‘Humans for sale’: Analysing The Guardian's representations of Qatar during the 2022 men's FIFA World Cup

Abstract

In 2010, Qatar became the first Middle Eastern nation to be awarded a FIFA World Cup (FWC). In the years leading up to the 2022 FWC, Media outlets frequently portrayed Qatar as an inhumane and barbaric nation. As such, the objective of this article is to explore and interrogate these tensions by analysing portrayals of Qatar as the host of the 2022 FWC. We pose two research questions: (1) How was Qatar represented in the news media as the 2022 FIFA World Cup host? And (2) How and to what extent do these representations reproduce or contest Orientalist framings of Muslim nations? We addressed these questions by conducting a reflexive thematic analysis of news media articles published by The Guardian, which focused on Qatar before, during, and immediately after the completion of the FWC, and interpreted them through Edward Said's postcolonial framework of Orientalism. Our analysis identified two contested themes in The Guardian coverage of Qatar: (a) migrant worker exploitation and (b) LGBTQ+ and women's rights violations. Within these themes, representations tended to frame Qatar as an unfit World Cup host, casting doubt not just on the nation's preparedness but also on its cultural legitimacy. These depictions contributed to a broader media discourse that marginalized Qatari voices, downplayed national reform efforts, and recycled longstanding Orientalist tropes regarding Islam and the Middle East. We also identified counternarratives that questioned whether such scrutiny would be targeted towards host nations in Western nations. Based on these findings, we argue that the Guardian's depictions of Qatar reveal a contested framing of the nation where Orientalist discourses are both reproduced and resisted within the news media corpus.

Keywords

news media analysis Orientalism Qatar FIFA World Cup sport media sport mega events

Introduction

In 2010, Qatar made history by being named the first Middle Eastern nation to host the FIFA World Cup (FWC). This victory, hailed as a ‘bold gamble’, was overshadowed by widespread allegations of corruption, scandals and labour rights abuses, particularly amongst migrant workers, women and LGBTQ+ communities (Jackson, 2017). These allegations not only intensified scrutiny of the Qatari government but also sparked criticism of FIFA for awarding its most prestigious and profitable event to an ‘unsuitable’ host (Ewers et al., 2020). This criticism reached a crescendo with a report published in The Guardian in 2021, which claimed that more than 6500 migrant workers had died in Qatar since the country secured its World Cup hosting rights (Pattisson and McIntyre, 2023). Qatar's International Labour Organization office contested the report, however, arguing that it did not differentiate deaths between migrant workers and the general migrant population, nor did it make clear which deaths were work-related (Mills, 2021).

Concerns over LGBTQ+ rights were similarly prominent. Homosexuality in Qatar remains illegal and punishable by up to seven years in prison (Addley, 2022). Human Rights Watch has documented several cases of abuse against LGBTQ+ individuals by Qatari security authorities in the lead-up to the tournament (Ingle, 2022). This persecution of LGBTQ+ communities raised alarm among Qatari locals (Campbell, 2022), international fans (Henao and Fam, 2022), footballers (Kidd, 2022) and participating teams (Turak, 2022). Qatar officials pushed back, emphasizing that all fans, LGBTQ+ individuals, were welcome to attend, while simultaneously asking visitors to respect the nation's culture (Lewis, 2022).

While criticism is not uncommon for sports mega-event hosts, some within the Qatari government believed that the level of scrutiny directed towards their nation was unprecedented and disproportionate (Al Jazeera, 2022). Critics nonetheless framed Qatar's hosting of the World Cup as a textbook case of sportswashing (Blum, 2023; Bokat-Lindell, 2022; Ogden and Bonagura, 2022; Wearing, 2022); a process of leveraging global sporting events to deflect attention from a nation's poor human rights record (Manoli et al., 2024).

Given these tensions and contexts, the aim of this paper is to critically examine portrayals of Qatar in the context of its role as host of the 2022 FWC. Specifically, we address the following research questions: (1) How was Qatar represented by news media as the 2022 FIFA World Cup host? And (2) How and to what extent do these representations reproduce or contest Orientalist framings of Muslim nations? We addressed these questions by conducting a thematic analysis of 33 articles published by The Guardian, a major British news outlet, and interpreting the findings using Edward Said's (1978) postcolonial framework of Orientalism.

Our analysis identified two contested themes in The Guardian's coverage of Qatar: (a) migrant worker exploitation and (b) LGBTQ+ and women's rights violations. Within these themes, representations tended to frame Qatar as an unfit World Cup host, casting doubt not just on the nation's preparedness but on its cultural legitimacy. These depictions contributed to a broader media discourse that marginalized Qatari voices, downplayed national reform efforts, and recycled longstanding Orientalist tropes regarding Islam and the Middle East. Moreover, FIFA's responsibility to address these issues in the 2022 tournament and past FWCs was omitted from the commentary. At the same time, however, the Orientalist framing of Qatar did not go uncontested. We identified counternarratives that questioned whether such scrutiny would be targeted towards host nations in the Western world.

Based on these findings, we argue that the Guardian's depictions of Qatar reveal a contested framing of the nation where Orientalist discourses are both reproduced and resisted within the news media corpus. Much of the commentary on Qatar constructed it as especially susceptible to corruption, labour exploitation, sexism and homophobia. These contributions, rather than addressing the nation's material concerns around migrant workers, LGBTQ and women's rights through its historical and cultural contexts, instead reinforce constructions of a civilizational clash between Western ‘modernity’ and Eastern ‘barbarism’, utilizing the FWC as its entry point. These results illustrate how the media reproduces Orientalist tropes through layered discursive strategies that merge political critique with cultural essentialism. Importantly, however, other contributions countered these framings and, in doing so, presented Qatar as a complex FWC host that promoted both problematic and progressive policies in the lead-up to the tournament. In doing so, these alternative discourses avoided invoking Orientalist tropes and, in many cases, called out this framework within other articles in the corpus

(Re)Configuring Orientalism and Muslim Sport

We employed Edward Said's (1978) concept of Orientalism to interpret the Guardian's representation of Qatar during the FWC. Orientalism refers to the Western tendency to depict the Middle East, Asia and North Africa, as inferior, dangerous and underdeveloped, through racist and universalizing stereotypes. This framework concomitantly reinforces colonialist ideologies that portray the West as a site of modernity and liberation (Pedersen and Koefoed, 2009). Importantly, rather than being a debate over the ‘truth’ of these regions, whether East or West, Said's Orientalist critiques demonstrate how representations are mobilized in the service of empire. Orientalist discourse helped enable colonialism in advance, just as it continues to justify Western geopolitical, economic and military power over the ‘Middle East’ in present times.

