Stadiums Of Legitimacy: Sport Infrastructure, Reputational Power, And Sportswashing

Description

Research purpose. This article examines sportswashing as a reputational strategy through which states, cities, and corporate actors leverage sports mega-events to enhance international image, legitimize contested political agendas, and attract foreign investment. Drawing on evidence from mega sport event research, it argues that sportswashing is not only produced through media narratives, branding, and public diplomacy, but is also materially embedded in the built environment. Stadiums, arenas, fan zones, transport corridors, and wider urban redevelopment projects operate as infrastructural evidence of modernization, capacity, and global integration. The abstract conceptualizes sport infrastructure as a material mechanism of sportswashing and explains how infrastructural spectacle can reinforce and stabilize preferred political narratives while diverting attention from ethical controversies, governance deficits, labor issues, displacement, or deepening urban inequalities. By centering infrastructure, it highlights how mega-event legacies function not merely as outcomes of event delivery, but as strategic instruments in reputational politics.

Design / Methodology / Approach. The analysis synthesizes key theoretical contributions on sportswashing, soft power, and legitimacy, drawing on evidence from a systematic review of sport mega event research. It shows how infrastructure megaprojects and spatial redevelopment function as instruments of reputation building and as resources for political narrative construction. The study adopts a conceptual-analytical approach, drawing on comparative case logic widely used in the field to explain how infrastructural investments are mobilized for state-led image management and international positioning in and through sport mega events.

Findings. Sport infrastructure emerges as a highly visible and politically legible mechanism of sportswashing in sport mega event contexts in three interlinked ways. First, sports mega event venues and associated mobility systems operate as architectural signifiers of modernization and global integration, signalling state capacity and competence to both domestic and international audiences. Second, construction and redevelopment generate quantifiable indicators (e.g., capital outlays, employment figures, visitor volumes) that can be selectively mobilized within technocratic narratives to legitimize image-building and reframe reputational projects as development policy. Third, these initiatives often function as dual-use infrastructure: they support international spectacle and domestic political consolidation while producing contested legacies, including underutilized facilities, opaque financial governance, environmental pressures, and intensified spatial inequalities. Taken together, this evidence reinforces a core paradox in sport mega event research: infrastructure is showcased as development and progress, yet it can simultaneously obscure uneven outcomes and the socio-political costs of event-led urban transformation.

Originality / Value / Practical implications. The practical contribution of the study helps policymakers, sports governing bodies, sponsors, and civil society identify where narratives of sports infrastructure modernization may hide ethical risks, governance deficits, and distributional harms.

(This research was carried out as part of the project “Innovations, Methodologies and Recommendations for the Development and Management of the Sports Sector in Latvia” (VPP-IZM-Sports-2023/1-0001)

Period	23 Apr 2026
Event title	International scientific conference "EMERGING TREND IN ECONOMICS, CULTURE AND HUMANITIES (etECH2026)"
Event type	Conference
Conference number	10th
Location	Riga, LatviaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International