Authoritarian regimes increasingly use sport to project soft power, soften the public memory of human-rights violations, and buy international legitimacy. Most sport institutions are not structurally equipped to evaluate that risk before they sign. Existing literature on sportswashing is largely diagnostic. DASH is operational: a tool a board, a federation, or a sponsor can run on a deal in front of them.
Each question is scored 0 to 3, producing a composite range of 0 to 15. The protocol pulls its normative weight from the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, and translates them into something a non-lawyer can apply.
DASH was tested against six high-profile cases: PSG and Qatar Airways, Aramco and Formula 1, Newcastle and PIF, Chelsea and Abramovich, Anzhi and Kerimov, and the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. State-linked and opaque arrangements produced the highest cumulative scores. Corporate or conditional-reform partnerships showed lower exposure and greater reversibility. The point of the pilot was not to rank villains. It was to show that the same questions, applied consistently, separate symbolic partnerships from structural governance capture.
DASH is not a purity test. It does not tell an institution whether to take a deal. It tells the institution what kind of deal it is taking, in language that survives a board meeting, a press cycle, and a regulator. It is soft infrastructure for ethical oversight: engagement without complicity, visibility without surrender, reform without naivete.
DASH I covers ingress. It does not measure what happens once an actor is inside. That is the job of DASH II, which extends the framework into post-capture control. Together they form a lifecycle model: from how power gets in, to how it stays.
Founder of Cinderpoint Systems LLC. M.S. Artificial Intelligence (MSAI), M.S. Management (MSM). Researches how systems fail under speed, opacity, and scale.