Such framings have been amplified in the post-9/11 era, through which a new form Orientalism emerged that was once described as coming ‘with a vengeance, in which the progressive ‘West’ was set out against an immobile “Islam” that was, if not a barbarism, then the breeding-ground of barbarians’ (Gregory, 2004: 58). This modern Orientalism, bolstered by Islamophobic and anti-immigrant racism, characterizes Muslim ‘looking’ peoples and communities as antithetical to democracy and homogenizes Muslim, Middle Eastern, North African and Arab nations as inherently suspicious. This helped justify violent neocolonial invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s that led to over 200,000 civilian deaths, left thousands more maimed and about 38 million displaced in the Middle Eastern regions (Vine et al., 2021). The omnipresent fear of (Muslim) terrorism and migrant ‘invasions’ shaped by this discourse has also influenced a global counter-terrorism industry that mass surveilled and criminalized Muslims in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada (Eroukhamanoff, 2015; Nagra and Maurutto, 2023).

An important critique of Said's original work is the omission of the ways that Orientalism constructs sexual difference as part of its colonial logic and framework (Yegenoglu, 1998). Feminist scholars have also thus extended Said's work to illustrate how Orientalism constructs Middle Eastern, Arab and Muslim nations as sites of religious conservatism, patriarchy, and homophobia (Abu-Lughod, 2001; Lewis, 2006; Yegenoglu, 1998). The West is conversely constructed as the modern site of tolerance, inclusion, women's freedom and a safe harbor for LGBTQ+ communities (Puar, 2006). Such a binary persists even as rights for women and queer people are under threat within the United States and other ostensibly progressive nations (Walton, 2024). Nonetheless, gendered forms of Orientalism have commonly framed Muslim men as particularly virulent patriarchs and Muslim women as their passive, agentless victims (Bullock and Jafri, 2026).

Orientalism and sport studies

Orientalism as a major influential framework has been underutilized in critical studies of sport (Darnell, 2017), though there is some evidence suggesting that Said's critiques are being taken up more recently in this scholarship (Ali and Hussain, 2025). A large focus of this work has been on critiquing Orientalist framings of Muslim women (Amara, 2008, 2012; Rizwan and Ali, 2025; Samie, 2017; Samie and Sehlikoglu, 2015; Samie and Toffoletti, 2018) and men (Burdsey, 2007, 2016; Hussain and Bien-Aimé, 2025; Malcolm et al., 2010). Emerging literature has also focused on the representation of Muslim nations as sport mega-event hosts (Swart and Hussain, 2023) and on the rise of sport as a tool for the deradicalization of ‘at-risk’ Muslims (Ali, 2025; Ali and King, 2021). These critiques demonstrate how Muslim athletes are often depicted as either ‘success stories’ of Western liberalism, multiculturalism and social improvement (Ali, 2025; Burdsey, 2007, 2016), or as dangerous threats in need of surveillance (Ali and King, 2021). Muslim women, conversely, have often been considered ‘out of place’ within sport (Hussain and Cunningham, 2021; Samie and Sehlikoglu, 2015), or as requiring (Western) sport to help spark their agency and modernize them away from the grips of Muslim men (Ali, 2025).

These framings form a necessary contextual backdrop for our analysis of the Guardian's positioning of Qatar, a Muslim-majority nation, particularly as it relates to the significance of sport mega events for rights related to gender and sexuality. As an important exception to the critiques of Orientalism in sport noted above, our analysis illuminates how Orientalist discourses maintain their hegemonic positioning through contested framings. As we will show, Orientalism is both enacted and resisted within the Guardian's news media's representations of Qatar. This demonstrates two unique contributions of this research: (a) that, unlike previous work on Orientalism and sport representations, this research illuminates the ways that some authors within a Western news agency actively resist Orientalist framings; and (b) that these competing framings nonetheless combine to reproduce an Orientalist framework by failing to attend to the cultural specificities, histories and contexts of Qatar.

The emergence of Muslim nations in global sport

International sporting events are important vessels for projecting political and ideological agendas for host nations. Gulf nations have historically leveraged sport events to showcase their ‘modernization’ and investment power (Amara, 2008), or to assert political agency (Henry et al., 2003). At the same time, however, media coverage of these events remains rooted in Orientalist narratives that frame Arab and Muslim sport events as a threat to Western dominance (Amara, 2008; Brannagan and Rookwood, 2016; Swart and Hussain, 2023). As such, Middle Eastern and Arab nations’ investments in global sport are often met with media suspicion, rather than as a signal of their desire to participate in the profitable global capitalist sport economy (Amara, 2016). The phenomenon of sportswashing, for example, has been disproportionately utilized to critique Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern states. Saudi Arabia has been subject to intense scrutiny for its investments in Newcastle United, LIV Golf and European football (Ettinger, 2024; Francavilla, 2024; Whitehead, 2024; Worden, 2023), while the UAE's hosting of NBA games generated similar concerns (Ganguli, 2024; Hausheer Ali and Stansbury, 2024; Human Rights Watch, 2024; Maese, 2023).

Previous scholarship on the selection of Qatar as the World Cup host has shown that the nation drew significant media scrutiny for its treatment of migrant workers who helped build the football stadiums for the tournament, even though the welfare of migrants was disputed (Ewers et al., 2020). Mohammed Al Thani (2021) found that this coverage relied on small, unrepresentative samples to make claims of human rights violations, poor worker living conditions and to criticize of the Kafala system that governs migrant workers in Qatar. As such, and despite Qatar's attempts to portray itself as progressive in the lead up to the FWC, Orientalist tropes continued to define the nation as exotic, dangerous and odd (Swart and Hussain, 2023). This study builds upon the previous work by (a) focusing on a specific news outlet, The Guardian, and (b) tracing representations of Qatar as they occurred during the tournament and following its completion.

Methods

Our analysis of The Guardian's reporting on Qatar during the 2022 World Cup focused on articles published online between 1 November 2022 and 31 January 2023. The Guardian is a left-leaning British daily paper and is considered a trustworthy ‘newspaper of record’ (Bold, 2018). News rater Ad Fontes Media rates The Guardian in the skewed left category of bias, but as reliable in analysis and fact-based reporting (Ad Fontes Media, 2023). Indeed, to be labelled a ‘Guardian reader’ mirrors being characterized as ‘woke’, a derogatory jab aimed at trivializing those who care about social justice (Letters, 2021). The outlet is part of the ‘Guardian Media Group’, which is owned by Scott Trust Limited, which was created in 1936 to ‘secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity’ (The Scott Trust: Values and History, 2015). Like many other newspapers, however, The Guardian also relies on reader revenue by mobilizing its ‘independent’ image to differentiate itself from other outlets and, in doing so, attract potential donors (Klein, 2025). The Guardian also has specific digital outlets for the USA, Australia, and Europe, as well as an ‘International’ edition. These illuminate both the Guardian's overall target audience and journalists, located largely within Western nations.

Given this context, we chose the Guardian for three reasons: first, it is a news outlet that is considered reliable, fact-based and free of direct political interference (to the best of our knowledge), which differentiates it from several of its contemporaries. Second, and relatedly, it is independent, Western-based, and does not hold a large stake in the Qatar World Cup (since it is not a primary broadcaster of the competition, nor a sport-specific news outlet). Finally, given its liberal lean, we were interested in the ways it would cover Qatar as a ‘controversial’ World Cup host, and whether it would illuminate the complexities of the debates surrounding its selection. And while the sample size (n = 33), and the different types of articles included in the corpus (news reporting, opinion pieces, editorials) limit our ability to make broader claims about Western news media representations of Qatar, we nonetheless believe it represents a fruitful starting point for future analyses of similarly structured, financed, and politically positioned news outlets, particularly in an era of emerging mis/disinformation.

