The Geopolitics of Gulf Sport Sponsorship

ABSTRACT

The names of two major Gulf airlines, Qatar Airways and Emirates, have saturated the European football scene for many years, sponsoring some of the most prominent European teams and FIFA itself. These state-backed airlines are also active in motorsports, rugby, cycling, tennis, golf, cricket, and equestrian sport, while several prominent Gulf elites and royal family members have recently taken over major sports franchises in Europe and elsewhere. How should we understand these far-reaching sponsorship agendas in the Gulf? What can they tell us about the politics and ethics of international sport on the Arabian Peninsula? Moving beyond the general readings of Gulf sport sponsorship as an exercise in ‘soft power,’ this article shows how these deals are strategic nodes for diverse actors in the Gulf and in the international sporting community to advance various interests: personal, political, financial, and otherwise. Informed by a critical geopolitics lens that questions the coherence of the ‘state’ as an actor, I ask what it means to say that ‘the Gulf’ sponsors sport, and more specifically investigate the relevant actors behind these sponsorship deals. To do so, this article examines regional and global political economy through a focus on three Gulf airline sponsors, Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways, and three elite sports sponsors—the UAE’s Sheik Mansour, Qatar’s Nasser bin Ghanim Al-Khelaïfi, and Sheikh Nasser of Bahrain. By decentering ‘soft power’ approaches to sport that unduly emphasize the ‘state’ as an actor, this article suggests a more grounded approach to the geopolitics of sport in the Arabian Peninsula, which simultaneously acknowledges the complicity of Western actors and institutions in the rise of Gulf sports sponsorship deals in the past decade.

KEYWORDS:

• Sports geography
• political geography
• soft power
• critical geopolitics
• Arabian Peninsula

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Washington, D.C., and has benefited from the feedback of colleagues there. I am grateful to the special issue editors Rita Risser and Andrew Edgar for the invitation to participate and for their comments on earlier drafts. Thanks also to Mahfoud Amara, Michael Ewers, and Tod Rutherford for their feedback on early drafts, and for their insights and thought-provoking exchanges on this topic over the course of several years, I thank James Sidaway, Justin Spinney, and Julian Georg.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This writing is part of a broader literature on soft power as a ‘tool’ for smaller or less geopolitically influential states to exercise international influence, first articulated Joseph Nye (1990). It has developed into something of a cottage industry among scholars researching sport and international politics, from diverse disciplines, who have sought to apply it in many other countries (which is too extensive to survey here, but see Grix 2016).

2. More troubling, perhaps, is the fact that much of the popular and scholarly writing on sport and sports-related investment from the Arabian Peninsula is still shot through with (sometimes more, sometimes less) Orientalist language, all the while masquerading as critique. This frequently amounts to little more than a thinly veiled normative statement about the ills of ‘dirty’ money-infiltrating sport and/or the West, underpinned by myths of Western exceptionalism and noncomplicity in illiberal power dynamics (Koch 2017) and a nostalgic fantasy of sport uncontaminated by commercialism (Slack 2004; Smart 2007). One of the more egregious examples of this is found in an article titled, ‘The ball may be round but football is becoming increasingly Arabic: Oil money and the rise of the new football order,’ in which the authors consistently refers to the Gulf states as ‘sheikhdoms’ and refer to local sovereign wealth funds as ‘their cashed-up SWFs’ (Thani and Heenan 2017, 1017).

3. This is elaborated in a video on the Sponsorship page of the website, also available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=002lcCxXGvs.

4. An Instagram photograph of the ride is available at Cycling News (2016). The origin story is also narrated on a team video YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrmuvSx2epM.