Sport at Home, Sport in the World: Evaluating Qatar’s Sports Strategy from Above and Below

Abstract

This piece is an overview of actors and policies concerning sport in the nation of Qatar. In recent years, sports have been given high priority in government attempts to raise exposure of the nation internationally. Many authors have assessed the rationale of sports policy from an international relations perspective, speaking in terms of soft power or nation branding. Actors beyond the nation state, however, are equally involved in the shaping of ‘Qatar sport’—from businessmen and state-backed companies to individuals at the grassroots level. To redress the focus, the first section explores the establishment of the external view of Qatar as an emerging sports hub through the hosting of high-profile international sporting events and the creation of facilities for training and rehabilitating top-level athletes. The way these activities are organised is shown to be an elite-level, top-down approach. The second section shifts focus to explore informal sports participation at the grassroots level in Qatar. A bottom-up view onto involvement in sports in Qatar reveals a plurality of sporting participation that state and commercial-driven narratives sometimes fail to consider. Such multi-directional and actor-driven approaches are needed to arrive at a better understanding of how sport is viewed—and used—in Qatar.