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in Latin America, one of the ways Gulf states’ rising profiles have been most evident is their forays into the soft power of soccer. Gulf countries are not among the top trading partners of Latin America’s largest economies, but sports fans know that both Messi and Brazilian star Neymar play for a club team that is owned by a subsidiary of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, Paris Saint-Germain.

Latin American audiences are intimately familiar with the use of the World Cup for political aims, such as when Argentina sought international legitimacy for its bloody dictatorship when it hosted the tournament in 1978. Like the European and U.S. press, the show has discussed the human rights and labor rights complaints surrounding the Qatari-hosted event. Still, Wall told Foreign Policy that, overall, “in South America, perhaps we see [the World Cup] with different eyes.” Latin American coverage of the event has focused more on how soccer culture in both Latin America and the Middle East developed in the context of colonization. It’s been striking to encounter so many Brazil and Argentina fans from the Middle East and Asia at the World Cup, Wall added. “There is something that we see in each other.”

It has also prompted some to wonder if Latin American countries could better capitalize on their own soccer power. “The value of Argentine soft power” remains “much more potential than real,” former Argentine foreign ministry official Tomás Kroyer told Forbes Argentina this week. In Brazil, the Workers’ Party governments of 2003 to 2016 designed several policies to use the appeal of Brazilian soccer as a diplomatic tool, even taking the national team to play in Haiti to herald the arrival of Brazilian peacekeepers in 2004, Veiga de Almeida University international relations professor Tanguy Baghdadi told Foreign Policy in an interview.

The Middle East and North Africa are becoming a kind of citizenship frontier: a region where certainty, permanence, and protection of citizenship is being uniquely and dangerously corroded. And Western countries are enabling this dynamic.

The creation of a new, opaquely defined but unambiguously lesser form of citizenship is not a symptom of exploitative labor conditions. It’s a symptom of a regional erosion of citizenship.

Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain all emerged as states containing substantial populations of bedoon—stateless residents who were not recognized as citizens and were, in some cases, denied even birth certificates.

Most significant of all are the post-1948 populations of Palestinians in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, millions of people who were eventually issued identity documents by several governments, such as subvariants of Syrian passports (Syrian travel documents for Palestinian refugees), which looked like and served as passports but faced adamant political insistence from all sides—save Jordan, which eventually largely naturalized Palestinians—that this documentation was not, in fact, citizenship.

Tibetans in exile have been granted pseudo-passports—but not citizenship—by India. Residents of American Samoa are “U.S. nationals” not possessing the full rights of citizenship. The disintegration of Yugoslavia left thousands of Roma people stateless. Issues of statelessness and ambiguous citizenship are universal in any part of the world which experiences crisis and conflict.

Since the 2010s, the Middle East is emerging as a kind of experimental zone where the erosion of citizenship rights can be trialed. While Qatari soccer players are temporary citizens naturalized with an expiration date—even if the details of when their passports expire is not public—Western countries are increasingly comfortable denaturalizing and revoking the citizenship of their own immigrant citizens of Middle Eastern origin when those citizens are accused of terrorist activity in the region.

some right-populist movements are claiming that Middle Eastern and North African immigrants are somehow not really American, Dutch, or British

The West looks the other way as Gulf states chip away at citizenship norms for expediency, and local governments don’t protest too much when Western governments strand their denaturalized ex-citizens in the region. Especially after the emergence of the Islamic State, with its large contingent of Western, immigrant-origin fighters, the revocation of citizenship became an appealing alternative to long and complicated criminal prosecutions.

Western institutions in the Middle East have led the way in demonstrating that the definition of citizenship can be changed to solve an embarrassing problem, be that one of your citizens swearing allegiance to the Islamic State or the fact that half your national soccer team is foreign

The erasure of citizenship rights in these cases can be tolerated by international legal regimes because they are considered exceptional. It’s just for some athletes. It’s just for terrorists. But it doesn’t stay that way: The model, once implemented, is attractive for other uses.

conditional citizenship, a term coined by the American author Laila Lalami to describe people who, through a web of big and small prejudices and bureaucratic procedures, have “rights the state finds expendable.”

The Saudis have used their financial clout to ground down enemies in ways big and small, from Iranian American wrestlers facing scripted humiliation in WWE shows to American golf executives being forced to swallow previous bitter condemnations of the kingdom. Saudi Arabia’s golf takeover this year, in which the kingdom coerced the PGA Tour into a planned alliance after effectively winning a game of high-stakes chicken over the fate of one of the world’s most popular sports, struck some analysts as the final dam to break in the sports world’s resistance to Saudi involvement.

Another key currency in sports (and adjacent Spandex-clad theater) was embedded in that brief anti-Iranian WWE storyline, a forgettable footnote for American viewers. Saudi leaders have attempted to move the country away from religious fundamentalism, or Islamism, to replace it with something more palatable to global commerce: nationalism, partly ginned up by crushing Middle Eastern rivals at a game it came late to.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSaudi Arabia, with its geriatric leadership until six years ago, had inadvertently given the United Arab Emirates and Qatar a decades-long head start at investing in sports — but the much larger country has been a bully ever since.

Sheikh’s management style has embodied Saudi Arabia’s foray into global sports: free-spending, rancorous and hyper-political. He commandeered the lectern at an international chess tournament in Riyadh to rail against “ministate” Qatar, and he ranted that the Saudi soccer team had put in “less than 5 percent effort” during a World Cup loss to Russia. With his penchant for showmanship, it was perhaps inevitable that one of the PIF’s first massive investments would be bringing WWE to Saudi Arabia — and, with it, hired wrestlers acting out the humiliation of what was then a Saudi enemy nation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the Greatest Royal Rumble in Riyadh in April 2018, two Iranian American wrestlers, waving the Iranian flag, confronted four young Saudi wrestlers. The scripted comeuppance was swift: The Saudis pummeled the Iranians, brothers Ariya and Shawn Daivari, threw them out of the ring and sent them limping away as the crowd jeered.