We also focused on articles during the timeline above for two reasons: first, to capture articles that were more likely to be seen by both regular Guardian readers and FWC fans in the immediate lead-up, during, and in the aftermath of the FWC. Second, and relatedly, we were interested in identifying and analysing how Qatar was portrayed to this global audience during a heightened period of exposure. We began our search on The Guardian's website by scanning articles located in the World Cup 2022 section of the website. This archive contains all the articles concerning the 2022 FWC written by contributors to The Guardian. After an initial scan of this archive, we identified more than 100 articles that mentioned Qatar. Many of these articles included focused on topics unrelated to the host nation, including summaries and predictions, and were excluded. A total of 33 articles were, thus, selected.

The research team utilized thematic analysis to explore The Guardian's representation of Qatar as the FIFA 2022 World Cup host (Clarke and Braun, 2017; Hawkins, 2017). Thematic analysis is an ideal approach for this exploration as it allowed for a systematic but flexible scanning (Hawkins, 2017) of the news media corpus that led to the identification and interpretation of themes within the data set (Clarke and Braun, 2017). Such a process incorporates the researcher as an active subject who brings their lived experiences, epistemological assumptions, and academic training to the analysis. All three authors self-identify and/or are racialized as ‘Muslim’ and have experienced Islamophobia. We are also keenly aware, sensitive to, and impacted by the ways that the Middle East, Muslim, and Arab worlds are often racially conflated into a homogenous identity. These realities and experiences shape both our motivations for undertaking such a project as well as the interpretive lenses we utilize to understand constructions of Qatar within The Guardian.

Rather than describing these experiences to ‘validate’ the data, we understand this as a form of reflexive positioning that illuminates the subjectivity of both the data and its interpreters. We also utilized this reflexive work to challenge our own assumptions about the data we were analysing, by engaging in ‘critical discussions’. For example, while initially hesitant to label some of the articles as ‘challenging’ Orientalist framings of Qatar, our group discussions led us to become more open to the idea that some articles and authors were, to varying extents, attempting to do just that.

This reflexive process was also enacted to familiarize ourselves with the data (Terry and Hayfield, 2021) through immersion in the news corpus as well as the theories and literature noted above. NVivo was then utilized to separate the data into initial codes, based on emergent keywords that included: migrant workers, human rights, LGBT rights, women's repression, corruption and Western hypocrisy. These keywords were identified in three ways using NVivo: first, by conducting an initial scan of the article titles; second, by reviewing section/paragraph headers that separated the body of each article; and third, we identified specific, unique keywords that helped us interpret the corpus. We then examined patterns between the keywords within the data set by looking for similarities, differences and disagreements among them. These included emergent themes ranging from the inferiority of Arab culture and Qatari corruption to perceptions of unfair treatment of Qatar relative to previous World Cup host cities. Rather than being succinct or linear, the themes generated a contested representation of Qatar as the FIFA World Cup host. These themes were then interpreted through the lens of Said-ian critiques of Orientalism and by connecting the emerging Guardian narratives to the literature noted above on Orientalism, sport and the Middle East.

Results and Discussion

‘Humans for sale!’: Migrant workers’ conditions

The analysis of The Guardian's coverage of Qatar during the 2022 FWC revealed two contested themes: (1) migrant worker exploitation and (2) LGBTQ+ and women's rights violations. First, concerns about the human rights of migrant workers were the most frequently raised issue in The Guardian's coverage, with two-thirds of the articles discussing unpaid or underpaid labour and unsafe working conditions. These articles emphasized the exploitation of migrant workers involved in constructing the FWC infrastructure. Louise Donovan (2022) reported that Qatar's government had recruited tens of thousands of migrants to build stadiums and related facilities ahead of the tournament. Many labourers worked up to 10-hour shifts, 6 days a week, in temperatures exceeding 45°C, for as little as £1 an hour (Holmes, 2022). This extreme labour was compounded by the overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions plaguing worker accommodations (Holmes, 2022). The combination of accidents, heat-related illnesses, and chronic exposure to physical and mental stress was said to cause an increase in worker deaths (Dart, 2022). A Nepali worker's testimonial captured the weight of this exploitation: ‘Whenever I see that stadium on the screen, I feel bad. I was abused and exploited there. I, and many workers, received unfair wages. I love football, but I still can’t forget my dark days in Qatar’ (Pattisson and Acharya, 2023).

In examples like these, migrant workers are often presented through humanitarian framings that emphasize their suffering but also strip them of agency. Indeed, migrant workers in Qatar were often rendered as objects of pity rather than as political subjects navigating complex transnational labour systems. While migrant workers in Qatar are clearly limited in their ability to enact agency, their monolithic representation as victims also aligns with broader Orientalist logics that construct non-Western subjects as feminized, helpless and in need of rescue; logics that also position Western subjects as saviours-in-waiting. These framings can also be read as part of a broader moral economy that both elicits sympathy from Guardian readers and reassures them of their subject position in the global hierarchy.

The sentiment of the few Qatari officials and citizens’ perspectives included in the corpus (about one quarter of the articles) was that of frustration with the intensity and tone of this scrutiny. Qataris and other supporters argued that the dominant characterization of Qarat overlooked its own reforms to address the criticisms, including implementing human rights councils and establishing a minimum wage for workers (Wintour, 2022). Qatar's ruler, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, acknowledged that while some early criticisms of the 2022 World Cup host were constructive, the campaign quickly devolved into ‘fabrication and double standards’ (Wintour, 2022). The struggles of migrant workers were also rarely situated within global systems of neoliberalism, privatization and labour precarity. Instead, the Qatari migrant worker is constructed as a symbol of suffering, unable to speak or act beyond the terms defined by Western humanitarian discourse. Only rarely were calls made for Western reflection and accountability. Zidan (2022), for example, highlighted the need for self-critique by noting the West's own track record of labour exploitation. These few counter-narratives suggested that meaningful progress requires a dismantling of global economic systems, not just uncritical scrutiny of the East. These perspectives were largely eclipsed by hegemonic narratives that positioned Qatar, and by extension the Muslim world, as fundamentally incompatible with ethical labour practices or democratic accountability.

Similar criticisms were also levelled at Qatari officials for allegedly issuing death certificates without proper investigations or citing vague causes such as ‘natural causes’ or ‘cardiac failure’ (Dart, 2022). Additional articles emphasized the devastating effects of deaths extending to workers’ families, who were often left without adequate compensation (Lahm, 2022; Pattisson, 2022). While The Guardian estimated that thousands of deaths could be attributed to World Cup-related labour, Qatari sources, like Qatar's Workers’ Welfare Department, stated that only two deaths were directly work-related, while the ‘overrepresented’ thousands of others reported in the media were unrelated (Al Thani, 2021; Dart, 2022).

