtle rebrand. And subtle is the operative word here: the company’s distinctive logo, a white star on a blue and green background, remained in place. But somehow the blue was rendered just a little bluer, the green just a little greener, the typeface softened into grey lowercase, the word “Saudi” and the Arabic script above it quietly removed.

This was the logo upon which Sam Curran stood as he prepared to bowl for England against Pakistan in their final Twenty20 World Cup warm-up on Monday, a little heap of sawdust at his feet. At the boundary’s edge, a band of Aramco billboards – blue as blue as the sky, green as green as life – flickered into the Brisbane night. Curran examined the ball in his hands, launched into his hop-skip approach and fixed his gaze on a set of Aramco-branded stumps about 40 yards away.

Does Curran register the existence of these images or the significance of them? Let’s take a wild swing in the dark: probably not. Frankly, why would you? To exist as an international cricketer in 2022 is to be innocently festooned in a jumble of unintelligible words and icons: some ironed on to the front of your shirt, some painted on the grass beneath your feet, some cluttering the fringes of your player-of-the-match cheque. This is just the flora and fauna of your world. To expect a player to question or even scrutinise it is like asking for an opinion of Guernica from an ant crawling across its surface.

Just like that, seamless and unobserved, Aramco slips into the room, pulls up a chair and blends into the canvas. It was only a few days ago the International Cricket Council announced it was awarding one of its