Global Sports and Soft Power Diplomacy

“[‘Sportswashing’ is] about much more than just simply regimes trying to polish their image. There are sound economic and political objectives at play. Sportswashing as a term doesn’t capture a lot of the nuance about who the audience is, about why regimes engage in what they do — [or] the fact that a lot of Western regimes as well engage in what you might call sportswashing.”

—Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Ph.D., Fellow for the Middle East and Co-Director, Middle East Energy Roundtable, Baker Institute

About the Episode

The U.S. is currently hosting the FIFA Men’s Club World Cup, an international competition between soccer club teams and the prelude to the larger and more widely anticipated FIFA Men’s World Cup hosted next summer across 16 North American cities. (The latter tournament is played between countries, instead of clubs.)

On “Baker Briefing,” fellow Kristian Coates Ulrichsen explains why these competitions and other global sports tournaments aren’t just entertainment, but a space where politics, economics, and diplomacy increasingly intersect, with a look in particular at the case of Saudi Arabia and its Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

Coates Ulrichsen is the author of the forthcoming book “Kingdom of Football: Saudi Arabia and the Remaking of World Soccer,” which will be published by Hurst on Aug. 21. The book goes beyond the popular term “sportswashing” to explore how and why Saudi Arabia burst onto the international soccer stage in 2023 and won the rights to host the 2034 FIFA Men’s World Cup.

This conversation was recorded on June 3, 2025. 

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Mentioned in this episode:

• Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Kingdom of Football: Saudi Arabia and the Remaking of World Soccer (Hurst, 2025), https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/kingdom-of-football/ (forthcoming).

Transcript

A full transcript of this episode is available here. This transcript was AI-generated and has not been through editorial review.

About ‘Baker Briefing’

Hosted by David M. Satterfield,  the “Baker Briefing” podcast delivers timely analysis on breaking policy developments and other critical policy issues of the day in conversations with experts at the Baker Institute. New episodes are released weekly.

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