Prevailing media critiques, nonetheless, often portrayed Qatar's treatment of migrant workers as symptomatic of a broader cultural and religious ‘backwardness’, suggesting that systemic abuses were rooted in an Arab or Islamic worldview. For instance, one article responding to Qatar's last-minute alcohol ban claimed: ‘It's remarkable that they (FIFA) are only just now realizing what it means to be giving their premier tournament to a state without much interest in due process or consistency’ (Bland, 2022). The article continues that if security became ‘heavy-handed’, then ‘there's not much FIFA can realistically do’. Such statements implicitly framed Qatari governance as capricious and authoritarian, reinforcing tropes of Islamic despotism and irrationality. Other authors in the corpus adopted a paternalistic ‘white saviour’ complex by framing their attendance at FWC matches as an opportunity to advocate for change in Qatar (Topping, 2022). FIFA president Gianni Infantino's further claim that the World Cup ‘sped up the pace of reform’ in Qatar (Ingle, 2022) suggested that the Global South's progress depends on Western-led interventions.

In contrast, many Qataris expressed frustration that FIFA's role in awarding and organizing the tournament received comparatively little attention. Media criticisms frequently assigned Qatar sole responsibility for all controversies, bypassing FIFA's long history of corruption and human rights violations (Ingle, 2022). As one Qatari official put it, ‘Everything gets twisted. We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t’ (Wintour, 2022). The viral social media hashtag ‘I am Arab and I support Qatar’ is one further example of the ways some in the Arab world expressed regional pride and solidarity in the face of the criticisms (Wintour, 2022).

At the same time, however, other articles in The Guardian unsettled Orientalist stereotypes regarding Qatar by naming them as such and pointing to the ways that Western nations have operated in a similar fashion to the 2022 FWC host. An article by Perryman and Cannon (2022), for example, criticized portrayals of Qatar's World Cup bid as uniquely corrupt by arguing that Western nations also politicize and profit from mega-events. Wearing (2022) further situates this coverage within a longer genealogy of Orientalism, noting that:

the false notion that authoritarianism in the Gulf is simply a reflection of regional ‘culture’ has its roots in the Orientalist discourse … [which] externalizes and circumscribes the blame for human rights abuses in states like Qatar, while preserving a narcissistic sense of Western innocence.

Wearing (2022) further situates Qatar's political system within a global context of imperialism and capitalist exploitation. He reminds readers that Qatar's current political economy is not merely a local artifact but a product of historic colonial relations and contemporary Western interests; following the discovery of vast oil and gas reserves, Qatar and other Gulf states became key assets within the global economy, with British imperial power labeling the region as a geostrategic prize and profiting from their resource exploitation (Wearing, 2022). In another contribution, Zidan (2022) emphasized that many host countries of mega-events face similar labour and human rights criticisms but are rarely subjected to such sustained scrutiny, and that the hypervisibility of Qatar's abuses reflects a broader pattern of Orientalist double standards. Taken together, these media constructions demonstrate how the discourse around migrant worker conditions not only exposed real and pressing concerns but also functioned within an Orientalist framework where competing discourses debated over the casting of Qatar as an uncivilized, unfit FWC host nation. Genuine concern, often wrapped in racialized moralism, reveals the complexity and contradictions of humanitarian discourse in global sport event media coverage.

Humour as Orientalism catalyst

In certain cases, satire was used to delegitimize Qatar's role as the FWC host. By cloaking critiques of migrant labour conditions in humour, many Guardian contributors trivialized the severity of human rights concerns while simultaneously reinforcing an Orientalist portrayal of Qatar as an irrational and cruel nation. For example, one article mocked Qatar's social media strategy of sponsoring travel for England and Wales fans: Humans for sale. We will buy your labour. We will buy your joy too […] buy your feelings […] those tender feelings […] are now property of the state of Qatar’ (Ronay, 2022). This passage is rhetorically framed to evoke outrage and ridicule, rendering Qatar as both dehumanizing and absurd. The coupling of satirical exaggeration with emotionally charged language like ‘jaw-dropping’ and ‘disturbing’ further casts the nation's practices as alien or morally bankrupt. In doing so, satire becomes a mechanism through which imperial hierarchies of civility are reaffirmed.

Another example of satire deployed through dehumanizing metaphor is Ronay's (2022) comparison of stadium construction to a unseemly dance competition: ‘in return for food and a cash prize for the last couple left standing. Meanwhile, paying customers can spectate on the dancers’ agony and fatigue, their forced gaiety, their murderous existential crises’ (Ronay, 2022). Here, the workers’ suffering becomes a grotesque performance for Western spectatorship, flattening complex structural inequalities into a digestible, if voyeuristic, caricature.

Similarly, Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp invoked Orientalist fantasy in his critique of the exploitation of migrant workers to build the FWC infrastructure, stating: ‘It's not like Aladdin with his wonder lamp and “Boom, there's a new stadium”’ (Hunter, 2022). This statement references Disney's well-known 1992 portrayal of the Arab world, one that has been widely criticized for perpetuating images of violence, mysticism and irrationality (Aljahdali and Hakami, 2024). The invocation of Aladdin positions Qatar within a lineage of Orientalist media tropes where Muslim cultures are painted as magical yet primitive, capable of great spectacle but lacking in modern governance or ethics.

Pattisson (2022) also described Qatar's infrastructure in exaggerated, otherworldly terms, referring to Al Janoub stadium as a ‘futuristic arena, resembling a giant white spaceship’. This alien metaphor implies disconnection from global norms and insinuates that Qatar's technological advancements are incongruent with its supposed socio-political primitiveness, a common trope in Orientalist discourse that treats Muslim modernity as suspect or inauthentic (Teti, 2014). In Wintour's (2022) counter-narrative piece, they highlight a French magazine cartoon that depicted ‘bearded Qatari footballers brandishing axes, guns and rocket launchers’; imagery deeply embedded in Islamophobic stereotypes that link Muslim identity with terrorism and barbarity.

The rhetorical function of humour in these articles was not neutral. The use of satire served to perpetuate racism and Islamophobia, reflecting how humour and laughter are mobilized to exclude and ‘other’ minorities in the sporting sphere from normal ‘Westerners’ and ridicule their differences (Rizwan and Ali, 2025; Szto, 2016). As Ronay (2022) suggested, ‘we should laugh at Qatar, because laughter is the opposite of the designed response, and may disincentivize the future purchasing of human feelings’. This framing reinforces an ‘us versus them’ binary where the West, embodied in the laughing audience, is rational, moral, and culturally superior, while Qatar is reduced to the object of derision. This deployment of satire mirrors the Western sport media's tendency to mask structural violence with sensationalist irony. In the case of Qatar, satire not only trivialized the complexity of labour exploitation and cultural difference, but also reinscribed Orientalist hierarchies that frame Muslim nations as fundamentally unfit for global sport leadership.

