CMENAS Fall 2023 Colloquium Series Lecture: No Such Thing as ‘Soft Power’ – How Gulf States are Using Sport to Gain Supremacy on the World Stage

Gulf states are now one of the most powerful forces in world football. First, in 2008, the United Arab Emirates took control of Manchester City F.C. and transformed the club into a multiple English, and now European champion, the key asset in a group of twelve clubs in five continents; then Qatar, having controversially won the right to host the 2022 World Cup, purchased French giant Paris Saint-Germain F.C. (PSG); and now, Saudi Arabia is on the way to eclipse both, having spent hundreds of millions recruiting some of the sport's most famous names for its state-run and owned national league and clubs; and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), enjoying a uniquely close relationship with world governing body FIFA, is now seen as favorite to hold the 2034 World Cup. The acquisition of 'soft power' is routinely presented as the key reason behind these countries' unprecedented investment in football, as football enables them to burnish/re-define their global image and 'sportswash' their dreadful human rights record. While this is true, this doesn't tell the whole story. All three countries have applied different strategies and have distinct objectives, all of them geo-political rather than reputational in nature. What unites all three projects is not 'soft power', but power itself, on a regional but also, in the case of Saudi Arabia, global level. There is nothing 'soft' about this, even if the rest of the world has so far failed to recognize this essential difference.

Football writer, broadcaster, and investigative journalist Philippe Auclair has been France Football's England correspondent since 1999. He is the England football correspondent for Eurosport.fr, Europe 1, Radio France Internationale, and Swiss national radio RTS, and a regular contributor to the Guardian Football Weekly (UK) podcast, for which he specializes in governance issues and the geopolitical dimension of football. His investigations have been published by Josimar magazine and on the websites of the Arabic and African services of the BBC. His biography of Eric Cantona, The Rebel Who Would Be King, was voted 'Football Book of the Year' in both France and the UK, and he won France's 'Scoop Of The Year' award for his investigation into the 'Qatargate' dossier, to which he also devoted two books, published in France and Belgium in 2015 and 2022. He has recently been investigating the sports betting industry as part of a multinational team that won the Investigative Journalism For Europe's Impact Award in 2023.

He recently published on the topic, which he will expand on in his lecture. Please see: https://josimarfootball.com/2023/05/18/boardroom-blitz/

This event is part of the CMENAS Fall Colloquium 2023: “The MENA world after a MENA World Cup” 555 Weiser Hall, 500 Church Street, Ann Arbor.

Colloquium questions: cmenas@umich.edu

This series is funded in part by the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies (CMENAS) U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center (NRC) grant.

To register, go to https://myumi.ch/8eA8n.