Graduation Year

2026

Date of Submission

4-2026

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

International Relations

Reader 1

Professor Jordan Branch

Reader 2

Professor David Goldblatt

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Abstract

Most commentary on Gulf state sports investment concludes that sportswashing fails: Saudi Arabia's favorability ratings remain low, its human rights situation has deteriorated, and Western public opinion shows no measurable improvement. This thesis argues that this conclusion applies the wrong standard. Asking whether Saudi Arabia has become more admired misses the more consequential question of whether it has become more accepted, and treating those two outcomes as equivalent produces misleading results. This thesis develops an original Normalization-Attraction Framework to evaluate whether the Saudi Public Investment Fund's October 2021 acquisition of Newcastle United Football Club has generated measurable political returns. The framework separates normalization, defined as the displacement of geopolitical framing by sporting framing across fan, institutional, and media contexts, from attraction, defined as the development of genuine positive sentiment toward Saudi Arabia as a political entity. The findings show normalization has been substantially achieved across all three dimensions. Attraction, by contrast, shows no evidence of occurring: British favorability toward Saudi Arabia has not improved, and the Kingdom reached a historic execution rate in 2024. Saudi Arabia's sports investment strategy has succeeded at the lower bar it actually set for itself, producing acceptance without admiration. This has significant implications for how institutions, governing bodies, and democratic publics understand and respond to state-backed sports investment.

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