‘Women in Qatar do not have the same rights as men’: Qatar as a site of gendered oppression

The criminalization of LGBTQ+ identities and the repression of women's rights in Qatar also emerged as key focal points in The Guardian's coverage, often framed through a moralistic lens that reinforced Orientalist narratives (Holmes, 2022; MacInnes, 2022; Waterson, 2022; Wearing, 2022). Roughly a third of the examined articles in the corpus portrayed Qatar as inherently homophobic. It also reported on several LGBTQ+ focused public protests towards Qatar and cited European teams preparing to wear rainbow ‘OneLove’ armbands in solidarity with LGBTQ+ communities; FIFA's threat of yellow card penalties ultimately quashed the initiative (Wintour, 2022). The Danish national team also wore jerseys with faded manufacturer logos of its brand sponsor Hummel, which stated at the time that it ‘does not want to be visible in tournaments that cost lives’ (Wintour, 2022).

However, the media framing tended to universalize the Qatari state as a monolithic actor, neglecting internal diversity, civil resistance within the nation itself, and evolving dynamics that characterized Qatar's political landscape. The emphasis on protest symbolism, such as the armbands, also reflects a broader Western tendency to perform allyship in visible, consumable ways, which may ultimately sideline the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals in Qatar and the Middle East. In drawing on symbols familiar to Western audiences, the news stories tended to center the West as the normative moral authority while casting Qatar as a regressive foil.

Concerns about women's rights in Qatar also emerged, though they received less consistent attention, often surfacing in vague or anecdotal claims (Wearing, 2022). For example, Safi (2022) noted that ‘Qatari women are subject to guardianship laws that give men control over who they marry, if they can work or study and whether they can leave the country’. However, few articles provided in-depth or substantiated analysis. Instead, gender-based critiques frequently relied on reductive tropes and cultural generalizations. For instance, the Australian national team's video decrying ‘women [in Qatar] do not have the same rights as men’ (Wintour, 2022) failed to contextualize its claims or recognize the variety of female voices within Qatari society. As with coverage of LGBTQ+ issues, portrayals of women's oppression frequently leaned on generalized depictions of Islam as inherently patriarchal. These depictions also reflect what Samie and Sehlikoglu (2015) identify as the ‘damsel-in-distress’ trope: the figure of the veiled or oppressed Muslim woman used to justify Western interventionism in Middle Eastern or Arab nations. Such framings not only objectify Muslim women but also erase their political agency and activism (Bullock and Jafri, 2026; Samie and Sehlikoglu, 2015; Terman, 2017).

This narrative was further reinforced by direct commentary. In one article, an interviewee expressed frustration that Qatar did not reflect the values they associated with football, stating: ‘Football in my life has become such a thing of shared queer joy and community, calls for anti-racism, anti-sexism, and this does not represent any of that’ (Russell, 2022). This perspective reinforces the perceived incompatibility between Qatar and FIFA's claimed core values of inclusion and equity. It also implicitly constructs Western regions as singular beacons of tolerance and inclusion for queer communities and as safe havens for women. Such sentiments draw on broader racially framed narratives positing that Islam and global (Western) sport are inherently incompatible (Bahrainwala, 2018; Jarmakani, 2021; Mishra and Bakry, 2021; Sykes and Hamzeh, 2018).

Much of this criticism often omitted anti LGBTQ+ policies and movements outside of Qatar, including within many of the FWC's participating nations. In one exception, Zidan (2022) draws attention the concerning trend of anti-LGBTQ+ bills across several U.S. states and the rise of homophobic violence, including the mass shooting at a queer nightclub in Colorado Springs the same year of the tournament. Sykes and Hamzeh (2018) similarly note that Muslimness is frequently portrayed in Western media as synonymous with homophobia, reinforcing Orientalist ideologies that fail to acknowledge the pervasiveness of LGBTQ+ discrimination and marginalization across global contexts.

This was particularly apparent in one of the overlooked issues in The Guardian's reporting: the intersectional oppression faced by women migrant workers. While the suffering of male construction workers dominated media coverage, little attention was paid to the exploitation faced by female workers, who often worked behind the scenes in hotels and hospitality service roles, making them ‘particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment and gender-based violence’ (Donovan, 2022). Donovan's interviews with women working in World Cup hotels revealed widespread workplace harassment and a lack of safeguards to protect them from predatory behaviour by fans (2022). However, the absence of Academic and investigative research on this population makes it difficult to substantiate these claims, further complicating the portrayal of Qatar in the media and rendering female worker experiences underexplored (Ewers et al., 2020).

In sum, the media's focus on LGBTQ+ and women's rights often reinforced Orientalist assumptions about Islam and the Middle East as inherently incompatible with modern values, while overlooking the global pervasiveness of such issues. These narratives failed to center the voices of those most affected and often functioned to reaffirm Western moral hegemony rather than pursue genuine cross-cultural understanding or solidarity. Moreover, for many Qatari residents, the Western media's uproar tainted ‘one of the most important moments in their country's 51-year history’ (Safi, 2022). Rather than being a moment of national pride and global recognition, the event became a site of defensive justification against constant moral scrutiny. Articles noted that Qatari families made considerable efforts to prepare their children for an influx of unfamiliar customs and were eager to welcome guests respectfully, despite cultural and religious differences (Safi, 2022). Such accounts complicate the simplistic portrayals of Qatar as inhospitable or intolerant, and they call for greater attention to the ways in which global mega-events intersect with local realities and aspirations.

Sport mega-events are frequently used to project soft power and rebrand national identity both domestically and internationally; Qatar was no exception (Amara, 2008; Brannagan and Rookwood, 2016; Swart and Hussain, 2023). Hosting the World Cup was a calculated effort to position the country as progressive, capable, and globally integrated. However, many Qataris felt that their efforts were dismissed or overshadowed by an entrenched Orientalist media narrative. This characterization builds on previous literature demonstrating how soft power initiatives by Muslim and Arab nations like Qatar are often interpreted, via Orientalist frames, as suspicious or insincere attempts at image management – what some may call sportswashing – rather than legitimate expressions of modernity and growth (Dhaenens, 2023; Swart and Hussain, 2023).

Conclusion

Our analysis reveals how Western media portrayals of Qatar during the 2022 FWC reproduced longstanding Orientalist discourses that construct the Muslim world as culturally regressive, politically authoritarian and socially incompatible with liberal democratic ideals. The Guardian's coverage, driven by legitimate concerns over labour rights and civil liberties, frequently relied on reductive narratives that universalized Qatari society and obscured its complexity. By foregrounding tropes of backwardness, misogyny and homophobia without adequately contextualizing or comparing them to Western shortcomings, these representations reinforced longstanding constructions of ‘civilizational difference’. At the same time, however, alternative perspectives from some articles represented a powerful counter-narrative, one marked by frustration, disillusionment, and a desire for cultural recognition amongst the Qatari community.