Many Westerners ascribe a singular motive to Saudi Arabia, if not the entire Middle East, for its interest in sports: sportswashing. And Saudi Arabia has used sports to market its supposed makeover to the outside world — and to guard its image.

Sheikh celebrated by buying a $4.8 million Bugatti before landing on a larger vanity purchase. After a stint as honorary president of an Egyptian soccer club ended with him warring with management, Sheikh poured millions into buying a rival team and moving it to Cairo. Months later, he abandoned Egyptian soccer while lamenting the “headache.”

by dissuading potential religious extremism, “The idea is to get the country to look quote-unquote ‘normal.’ ”

“one of those key moments of reputation laundering and propaganda that Mohammed bin Salman needed at that time: an American organization with a billionaire as famous as Vince McMahon appearing in Saudi Arabia and things going on as normal.”

In the years since Khashoggi’s murder, financial leaders returned to doing business with Saudi Arabia, partly revealed when the kingdom released a list of partners in venture capital, including some of the highest-profile firms in the world. (That includes Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post. In 2022, the PIF invested roughly $430 million in Amazon.) In sports, reticent executives became increasingly easy marks for a kingdom practiced at bending opponents to its will.

The PIF’s effort to purchase Newcastle United was stalled by Saudi Arabia’s alleged role in one of the world’s largest piracy operations, which for years brazenly stole Qatari content, including that of Premier League games, and beamed it to set-top boxes in Saudi homes.Saudi Arabia denied having a role in the piracy. Investigations by several organizations, from the World Trade Organization to FIFA, found otherwise. The piracy halted just before the PIF was set to complete its purchase of Newcastle.

“The majority of fans don’t care.”

The Saudis — with a diversified portfolio full of other sports — were willing to blow up golf. Pro golf executives, it turns out, were not.

Endeavor, helmed by Ari Emanuel, announced in April a $21 billion deal to merge UFC, its mixed martial arts company, with WWE. Less than five years earlier, Emanuel had returned $400 million to the Saudis so as not to have to partner with them in the wake of Khashoggi’s murder. But Endeavor and its related companies had recently done business with the kingdom again — including Endeavor’s IMG negotiating media rights for the Saudi Pro League. Under TKO, the company created in the merger with Emanuel as CEO, WWE plans to continue its Saudi shows. And UFC recently announced it would hold its first event in Saudi Arabia next year.

Chalker declined requests for an interview or to answer detailed questions about his work for the Qatari government. Chalker also claimed that some of the documents reviewed by the AP were forgeries.

The AP took several steps to verify the documents’ authenticity. That includes confirming details of various documents with different sources, including former Chalker associates and soccer officials; cross-checking contents of documents with contemporaneous news accounts and publicly available business records; and examining electronic documents’ metadata, or digital history, where available, to confirm who made the documents and when. Chalker did not provide to the AP any evidence to support his position that some of the documents in question had been forged.

According to a friend, quoted by the Guardian, he was assaulted by security officials after being released. He then reportedly went to a police station to report the incident and was accused of telling lies and detained.

al-Jazeera – which is now beIN Sports – agreed the secret deal to pay $100m if Qatar won the vote.

When asked about the payment by the Mail on Sunday in January, a beIN Sports spokesperson characterised the bonus as “production contributions” which were “standard market practice and are often imposed upon broadcasters by sports federations and sports rights holders”.

The plan, to be funded by private Saudi and Emirati investors and executed by Egyptian firms that helped broaden the Suez Canal, also envisions the construction of five hotels, two ports and a free trade zone.

The $750 million project would have the dump ready for when Saudi Arabia inaugurates the first two of its 16 planned nuclear reactors in 2027. Saudi Arabia is reviewing proposals to build the reactors from US, Chinese, French, South Korean contractors and expects to award the projects in December.

Qatar’s more liberal Wahhabism of the sea contrasts starkly with the Wahhabism of the land that Prince Mohammed is seeking to reform. The crown prince made waves last year by lifting a ban on women’s driving, granting women the right to attend male sporting events in stadiums, and introducing modern forms of entertainment like, music, cinema and theatre – all long-standing fixtures of Qatari social life and of the ability to reform while maintaining autocratic rule.

A traditional Gulf state and a Wahhabi state to boot, Qatari conservatism was everything but a mirror image of Saudi Arabia’s long-standing puritan way of life. Qatar did not have a powerful religious establishment like the one in Saudi Arabia that Prince Mohammed has recently whipped into subservience, nor did it implement absolute gender segregation. Non-Muslims can practice their faith in their own houses of worship and were exempted from bans on alcohol and pork. Qatar became a sponsor of the arts and hosted the controversial state-owned Al Jazeera television network that revolutionized the region’s controlled media landscape and became one of the world’s foremost global English-language broadcasters.

Qatari conservatism is likely what Prince Mohammed would like to achieve even if that is something he is unlikely to acknowledge

“I consider myself a good Wahhabi and can still be modern, understanding Islam in an open way. We take into account the changes in the world,” Abdelhameed Al Ansari, the then dean of Qatar University’s College of Sharia, a leader of the paradigm shift, told The Wall Street Journal in 2002.

if built, the channel would suggest that geopolitical supremacy has replaced ultra-conservative, supremacist religious doctrine as a driver of the king-in-waiting’s policy