BAKU is humming with the customary accompaniments to showcase events: lavish new facilities are being finished, sponsors schmoozed, and human-rights activists and awkward journalists locked up. For June’s European Games—an unconvincing new tournament that Azerbaijan is hosting—the brutal regime is using the formula it honed at the Eurovision Song Contest of 2012, and hopes to deploy for the Olympic games of 2024. Smile, spend big and suppress dissent.

Sport is separate from politics, and can even be therapy for it; or so its organisers often maintain. What does it matter if some faraway goon blows his petrodollars on a summer jamboree—or a winter one, as will now be the case for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, which FIFA, football’s disgraced governing body, this week farcically moved to December to avoid the intolerable heat? It matters. Frivolous as they seem, staging these events in ghastly places not only tarnishes FIFA, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and other overseers. It renders all involved complicit in corruption, and worse.

As a new study (reviewed on page 82) makes clear, democratic governments and their pinched voters are realising that although the public benefits of hosting these events are vague, the outlays—and losses—are high and rising. London’s Olympics were sublime, but the costs more than tripled from initial estimates. Brazil’s World Cup led to riots as well as footballing disaster for the home side. The preference of FIFA and the IOC for glitzy new stadiums, and an inflationary contest in spectacle, do not help. The risk is that the field is left to authoritarian countries. The Winter Olympics of 2022 now has only two bidders: China and Kazakhstan. Last year’s winter games were held in Sochi, Russia, just as Vladimir Putin’s meddling in Ukraine boiled over into bloodshed. Invasions notwithstanding, in 2018 Mr Putin is due to preside over the next World Cup.

The trouble is that these shindigs are not merely symptomatic of authoritarianism: they are themselves occasions for self-aggrandisement, larceny and abuse. The prestige and propaganda fodder they confer is only their most obvious incidental perk. Costs are spiralling not only because of white-elephant projects, but because such extravaganzas are a gold-medal chance for autocrats to reward cronies through kickbacks and dodgy contracts. The well-connected rich get richer (and the autocrats more safely ensconced) while, too often, the poor get little or nothing. Human rights can suffer directly, too. Sometimes, as in Azerbaijan, critics are incarcerated in advance or, if they cause embarrassment during the circus, are banged up when it moves on. Too many of Qatar’s migrant construction workers are still labouring in conditions akin to indentured servitude; alarming numbers are dying.

Synchronised skimming

All this means that awarding a tournament to a nasty regime, and even attending it, is neither neutral nor blameless. Visiting teams in effect use their own countries’ public funds to shore up repression abroad. And the ascendancy of authoritarians is killing sport’s claim to promote dignity and fraternity.

Three kinds of change are needed. Sponsors and participants must force the organising bodies, above all the egregious FIFA, to clean up their acts, by making public both their decision-making on venues and their executives’ interests. The arms-race in razzmatazz and pointless new construction must end, so that the costs for hosts become less prohibitive. Finally, the human-rights records of applicants—not just their easy promises of improvements—must be taken into account. The figleaf idea that sport can float free of mundane political reality must go. It never could.