Weaponizing the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games?

Sports has long been a neglected topic in the literature on international relations, but ever since Joseph Nye his work on soft power this has changed. Soft power is the ability of nations to get what they want through attraction rather than coercion. A particular strand of work focuses on how so-called Sporting Mega Events such as the FIFA World Cup or Olympic Games are used by host nations to create this attraction on the world stage. But why and how particular countries intent to use these events is showing very different results and remains up for debate. This paper presumes that the regime type of a country can affect intentions in a significant way. Therefore the aim of this paper is to research in what way the intended use of Sports Mega Events differ as a soft power resource between different regime types. In order to do this, a comparative case study approach is used, analyzing France hosting the Olympic Games and Qatar hosting the FIFA World Cup. To test this, hypotheses on the resources of cultural power, governance structure and trade are derived from existing literature on soft power and regime types and earlier work on SME’s. Results show that an expected clear dichotomy between regime types does not exist empirically. Both countries use a hybridity of all resources in order to make use of their respective SME’s as a soft power tool. Furter research is needed on how these events are used in the context of soft power and how different regime types intent to use them.