Good Things Come from Small Places: Communicating Qatar to World Cup Tourists

Abstract

This paper deals with the discursive and linguistic ways in which the World Cup 2022 is communicated to a global audience of potential tourists. More specifically, three distinctive communicative phases are identified, which include the “Expect Amazing”, “Deliver Amazing”, and “Now is All” ones. With a focus on the enregisterment of the World Cup 2022 as a tourism-related discourse, it is argued that the Qatari authorities employ the various phases of the event communicatively not only in order to give a tangible answer to the accusations they have been receiving primarily on behalf of the Western media but also in order for them to put Qatar on the global tourist map, to rebrand the country, and ultimately to establish tourism as one of the country’s basic revenue sources in the post-World Cup era in an overall attempt to diversify its economy.