The Guardian's constructions of Qatar and the 2022 World Cup is also particularly useful for FIFA itself: an organization consistently mired by corruption and controversy. Two recent examples include a formal complaint against FIFA over ethics violations and political neutrality after awarding US President Donald Trump a peace prize (Al Jazeera, 2025) and an International Criminal Court filing that alleges the organization's president Gianni Infantino aided and abetted Israeli war crimes against Palestinians (Zirin and Modiano, 2025). Indeed, the characterizations of Qatar in 2022 may have also acted as a brief shield for FIFA's own morally dubious politics and operations. To be clear, this is not to inscribe Qatari political leaders and stakeholders as innocent bystanders: the issue of LGBT/gender-based discrimination and migrant worker rights continues to require further attention and scrutiny. It is, rather, to show that in such a context, Orientalism remains a reliable, effective lens for illuminating the shortcomings of nations like Qatar while casting shadows over Western nations and organizations like FIFA. The consequences are two-fold: first, such constructions continue the trend of Othering Muslim, Middle Eastern and Arab nations within the global sport landscape; second, they divert questions regarding the (broken) promises of major sport events, and their role in ongoing geopolitical, capital and colonial processes; questions that should be more frequently explored by outlets such as The Guardian.

Based on these insights, our analysis makes three interrelated contributions to the sport studies literature. First, our study reveals that while Orientalist hegemony remains mostly intact within The Guardian's portrayal of Qatar, there are also important counter-narratives in the corpus. This finding both draws similarities and differences to previous research on Qatar as FWC host (Bazian, 2022; Swart and Hussain, 2023) and on portrayals of Muslim nations in sport (Amara, 2008; Brannagan and Rookwood, 2016). Second, while alternative perspectives on Middle Eastern nations like Qatar appeared more frequently in our analysis, it nonetheless illuminates the continued omnipresence of Orientalism in modern sport media constructions of Muslim-majority nations, the Arab World, and the Middle East and its peoples. As such, this study builds upon the conclusions of previous research demonstrating how Orientalist framings continue to dominate media-based narratives of these regions and people in sporting contexts (Ali, 2025; Ali and King, 2021; Burdsey, 2007, 2016; Samie and Sehlikoglu, 2014; Swart and Hussain, 2023). Finally, the findings also provide critical insights into Western perspectives regarding the increasing Middle Eastern and Arab presence within the global sport mega-event landscape. In doing so, this study has helped contribute to a foundation of knowledge on this burgeoning phenomenon, from which future research might grow. As our findings indicate, meaningful critique and commentary of sport mega events must move beyond cultural essentialism and engage with the global structures of inequality in which spectacles like the FWC are implicated.

Given this imperative, our study also has practical implications concerning the importance of media accountability and epistemic humility in the coverage of international sporting events. To foster a more inclusive form of global sport media, both journalists and the outlets that employ them must embrace cultural complexities, privilege historically marginalized voices and resist the allure of simplified moral binaries. Interrogating the ideological underpinnings of global sport media narratives, particularly those rooted in Orientalism, create opportunities for equitable, ethical, and culturally sensitive storytelling. Such an approach is not only necessary for fairness in reporting but is also essential for understanding how power operates within and through global sport media.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors received financial support through Western University for the research, authorship, and publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Adam Ehsan Ali

References

Abu-Lughod

(2001) Orientalism’ and Middle East. Feminist Studies 27(1): 101–113.

Addley

(2022) Six out of 10 people in UK oppose Qatar hosting World Cup over anti-gay laws. The Guardian, 8 November. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/07/six-in-10-in-uk-oppose-qatar-hosting-world-cup-over-anti-gay-laws.

Ad Fontes Media (2023, February 7) The Guardian Bias and Reliability. https://adfontesmedia.com/the-guardian-bias-and-reliability/.

Ali

(2025) Rare sites and white saviours? Gendered orientalism, radicalization, and the construction of Muslim women soccer players in TSN’s Radical Play. Communication & Sport 13(3): 442–462.

Ali

Hussain

(2025) Arab and Middle Eastern Sport: Critical Muslim Perspectives. Leeds, England: Emerald Group Publishing.

Ali

King

(2021) ‘He could be dangerous’: Orientalism, deradicalization, and the representation of refugee Muslim boxers in TSN’s Radical Play. Sociology of Sport Journal 38(4): 335–344.

Aljahdali

Hakami

(2024) A flawed world: Disney's Aladdin through the Lens of Orientalism. International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation 7(12): 105–109.

Al Jazeera (2022) Qatar emir slams ‘ferocious’ campaign against World Cup host. Al Jazeera, 25 October. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/25/qatar-emir-slams-unprecedented-campaign-against-world-cup-hosts.

Al Jazeera (2025, December 10) FIFA’s Gianni Infantino faces ethics complaint over Trump peace prize. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/10/fifas-gianni-infantino-faces-ethics-complaint-over-trump-peace-prize.

10.

Al Thani

(2021) Channelling soft power: The Qatar 2022 World Cup, migrant workers, and international image. The International Journal of the History of Sport 38(17): 1729–1752.

11.

Amara

(2008) The Muslim world in the global sporting arena. The Brown Journal of World Affairs 14(2): 67–75.

12.

Amara

(2012) Veiled women athletes in the 2008 Beijing Olympics: Media accounts. The International Journal of the History of Sport 29(4): 638–651.

13.

Amara

(2016) Sport and Muslims or Muslims in sport, post-9/11. In: Routledge Handbook of Sport, Race and Ethnicity. London, UK: Routledge, 244–252.

14.

Bahrainwala

(2018) When terrorists play ball. Communication & Sport 6(6): 680–702.

15.

Bazian

(2022) Qatar’s World Cup, Islamophobia ‘imagined geography’ & western hypocrisy*. Critical Muslim Studies, December 16. https://criticalmuslimstudies.co.uk/qatars-world-cup-islamophobia-imagined-geography-western-hypocrisy/.

16.

Bland

(2022, November 21) Monday briefing: what the Qatar world cup says about the state of football. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/21/first-edition-qatar-world-cup-2022.

17.

Blum

(2023) The World Cup was the Last Straw; Sportswashing Must Stop - LSE Human Rights,’ LSE Human Rights - A student-led blog from LSE Human Rights, 25 May. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/humanrights/2023/05/25/the-world-cup-was-the-last-straw-sportswashing-must-stop/.

18.

Bokat-Lindell

(2022) The Qatar world cup is peak ‘Sportswashing.’ but will it work? The New York Times, December 14. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/14/opinion/world-cup-qatar-sportswashing.html.

19.

Bold

(2018, September 17) The Guardian most trusted and The Sun least trusted online news brand, Pamco reveals. Campaign. https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/guardian-trusted-sun-least-trusted-online-news-brand-pamco-reveals/1492881.

20.

Brannagan

Rookwood

(2016) Sports mega-events, soft power and soft disempowerment: International supporters’ perspectives on Qatar’s acquisition of the 2022 FIFA World Cup finals. International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics 8(2): 173–188.

21.

