Blood on the Basketball: The NBA Must End Its Deal With the UAE as the Sudan Genocide Worsens
The UAE has been accused of supporting the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary, which has committed some of the worst atrocities in Sudan's three-year civil war.
As the National Basketball Association (NBA) finals get underway, the league faces several vexing problems, including how to stop teams from tanking and players from betting. These issues pale in comparison, however, to the commercial branding deal the league has forged with a government – the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – accused of supporting a Sudanese militia committing some of the 21st century’s most heinous race- and ethnicity-based human rights crimes.
Ironically, many NBA players have been civil and human rights leaders for decades. During the Jim Crow era in the US, basketball players like Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar stood up against the gross injustices of that time and advocated for civil rights. More recently, NBA and WNBA players, including Maya Moore, LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, and Jaylen Brown, advocated for racial justice in America. Others have spoken out about the brutal tactics of ICE agents.
The NBA and WNBA are now one degree of separation from one of the worst cases of racial injustice in the world due to the largest branding deal ever signed with a government by the two leagues. The multi-year deal, announced in 2024, will reportedly generate an estimated $500 million in ad revenue around the following components: the mid-season basketball tournament named the Emirates NBA Cup, the Emirates Air logo on a patch on jerseys of all NBA and WNBA referees, and virtual Emirates branding projected onto the court during every nationally televised NBA game. The New York Knicks, which will play in the finals, have their own $30 million deal, resulting in Experience Abu Dhabi patches on the team jerseys and warm-up jackets.
With their history of human rights advocacy, the dark side of this partnership is one that most players probably don’t know about. While the UAE consistently issues blanket denials of allegations that it supports the militia known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), there is ample evidence from human rights groups, news organizations, and others to the contrary.
It’s unlikely that Steph Curry knows that the UAE provides arms and other support to a militia in Sudan that the United Nations says is committing genocide. Genocide is a very specific crime. It is invoked only when acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a group based on their nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion. In the Sudanese case, it is racial and ethnic identity.
Angel Reese is probably not aware that, largely because of UAE support, the war in Sudan has displaced nearly 14 million Sudanese people, the largest number in the world. That means 14 million people are homeless in part because of the drones, artillery, mortars, and missiles that the UAE reportedly provides to its Sudanese militia partner, which attacks targets often based on their racial and ethnic backgrounds.
LeBron James would probably not have heard that in October 2025, as the NBA Emirates Cup games were underway, the RSF, supported by the UAE, overran the Sudanese city of El Fasher and killed somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 Sudanese civilians, including burning people alive, again on the basis of their racial or ethnic identity. And that it didn’t just happen overnight; the militia had laid siege to the city for 500 days, attempting to starve the residents, while the world looked on.
Caitlin Clark surely couldn’t have known that the United Nations says that sexual violence in Sudan is “pervasive” and “systematic,” and that the war there is the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis for women and girls.”
Jaylen Brown is unlikely to have come across the fact that children are extensively recruited and used as soldiers in Sudan’s civil war, and that the primary perpetrator of child soldier recruitment is the militia supported by the UAE.
NBA and WNBA players might be disincentivized to speak out about the UAE’s role in these atrocities as they could be fined for conduct detrimental to the league’s commercial interests.
But this is genocide, the world’s most heinous crime, one rooted in racial domination and extermination. Players could at least raise awareness of the plight of the Sudanese people. Some players might even be willing to incur a financial penalty by calling on the UAE to stop supporting the genocidal militia in Sudan.
Meanwhile, sports fans and others concerned with this outrage can raise their voices and call on the NBA, WNBA, and New York Knicks to end their brand relationships with the UAE, and demand that the UAE end its military support for that genocidal militia in Sudan, a link that is deeply antithetical to everything the players and leagues stand for. Money not tainted with so much blood can come from other sponsors.
Millions of Sudanese lives are at stake, and silence simply encourages those responsible.
Omer Ismail is the former Foreign Minister of Sudan during the last civilian-led government before the military coup. John Prendergast is co-founder of The Sentry, which launched the Blood on the Ball campaign
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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Thanks for this heightened awareness of what the commercial NBA is supporting genocide. There needs to be more of this and both women's and men's professional basketball players need to be made aware and use their potent platforms to voice their dissent of being used to promote the UAE's complicity in genocide
Greed and money seem to matter more to many than human lives and human dignity. My heart continues to ache for the Sudanese people.