This year’s NBA playoffs have been a remarkable success, with historic comebacks and overtime thrillers, helping to draw the most viewers in decades. Tragically, this success on the court comes during a dark moment for the league off the court. The National Basketball Association is undermining its historic commitment to racial and social justice, to its players, and to people a continent away, the people of Sudan.
The link between the NBA and the Sudanese people runs through the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a key partner of the NBA and the most influential external actor in Sudan’s war, a conflict that has generated the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. Through its commercial branding deal, the NBA essentially has been coopted onto the UAE’s side in that conflict: The UAE’s state-owned airline, Emirates, is flying high during the playoffs, its branding displayed on top of the backboard, digitally overlaid on the court or surrounding areas, and sewn onto the jerseys of all referees — part of the league’s commercial partnership with the UAE that generates hundreds of millions of dollars per year for the NBA and the airline.
This year’s NBA Championship gives the UAE a bonus boost, as it features the New York Knicks, whose jerseys sport patches reading “Experience Abu Dhabi” (referring to the largest of the UAE emirates). The Knicks rake in $30 million annually from this deal.
These displays feed into the UAE’s economic and diplomatic strategy aimed at creating a national brand of “a visionary, futuristic and forward-looking state.” Its reputation is a source of both significant soft power and economic strength.
Yet the UAE is forward-looking only if dystopia awaits. For it is the chief arms supplier of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group battling the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for control of Sudan and its resources. (The UAE denies that it has armed the RSF, despite reams of evidence, including from human rights organizations, U.S. lawmakers, the U.S. intelligence community, the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, and reporting by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Middle East Eye. It cynically touts its humanitarian aid to Sudan, even as it seeks to disguise military assistance to the UAE as humanitarian aid.) The UAE is also a hub for RSF-owned businesses and a safe haven for RSF leaders’ wealth through their real estate investments, as documented in an investigation by the policy organization The Sentry (co-founded by one of us, John).
Both the RSF and the SAF are responsible for mass atrocities, and Egypt and Saudi Arabia have been key supporters of the SAF. The RSF, though, is also responsible for the most intense period of ethnically motivated murder since the Rwandan genocide more than 30 years ago, killing an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 people in and around El Fasher last year in a matter of weeks, as families were massacred and women raped. “We want to eliminate anything black from Darfur,” RSF fighters declared, according to witnesses interviewed by a U.N. independent fact-finding mission. “If we find Zaghawa [a non-Arab ethnic group in Darfur], we will kill them all.” Far from the RSF’s only series of atrocities, which the United States determined in January 2025 amounted to genocide, this was part of a pattern that began only weeks into the war, which erupted on April 15, 2023, with RSF attacks targeting ethnic Massalit residents of El Geneina, in Darfur, killing 10,000-15,000 people by the end of 2023, according to U.N. expert panel estimates.
Laundering a Reputation Amid Racial and Ethnic Killing
The NBA is thus profiting handsomely and laundering the reputation of a regime that is underwriting a militia responsible for killing people based on their race and ethnicity. And even worse, it is part of an ecosystem of elite global brands that persist with their UAE-reputation-boosting brand partnerships more than three years into the UAE-backed genocide in Sudan. Other brands include the Premier League (UK football/soccer), Formula One (car racing), UCI (bicycle racing), the Ultimate Fighting Championship (mixed martial arts, coming soon to a White House lawn near you, unless a new lawsuit stops it), ATP Tour and Grand Slam tournaments (tennis), DP World Tour (golf), Disney, Warner Brothers, and the Guggenheim. They are promoting the image of the UAE that its regime wants the world to see, deflecting the reputational — and real economic and strategic costs this would impose — that the UAE might otherwise experience.
The NBA cannot say it did not know. For nearly two years, at least, human rights organizations have been raising these concerns with NBA leadership. The response is always a variation on a theme: We are following U.S. State Department guidance. (The State Department under both the Biden and current Trump administrations have determined that the RSF is committing genocide but has not publicly identified the UAE for its role in arming the RSF, nor advised against doing business with the UAE.) In effect, the NBA has chosen to delegate its ethical judgments to the U.S. government.
Yet this is not a league known for blindly following government policy. Silence was not an option for the NBA after George Floyd was murdered. After federal immigration agents killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota earlier this year, the NBA Players Association left no doubt where it stood: with the protesters opposed to an inhumane policy. And the NBA Social Justice Coalition — encompassing NBA executives, players, and coaches — has advocated for changes in law at both national and state levels. Nationally, it has supported the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Freedom to Vote Act, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, and the EQUAL Act (to end the disparity in sentencing for crack and powder cocaine). At the state level, it has advocated for legislation to help reintegrate people with criminal records into their communities and to restore voting rights to formerly incarcerated individuals. And in 2017, the NBA moved its All-Star game out of Charlotte after North Carolina passed legislation that removed protections against discrimination for LGBTQ+ individuals.
Time and again, the NBA, with players in the lead, has chosen to speak out and to act against injustices. Silence and inaction should not be an option now, not when the NBA is encouraging its fans to use their hard-earned dollars to fly Emirates and experience Abu Dhabi — and in so doing, to fund a regime that is sending weapons it buys to a genocidal militia.
Yet now, though genocide is underway and the NBA is bound up with its supporters, the League has abdicated any moral responsibility regarding the atrocities unfolding in Sudan. It needs to change course. Human rights is not a U.S. government priority in the Middle East, where oil has long been the central consideration. Moreover, U.S. policy on the UAE is now wrapped up in President Donald Trump’s family’s business dealings, most notably a UAE-backed firm’s 49 percent stake in their cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial, along with a $2 billion investment in the company’s stablecoin. U.S. State Department guidance in this case will not be driven by human rights concerns.
The NBA’s Own Moral Compass
As an ethical organization, the NBA needs to follow its own moral compass, guided by principles rooted in social justice and its own history of championing human rights and racial justice.
The NBA and the Knicks should immediately suspend their partnerships with the UAE, expressly link those decisions to the UAE’s military support for the RSF, and keep the door open to resuming the partnership if the UAE immediately and verifiably ends this support.
On Oct. 27, 2025, at El-Fasher University, one RSF commander encountered a pregnant woman. How far into her pregnancy was she, he asked, according to two survivors. “Seven months,” she responded. He proceeded to kill her — with seven shots into her abdomen, as if it were one for every month towards a life that would never be. The U.S. government may be content to maintain business as usual with the regime in Abu Dhabi that has done so much to make such inhumanity possible. As it has for decades on other issues of racial and social justice, the NBA can listen to its better angels and make a different choice.
