From cycling to football to the World Cup, rival nations have learned that a country’s image is a strategic asset. Israel cannot afford to sit out that race.
Tadej Pogacar rode into Paris this week to win his record-tying fifth Tour de France. A few weeks earlier, the Tour rolled through Barcelona for its Grand Depart, and something was missing.
A year earlier, the team then known as Israel-Premier Tech needed police escorts and blocked roads, and watched the Vuelta a España’s final stage in Madrid canceled after protesters overran the route. This year, the same riders raced under a scrubbed new identity, NSN Cycling Team, every trace of Israel removed, and the crowds left them alone.
UAE Team Emirates and Bahrain Victorious rode the same roads without incident, jerseys carrying national names and government backing intact. Nobody demanded they change, and every time Pogacar raised his arms, the UAE logo was impossible to miss.
The topic at hand is not cycling. It is how countries have learned, over decades, to treat their name as a strategic asset to be managed, protected, and projected.
Qatar offers the clearest case study. A nation of under three million people hosted the 2022 World Cup and bought itself global familiarity that decades of diplomacy could not have purchased.
Qatar Airways sponsors top European clubs, and Qatar Sports Investments owns Paris Saint-Germain outright. Every match becomes a small act of national branding, repeated millions of times a season.
The Emirates has run the same playbook with even more polish. The Emirates airline’s logo has sat on the shirts of Real Madrid, Arsenal, and AC Milan. Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways put its name on Manchester City’s stadium, turning one of the world’s most dominant clubs into a permanent advertisement for the emirate.
Bahrain has gone further: its sovereign wealth fund, Mumtalakat, took majority control of McLaren’s parent group in 2024 and added to that stake in 2025, meaning Bahrain does not merely sponsor a Formula One team, but it substantially owns one, while the Bahrain Grand Prix opens the F1 season worldwide each year.
None of this is incidental spending. It is a strategy. Countries that spent decades absorbing criticism over human rights and governance have used sport, deliberately and systematically, to soften how the world sees them. Saudi Arabia’s 2034 World Cup and its acquisition of Newcastle United are the same strategy scaled up.
Buy visibility. Build partnerships. Make the criticism harder to hear over the noise of the crowd.
This is not only a Gulf strategy. Turkey has run a quieter version for 15 years, with Turkish Airlines as title sponsor of the Euroleague and a former shirt sponsor of Barcelona and Manchester United.
Rwanda offers the more instructive case. Over eight years, Kigali built sleeve sponsorships with Arsenal, Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, and Atletico Madrid into one of the most studied rebranding campaigns in sport, transforming how the world saw a small African country a generation removed from genocide.
That campaign is now unwinding: Bayern pulled back in 2025, and Arsenal is ending its deal in June 2026, both under pressure over Rwanda’s alleged role in fueling the conflict in neighboring Congo. The lesson cuts both ways.
Sports branding can build goodwill faster than any embassy, and it can be stripped away just as fast once the underlying policy story becomes indefensible.
Investing in image, not just security
Israel, by contrast, treats its brand almost entirely as a defensive problem, managed only after a crisis breaks rather than built in calm periods so it can absorb the next one.
The country invests enormously in its security and its technology sector, but far too little in the softer architecture of global perception: the sponsorships, cultural partnerships, and long-term commercial visibility that let the Gulf states walk into a stadium and be applauded rather than protested.
This is not a call for propaganda. It is a call for strategy. Israel once used innovation-driven diplomacy to strengthen ties in Asia and Africa, and still has genuine assets to build on: a high-tech economy, a diaspora with real commercial reach, and a growing network of Abraham Accords partners with every incentive to stand alongside it.
None of that translates into goodwill by itself. It has to be built, funded, and sustained over years, through partnerships that have everything to do with normalization by proximity.
A cycling team was forced to change its identity and ownership. That is not a footnote to a sports season. It is a preview of the peace Israel is now trying to build. As the smoke clears from nearly three years of war, Israel’s leaders are focused, correctly, on restocking munitions, rebuilding deterrence, and consolidating the alliances the fighting forged.
But the aftermath of a war is not won by hardware alone. It is won by whether the world extends a country the same benefit of the doubt, the same willingness to let its flag be worn in public, that it extends to nations with far less claim to it.
Public credit and affection are a strategic reserve of their own, and like any reserve, must be built before the next crisis arrives, not assembled after it.