Tackling the Condescending News Coverage of Arsenal/PSG Visit Rwanda Engagement

Last week, British newspaper Mirror joined the condescending news coverage of a very innovative idea - the engagement that Arsenal and PSG football clubs have with Visit Rwanda. 

The writer attempts to cast a spell of doubt over the idea, with a summation that it was a government attempt to "launder its reputation through sport". Not only is this far from the truth, the Mirror deliberately leaves out key aspects that have made the Visit Rwanda campaign such a success. 

Before I get into what is wrong with Mirror article, and previous ones ran by the Guardian and Daily Mail, let me put the facts out clearly.

On 23 May 2018, Rwanda announced that it had signed a ‘Visit Rwanda’ sleeve sponsorship deal – worth around 10 million pounds a year for three years – with Arsenal FC. 

An independent review conducted showed that in 2020, 851 social media "Visit Rwanda" posts were shared, creating organic visibility and generating 110 million impressions, reaching 78.5 million accounts, and drawing 10.5 million engagements.

A survey showed that the likelihood of tourists to visit Rwanda as a result of its partnership with Arsenal increased from 35 percent in 2019 to 41 percent in 2020.

Had it not have been for the COVID-19 pandemic which froze international travel, the authorities in Rwanda would be facing a crisis of too many tourists!

But even with the bad times for international travel, country received 493,734 visitors in 2020, mostly from African countries, out of which only 1,200 were from the UK and 924 from France. 

At the same since 2019, Rwandan authorities scooped another winner - the same Visit Rwanda deal with French champions Paris Saint Germain (PSG). 

As if with a strike of gold, world icon Lionel Messi moved to PSG this past August 2021. PSG gained up to four million followers on Instagram after announcing Messi's two-year deal, from 38.7 million to 42.7 million. 

The reporting by Mirror, Guardian and Daily Mail has been that Rwanda has poverty and gets UK aid money, which is possibly being channeled to the international teams. A very wrong premise indeed!

First, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) has made it clear in several statements that it knows where exactly British money is going. 

Condescending stories in European newspapers that directly link aid funding to the shirt sponsorship miss the point.

The logic behind the deal is to concentrate on a strong-performer sector with the hope that it will generate more resources to be spent elsewhere. The growth of Rwanda’s tourism sector has been nothing short of dramatic and has arguably been the RDB’s greatest success. Foreign exchange receipts from the sector have been growing at around 30 per cent annually and are targeted to reach $800 million by 2024.

The Rwandan authorities have been successful in building a global reputation for the country as a tourism destination. It has also attracted global hotel brands like the Marriott and Radisson to bolster its image. 

The other side of the coin is that, Rwanda is far from (being) the only country that has partnered with football teams to attract tourism to its country. Many countries have sponsored football club shirts. For example, Azerbaijan sponsored Atletico Madrid, Malaysia and Puerto Rico have sponsored Sevilla, Qatar sponsored Barcelona and Chad sponsored FC Metz. Emirates and other airlines have also sponsored several football club t-shirts (including Arsenal’s).

The Arsenal/PSG deals grant the Rwanda with access to hospitality boxes, matchday tickets and access to star players for promotional work, pointedly implying a personalistic element to the sleeve-sponsorship deal. 

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