The end of an era in sports mega events: analysis of events in developing nations, South Africa, Brazil, India and Qatar

Abstract

Emerging countries hosted the main sporting events in this century, we can say that this group of countries had a strategic interest in organizing mega-events, as well as the corresponding international federations and confederations. In the specific case of this study, it will be analyzed how emerging countries used sporting mega-events as a discourse to expand their political influence and as public diplomacy. The objectives will be (1) to discuss the concept of diplomacy in sporting events in the context of global society and its limits; (2) understand the way that the international/national media evaluated the mega-events (for this we have data from other FAPESP projects, we will need to analyze Qatar in 2022); (3) analyze the speeches of selected newspapers through two combined methodologies (framing media framing and analysis of communicative/strategic action from the perspective of the "Communicative Action Theory") to understand how the countries were portrayed during the event sports in the aspect of culture, event infrastructure and political values. It is expected to debate with other studies the reasons/consequences that led countries to host these mega-events and what are the interests of the large international federations and confederations in choosing them. Some issues were raised to deepen this theme: (a) there are academic discussions about the international federations and confederations to choose these countries because they are fragile democracies, therefore, easier for legislative changes; (b) sites with endemic corruption, which would facilitate agreements with global partners and the local political elite; (c) particularly, we are interested in interpreting the first World Cup in an Arab country (how the western media will present its culture, its social values, its religion). Based on this discussion, we propose three sub-areas of analysis: (i) sports diplomacy in the context of the globalized world; (ii) use of sporting mega-events by peripheral nations to obtain their adulthood certificate; (iii) international media as an impact factor in the evaluation of countries abroad and possible influence of sports diplomacy. (AU)