Toward a Measurement Tool for Sports Diplomacy in the News: The Case of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022

Using a 12-months-long constructed week sampling strategy, this study relied on a dataset of 456 media articles about the 2022 FIFA World Cup to take an initial step toward operationalizing the concept of sports diplomacy. A preliminary measurement approach was derived from the literature and examined through a content analysis of articles published during the year leading up to the event. Subsequently, the fit of this initial instrument as an empirical measure of sports diplomacy was assessed, and modifications were proposed. In tandem, the study examined sourcing patterns in media articles, focusing on the relationship between sources and sports diplomacy. Findings reveal that mentions of sports diplomacy indicators were scarce and that the construct, as theorized in literature, faced scale reliability issues. Reliability measures improved modestly when we reconceptualized the construct. Importantly, in the rare instances sports diplomacy was used to describe the 2022 World Cup, it was FIFA that advanced this notion, relying primarily on political sources. Sports officials dominated as a source category ahead of businesspeople and political officials. Based on these limited findings, the paper offers a cautious analysis of the construct, drawing on interpretivism to explain the results while inviting further refinement of future measurement efforts.