Global Health Governance and the Pandemic Era

International sporting bodies function as significant geopolitical arenas in their own right. FIFA, football's global governing body, and the International Olympic Committee award hosting rights to major events — the World Cup and the Olympic Games — that states pursue as instruments of prestige and "soft power," a concept developed by Joseph Nye to describe the ability to shape outcomes through attraction rather than coercion. Qatar's hosting of the 2022 World Cup and Russia's hosting of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, followed by its invasion of Ukraine's Crimea region weeks after the closing ceremony, illustrate how these organizations, nominally apolitical, sit at the intersection of sport, commerce, and international politics, including recurring disputes over corruption, labor conditions, and athlete boycotts.