Mega-Sporting Events and Soft Power: Perceived Changes in Qatar’s Nation Brand Following the 2022 FIFA World Cup

Countries increasingly use mega-sporting events as instruments of soft power and nation branding, yet empirical evidence of their impact on international perceptions remains limited, particularly in non-Western contexts. This study examines changes in Qatar’s nation brand following the 2022 FIFA World Cup by assessing how international audiences evaluated key nation-brand dimensions before and after the event. Drawing on Anholt’s Nation Brand Index framework, a quantitative, perception-based design was employed using a cross-sectional survey of an international sample. Respondents retrospectively assessed Qatar across six dimensions: governance, culture, people, tourism, exports, and immigration and investment. The findings indicate a statistically significant but modest improvement in Qatar’s overall international image. Perceptual gains were most evident in the dimensions of people, culture, and governance, while economically oriented dimensions showed limited or no change. These results suggest that the World Cup functioned as a reputational enhancer rather than a transformative nation-branding intervention, generating selective and uneven effects. The study contributes to nation-branding and sports-diplomacy research by providing perception-based evidence from a non-Western context and highlighting the importance of aligning mega-events with long-term strategic initiatives to achieve sustainable soft-power outcomes.