Almost three years ago, Qatar had the eyes of the world on it for very different reasons. The team bidding for the 2022 World Cup had unveiled the latest money–no–object weapon in its lavish, imaginative, improbable and ultimately successful bid to land the football tournament.  Harold Mayne-Nicholls, visiting technical inspector for governing body Fifa, had just delivered a downbeat assessment of the Qataris' chances of bringing the world's biggest sporting event to a gas-rich country the size of Yorkshire with June temperatures that often top 50C.  But then a former World Cup winner, Zinedine Zidane, was unveiled as an official ambassador and immediately lightened the mood as he spoke of football's ability to build bridges and inspire hope.  "Football is for everyone," the former French international and three-time world player of the year told the assembled journalists and lackeys. "When I think of all the youth of the Middle East, what they're missing is an event like the World Cup."  That was the pretty wrapping that surrounded compelling personal pitches to the Fifa executive, and, as the body's president, Sepp Blatter, now admits, "political influence" on committee members to vote for Qatar for economic reasons. The successful bidders have always insisted they broke no rules.  Given the chaotic nature of the bidding process and the lack of rigour with which it was governed, that may well turn out to be true – despite the ongoing efforts of Michael Garcia, a former US attorney for the southern district of New York, to retrospectively investigate.  It is thought that Qatar paid close to £2m to secure Zidane as a bid ambassador, plus millions more to recruit others including then Barcelona manager, Pep Guardiola, who finished his playing career in the Gulf state's professional league. At the time of its World Cup bid, Qatar needed to win credibility among the footballing community and the answer was to spend, spend, spend – on ambassadors, on overseas football development, on training academies, on youth schemes.  Zidane's unveiling was a tiny, but apt, example of the lavish spending and ambition that not only characterised the controversial 2022 bid but has been woven through an unprecedented trolley dash around world sport.  Qatar's successful attempt to host a competition for which it has never qualified is far from the only significant entrance on to the global sporting stage by this ambitious Gulf state.  This is sport as soft power, a calculated attempt to build Qatar's name through a co-ordinated series of moves to align itself with the biggest and most emotive names in world sport.  Just as it reached for the best player in the world when looking for an ambassador to join its team of expensively assembled stars, so it looked to the most famous and most feted club when looking to deepen its influence in Spain.  Chiming with their més que un club (more than a club) rhetoric, Barcelona had never had a sponsor on their famous red and blue shirts when they agreed to feature Unicef on their jerseys in a one-off deal in 2006. But in modern football, money eventually talks louder than principles.  In 2010, Qatar agreed a deal for its charitable Qatar Foundation to take over the shirt sponsorship, before a deal for Qatar Airways took effect this season that is valued at more than €30m (£25m) a season for the next three years.  In Paris, the links are stronger still. Believing the English market to be overheated, the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) alighted upon Paris St Germain. Existing French trade links, actively encouraged and fostered by France's then president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who lobbied the Uefa president, Michel Platini, to vote for Qatar, helped smooth the way.  Taking on the club in a deal worth €100m, the QIA went on to spend almost four times that in just three seasons on stars such as Zlatan Ibrahamovic and David Beckham.  An $800m (£490m) sponsorship deal with the Qatar Tourism Authority, ostensibly to promote the image of the country abroad, will test Platini's cherished financial fair play rules – introduced to prevent European clubs running up huge losses but also requiring them to wean themselves off sugar daddies – to the limit.  At the same time another of Qatar's big global "soft power" projects was making significant incursions into sport. Al-Jazeera television, which is owned by QIA, launched BeIn Sport in France, embarking on a trolley dash for football rights that included Ligue 1, the Champions League and the European Championships.  As everyone from the multinationals bankrolling global sporting events to pay-TV platforms pouring billions into sports rights has discovered in recent decades, sport hits emotional buttons and forges deep links in a way that other investments do not.  That rationale is now informing the investment priorities of entire governments. In Qatar, which has also invested heavily in expensive property in London and elsewhere, the spending has not been confined to overseas. A steady stream of international football teams – including an England side that played Brazil in 2009 – have been enticed to Doha to play exhibition matches.  The Aspire academy has state-of-the-art facilities and a slate of perfect pitches used by a procession of big European clubs including Bayern Munich and Manchester United. The academy also takes in promising players from around Africa and beyond in what its Qatari backers claim is a purely altruistic endeavour.  Having already landed the World Cup, and having failed at the shortlisting stage to reach the final cut for the 2016 and 2020 Olympics, another bid for the 2024 Games is on the cards. Qatar narrowly failed to beat London to the 2017 world athletics championships.  The country's rulers insist this is more than window dressing. The former emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani spoke endlessly about his desire to use sport to inspire his young nation and forge a new identity, and his newly appointed son shows every sign of following suit.  Billboards on Doha's ever-expanding road network would extol the virtues of physical exercise, while London 2012 architect Lord Coe is among those who has bought into the vision.  "It's about nation building, he sees sport as a means to inspire young people in his country and he looks at sport as something that introduces a completely different dimension," Coe told the Guardian in December at a lavish Doha conference on sport and development.  Asked then how all these bits of the puzzle fitted together Hassan al-Thawadi, the chief executive of the Qatar 2022 supreme committee, played down the extent to which there was a masterplan at work.  "Everything has different pieces and everyone has different goals. In the end some things are interconnected and other things aren't. It's a complicated map. Some aspects are holistic and fit the national vision. Others are private initiatives," he said.  But the line between private initiatives and government is inevitably blurred in a feudal monarchy. The vision is not unique to Qatar and has been pursued to a greater or lesser extent by others in the region.  See also Dubai's longstanding agreements to host global golf and tennis competitions and its push to become home to the governing bodies of world sport. See Bahrain's controversial Formula 1 grand prix. And Abu Dhabi's takeover of one of England's most famous football clubs – Manchester City – and its transformation into one of the world's richest.  But Qatar has taken the proposition to a whole new level. It has been an exercise that has brought the eyes of the world upon a tiny Gulf state.  Qatar has allied that with some of the most glamorous names in sport, from Barcelona to Beckham. But in the process of attracting the gaze of the world, it has invited global scrutiny on the means with which it is fuelling that furiously paced expansion and its priorities.  "There are big opportunities here, elevating one's presence in terms of seats at global tables and external image, but there are also risks," observed Stephen Greyser, emeritus professor at Havard Business School, at the Doha conference.
Zinedine Zidane's envoy role is just an example of spending by a state that sees sport as a way of asserting its global presence