Bullock

Jafri

(2026) Media (mis) representations: Muslim women in the Canadian nation. In: Islam and the Media. Routledge, 47–57.

22.

Burdsey

(2007) Role with the punches: The construction and representation of Amir Khan as a role model for multiethnic Britain. The Sociological Review 55(3): 611–631.

23.

Burdsey

(2016) One guy named Mo: Race, nation and the London 2012 Olympic games. Sociology of Sport Journal 33(1): 14–25.

24.

Campbell

(2022) This is the reality of life for LGBTQ+ people in Qatar. TIME, November 16. https://time.com/6234323/naser-mohamed-interview-qatar-lgbt-rights/.

25.

Clarke

Braun

(2017) Thematic analysis. The Journal of Positive Psychology 12(3): 297–298.

26.

Darnell

(2017) Orientalism through sport: towards a Said-ian analysis of imperialism and ‘Sport for development and peace’. In: Sport, Race and Ethnicity. London, UK: Routledge, 6–20.

27.

Dart

(2022) How many migrant workers have died in Qatar? What we know about the human cost of the 2022 World Cup. The Guardian, 18 December. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/27/qatar-deaths-how-many-migrant-workers-died-world-cup-number-toll.

28.

Dhaenens

(2023) Beyond the pitch: comparative media representations of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 in the UK and Egypt. https://lib.ugent.be/catalog/rug01:003152573.

29.

Donovan

(2022) Female migrant workers speak out about harassment in Qatar’s World Cup hotels. The Guardian, 17 November. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/nov/17/female-migrant-workers-speak-out-about-harassment-in-qatar-world-cup-hotels.

30.

Eroukhamanoff

(2015) The remote securitisation of Islam in the US post-9/11: Euphemisation, metaphors and the ‘logic of expected consequences’ in counter radicalisation discourse. Critical Studies on Terrorism 8(2): 246–265.

31.

Ettinger

(2024) Sportswashing: The geopolitics behind the Saudi Arabia sports strategy (2024). https://newsroom.carleton.ca/story/saudi-arabia-strategy-sportswashing/.

32.

Ewers

Diop

, et al. (2020) Migrant worker well-being and its determinants: The case of Qatar. Social Indicators Research 152(1): 137–163.

33.

Francavilla

(2024) Saudi government uses European football to sportswash its reputation. Human Rights Watch. 17 January. https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/01/17/saudi-government-uses-european-football-sportswash-its-reputation.

34.

Ganguli

(2024) The N.B.A. in Abu Dhabi: Big games, basketball clinics and ‘sportswashing’ claims. The New York Times, October 10. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/10/business/nba-abu-dhabi-games.html.

35.

Gregory

(2004) The colonial present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.

36.

Hausheer Ali

Stansbury

(2024) The real reason the Saudi government is investing in sports. Hint: It’s not to impress you. Atlantic Council. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/saudi-arabia-sportswashing-investment-sports/.

37.

Hawkins

(2017) Thematic analysis. In: Allen

(eds) The Sage Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods. London: Sage, 1757–1760.

38.

Henao

Fam

(2022) Some LGBTQ fans skip Qatar World Cup, fearing hostility | AP News. https://apnews.com/article/world-cup-soccer-sports-religion-679b18a9480573b7fb72633ace63cc7b.

39.

Henry

Amara

Al-Tauqi

(2003) Sport, Arab nationalism and the Pan-Arab games. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 38(3): 295–310.

40.

Holmes

(2022) World Cup 2022: everything you need to know about host country Qatar. The Guardian, 22 November. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/18/world-cup-2022-everything-you-need-to-know-about-host-country-qatar.

41.

Human Rights Watch (2024b) UAE: NBA games risk ‘Sportswashing’ abuses. 3 October. https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/10/03/uae-nba-games-risk-sportswashing-abuses.

42.

Hunter

(2022) Not up to players to make Qatar World Cup protest, insists Jürgen Klopp. The Guardian, 5 November. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/04/not-up-to-players-to-make-qatar-world-cup-protest-says-jurgen-klopp.

43.

Hussain

Bien-Aimé

(2025) Azeem Rafiq, an object or a subject? “Can the subaltern speak?”. Communication & Sport 13(3): 463–483. 10.1177/21674795241229624.

44.

Hussain

Cunningham

(2021) ‘These are “our” sports’: Kabaddi and Kho-Kho women athletes from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 56(7): 1051–1069.

45.

Ingle

(2022) Fans, fun, fireworks: Qatar World Cup 2022 enjoys rare moment of normality. The Guardian, 20 November. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/19/fans-qatar-world-cup-2022-tournament-matches-kick-off-human-rights-gay.

46.

Jackson

(2017) Qatar wins 2022 World Cup bid. The Guardian, 20 February. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2010/dec/02/qatar-win-2022-world-cup-bid.

47.

Jarmakani

(2021) Shari’a Barbie’s afterlives: Apprehending racialized and sexualized Islam through social media. Meridians 20(2): 298–322.

48.

Kidd

(2022) World Cup spotlight draws focus on Qatar’s record. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertkidd/2022/11/11/should-players-be-expected-to-protest-at-qatar-world-cup/.

49.

Klein

(2025, March 27) The newspaper flourishing without a paywall. New York Magazine. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/how-the-guardian-us-flourishes-without-a-paywall.html.

50.

Lahm

(2022) Holding the World Cup in Qatar has damaged football and I will not be going. The Guardian, 15 November. https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2022/nov/15/world-cup-qatar-damaged-football-philipp-lahm.

51.

Letters (2021, May 9) Proud to be Guardian readers. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/may/09/proud-to-be-guardian-readers.

52.

Lewis

(2022) Qatar says all are welcome to the World Cup but some LGBTQ soccer fans are staying away. CNN, November 19. https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/19/football/qatar-world-cassocup-2022-lgbtq-rights-spt-intl.

53.

Lewis

(2006) Gender, orientalism, and postcolonialism. Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts: 1–21.

54.

MacInnes

(2022) Fears raised for Qataris if they support LGBTQ+ rights during World Cup. The Guardian, 28 October. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/oct/27/fears-for-qataris-support-lgbtq-rights-during-world-cup.

55.

Maese

(2023, November 7) The Middle East’s play to rule global sports – Washington Post. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/interactive/2023/middle-east-sports-investment/.

56.

Malcolm

Bairner

Curry

(2010) ‘Oolmergate’: Cricket and the representation of Islam and Muslims in the British press. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 34(2): 215–235.

57.

Manoli

Konstantopoulos

Antonopoulos

(2024) Image laundering, sport washing and greenwashing in and through football. In: The Geopolitical Economy of Football. London, UK: Routledge, 35–42.

58.

Mills

(2021) Qatar not reporting all work-linked deaths, Ilo says. Reuters, November 19. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/qatar-not-reporting-all-work-linked-deaths-ilo-says-2021-11-19/.

59.

Mishra

Bakry

(2021) Social identities in consumer-brand relationship: The case of the Hijab-wearing Barbie doll in the United States: Ethnic identities in the multicultural marketplace. Journal of Consumer Behaviour 20(6): 1534–1546.

