Sanitizing the stain: a critical integrative review of sportswashing discourse

Purpose This paper aims to develop a marketing-oriented understanding of sportswashing by synthesizing its burgeoning, fragmented and cross-disciplinary scholarship through Mary Douglas’s anthropology of purity and pollution, explaining how sportswashing operates as a symbolic purification process. Design/methodology/approach This research uses a critical integrative review of 45 peer-reviewed articles, identified through systematic searches of major academic databases. After two-stage screening, the corpus was analyzed qualitatively from an interpretive stance, using thematic synthesis followed by abductive theorization. Findings This study first maps the sportswashing ecosystem − stains, actors, motivations, mechanisms, phases and outcomes − revealing complexity and tensions pervading the literature. Building on this synthesis, it identifies five cleansing logics through which sportswashing operates as a symbolic purification process: separation, dilution, displacement, containment and sanctification. Each logic illuminates how sportswashing operates as a contest over cultural classification through association without explicit claims. Research limitations/implications This synthesis advances a research agenda for interpretive marketing and consumer research, highlighting what qualitative inquiry could reveal about sportswashing across consumer resistance, platformization of consumer culture, CSR-washing, macromarketing, branding and reputation, marketing communications, market systems and critical and postcolonial marketing. Originality/value This paper theorizes sportswashing as a symbolic purification process, extending the CSR-washing literature from deception to associative classificatory work. Its five cleansing logics connect marketing scholarship on sponsorship, reputation, meaning transfer and brand activism; show how fan meaning-making and consumer resistance become embroiled in cultural-political reputation management; and reframe sportswashing as a contest over cultural classification, resolving persistent conceptual tensions.