Geopolitics on a Jersey
Journal: Cornell International Affairs Review
Year: 2023

Throughout the past two decades, elite sports, especially soccer, have seen an onslaught of lucrative investments by authoritarian states. Media outlets have branded these investments as “sportswashing,” while contemporary scholars have adapted soft power theory to sports in order to measure the geopolitical implications of these state-backed investments. 1 However, scholarship intersecting sports and soft power is limited to a broad, transnational scale, and primarily focuses on the diplomatic