Football, the 2022 Qatar World Cup, and Sportswashing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alongside the Summer Olympics, the FIFA Men’s World Cup is one of the two most popular sporting events on the planet. As a truly transnational spectacle, it represents a special opportunity for the host to project an attractive public image around the globe. Qatar has attained exceptional wealth, primarily through gas and oil exports, and has been enacting innovative foreign policies, such as hosting the World Cup in 2022 with the intention of generating an attractive public image of legitimacy, which grants the ‘soft power’ that enables them to transcend their small state constraints. In this commentary, we present our opinion on how before, during, and after the tournament, Western/British media portrayed a narrative that was based on a polarised Western-Middle Eastern cultural conflict that significantly limited Qatar’s ability to transform their hosting of the World Cup into a more positive public image. We frame this by outlining how this approach and these beliefs are essentially driven by Orientalist accusations that position Western ideals as superior to Arabic ones, and we contend, using a Weberian approach, that this was – essentially – an unfair turn of events given the still young (comparable to the West) historical development of Arab states.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".