Saudi Arabia has been accused of sportswashing, an attempt to improve its reputation through buying the English football club Newcastle United. The purpose of this paper is to explore through a discourse analysis how Saudi Arabia's action to acquire Newcastle United can be seen as an exercise of power, and whether and how the images presented construct and reinforce orientalist discourses about the Saudi state and the region. The discourse analysis is conducted using Laclau and Mouffe's methodology and the theoretical framework applied is Joseph Nye's soft power, Edward Said's Orientalism and hegemony. Based on the international newspaper The Guardian and the human rights organization Amnesty International, orientalist discourses have been identified and the purchase of Newcastle United has resulted in soft disempowerment effects for Saudi Arabia. Local newspaper The Chronicle also constructed orientalist discourses about the state of Saudi Arabia but legitimizes the purchase of Newcastle United making the soft power exercise successful.

Qatar wants to use the 2022 FIFA World Cup as a soft power mean. They want to remove stains on their reputation via sportswashing. However, there is reason to believe that this effect might not occur in the case of Qatar, or in other words; that the tournament has a soft disempowerment effect on the state of Qatar. By doing a discourse analysis this study exams if the soft power efforts of Qatar have been successful, primarily in the Swedish context by examining how the Swedish media and Swedish FA articulates about Qatar, but also in the context of FIFA. The study also examens whether the articulations can be labeled as cases of Orientalism. The results show that in the Swedish context, both an orientalist and soft disempowerment-discourse are showing, and in the case of FIFA an orientalist discourse and a discourse which suggest that the tournament has been a good soft power resource in the eyes of FIFA occurs.