Ghutratizing Qatar’s World Cup 2022™ as an act of branding resistance: an ethnosemiotic approach

Abstract This paper looks at the ethnosemiotic ways in which the ghutra and the egal, namely, the national male headdress, have been resemiotized during the FIFA World Cup 2022™, which has taken place in Qatar. Through an ethnography-informed multimodal analysis, it is argued that, through a systematic and strategic effort, which is both top-down, i.e., at the level of the Qatari officials who organized the event, and bottom-up, i.e., at the level of Qatari business people and lay people, who participated in the tournament as fans, this version of the World Cup is branded in such a way as to resist and, ultimately, challenge the dominant negative stereotypes against Arabs (primarily in the Western media) by foregrounding the Qatari values of good manners ( ahlaq ), hospitality, and open-mindedness through the strategic metonymic use of headdress. Ultimately, ghutratization serves the purpose of rebranding the country in an appealingly glocalized way and, thus, rectifying its damaged image. The theoretical contribution of this paper is the understanding of ways and functions of under-researched resemiotized dress in the branding of sports mega-events, such as the World Cup.