Football and Nation Branding: Exploring Saudi Arabia’s Digital Strategy for its Global Country’s Recognition

Abstract

Nation branding is an important factor of international reputation management which has gained increasing importance for nations worldwide. Since 2018, Saudi Arabia has embarked on a journey to enhance its global recognition and repu-tation by strategically investing in football. This exploratory and descriptive research article examines the efforts and challenges Saudi Arabia faces in investing in football as an important tool for country branding. The research will adopt a quantitative approach through the content analysis of X (Twitter) to explore the impact of football on Saudi Arabia’s nation branding initiatives. The analysis focuses on the content of the tweets, as well as on how they report about this content (i.e., positive, negative and neutral). The findings of this research shows that Saudi Arabia has a government-centric approach to nation branding through football and focuses on finding out the complex nature of utilizing football to promote the country’s pursuit of global recognition and reputation enhancement through the investment in talent, foreign commercial deals and hosting mega-sport events.