60.

Nagra

Maurutto

(2023) Anti-Muslim surveillance: Canadian Muslims’ experiences with CSIS. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 9(3): 311–325.

61.

Ogden

Bonagura

(2022) Qatar World Cup 2022 Sportswashing, security and soccer – ESPN. ESPN.com, 15 November. https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/37633869/sportswashing-security-soccer.

62.

Pattisson

(2022) Qatar World Cup: a guide to the sights and stadiums – and how workers suffered to make them. The Guardian, 15 December. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/nov/20/world-cup-qatar-stadiums-sights-hotels-workers-rights-guide.

63.

Pattisson

Acharya

(2023) ‘Dark days in Qatar’: Nepali workers face bitter legacy of World Cup debts. The Guardian, 18 April. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/dec/20/dark-days-in-qatar-nepali-workers-face-bitter-legacy-of-world-cup-debts.

64.

Pattisson

McIntyre

(2023) Revealed: 6,500 migrant workers have died in Qatar since World Cup awarded. The Guardian, 24 November. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/revealed-migrant-worker-deaths-qatar-fifa-world-cup-2022.

65.

Pedersen

Koefoed

(2009) Orientalism. In: International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. London, UK: Pergamon Press, 37–42.

66.

Perryman

Cannon

(2022) Will you be watching the World Cup?. The Guardian, 13 November. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/13/will-you-be-watching-the-world-cup.

67.

Puar

(2006) Mapping US homonormativities. Gender, Place & Culture 13(1): 67–88.

68.

Rizwan

Ali

(2025) Muslimness, women, and sport: Interrogating Instagram reactions to Morocco's Benzina at the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup. In: Media, Communication and the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. London, UK: Routledge, 246–263.

69.

Ronay

(2022) Paid fans and England band show everyone is for sale at Qatar World Cup. The Guardian, 5 November. https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2022/nov/04/qatar-world-cup-paid-fans-band-everyone-for-sale.

70.

Russell E (2022) ‘Built on the blood of slaves’: British football fans boycotting World Cup. The Guardian, 25 November. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/23/british-football-fans-boycotting-world-cup-qatar.

71.

Safi

(2022) Keen to welcome visitors but enraged by western coverage: how Qataris see the World Cup. The Guardian, 21 November. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/20/world-cup-qatar-qataris-welcome-visitors-but-enraged-by-western-coverage.

72.

Said

(1978) Orientalism. Westminster, London, UK: Routledge.

73.

Samie

(2017) De/colonising ‘sporting Muslim women’: Post-colonial feminist reflections on the dominant portrayal of sporting Muslim women in academic research, public forums and mediated representations. In: Ratna

Samie

(eds) Race, Gender and Sport: The Politics of Ethnic ‘Other’ Girls and Women. London, UK: Routledge, 35–62.

74.

Samie

Sehlikoglu

(2015) Strange, incompetent and out-of-place: Media, Muslim sportswomen and London 2012. Feminist Media Studies 15(3): 363–381.

75.

Samie

Toffoletti

(2018) Postfeminist paradoxes and cultural difference: Unpacking media representations of American Muslim sportswomen Ibtihaj and Dalilah Muhammad. In: Toffoletti

Thorpe

Francombe-Webb

(eds) New Sporting Femininities. London, UK: Palgrave Mac millan, 87–109.

76.

Swart

Hussain

(2023) FIFA 2022 World cup in Qatar: Under the gaze of western media. In: Sports Mega-Events in Asia. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore, 199–222.

77.

Sykes H and Hamzeh M (2018) Anti-colonial critiques of sport mega-events. Leisure Studies 37(6): 735–746.

78.

Szto

(2016) # LOL at multiculturalism: Reactions to hockey night in Canada Punjabi from the Twitterverse. Sociology of Sport Journal 33(3): 208–218.

79.

Terman

(2017) Islamophobia and media portrayals of Muslim women: A computational text analysis of US news coverage. International Studies Quarterly 61(3): 489–502.

80.

Terry

and

Hayfield

(2021) Essentials of thematic analysis. American Psychological Association .

81.

Teti

(2014) Orientalism as a form of confession. Foucault Studies 17: 193–212. doi:10.22439/fs.v0i17.4299.

82.

The Scott Trust: values and history (2015, July 26) The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/the-scott-trust/2015/jul/26/the-scott-trust.

83.

Topping

(2022) ‘There’s so many having major moral thoughts’: England fans conflicted over Qatar World Cup. The Guardian, 12 November. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/11/england-supporter-conflicted-over-qatar-world-cup-human-rights-record-gay-rights-boycott-tournament.

84.

Turak

(2022) ‘We are very frustrated': World Cup teams in Qatar ax pro-LGBTQ armbands after FIFA threat. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/21/qatar-world-cup-2022-teams-ax-pro-lgbtq-armbands-after-fifa-threats.html.

85.

Vine

Coffman

Khoury

, et al. (2021, August 19) Creating refugees: Displacement caused by the United States’ post-9/11 wars. Costs of War: The Watson School of International and Public Affairs. Brown University. https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/sites/default/files/papers/Costs-of-War_Vinel_Displacement-Update-August-2021.pdf.

86.

Walton

(2024) The anti-gender movement explained: How the threat to women’s and LGBTQ+ rights is spreading around the world. CNN, March 1. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/asequals/anti-gender-equality-threat-explained-as-equals-intl-cmd/.

87.

Waterson

(2022) BBC ignores World Cup opening ceremony in favour of Qatar criticism. The Guardian, 21 November. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/20/bbc-ignores-world-cup-opening-ceremony-in-favour-of-qatar-criticism.

88.

Wearing

(2022) A game of two halves: how ‘sportswashing’ benefits Qatar and the west. The Guardian, 16 November. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/16/sportswashing-qatar-west-world-cup-regime.

89.

Whitehead

(2024) Are Newcastle United’s PIF owners separate from Saudi Arabia – and why does it matter? The New York Times, 17 January. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5206964/2024/01/17/newcastle-united-pif-saudi-arabia-separate-explained/.

90.

Wintour

(2022) Before World Cup kicks off, has Qatar already lost at geopolitical football? The Guardian, 15 November. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/before-world-cup-kicks-off-has-qatar-already-lost-at-geopolitical-football.

91.

Worden

(2023) PGA-Saudi deal tees up sportswashing. https://www.forbes.com/sites/minkyworden/2023/06/08/pga-saudi-deal-tees-up-sportswashing/.

92.

Yegenoglu

(1998) Colonial fantasies: Towards a feminist reading of orientalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

93.

Zidan

(2022) The Qatar World Cup should be a watershed moment in sports journalism. The Guardian, 20 December. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/dec/20/qatar-world-cup-sport-journalism.

94.

Zirin

Modiano

(2025, December 10) ‘This is historic’: FIFA and UEFA presidents are accused of aiding Israel’s war crimes. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/fifa-uefa-war-crimes-israel/.