In article author takes advantage of sociological theory of German thinker – Ulrich Beck – to analysis of contemporary football. He assumes that idea of cosmopolitanization developed by Beck instances interesting analytical tool to the scrutiny of that sport. The concept of cosmopolitanization emphasising on interpenetration of global flows and local environment appears as adequate to such examination. From one perspective some actors in global football field (eg. FIFA) put a lot of pressure on the rest actors (expelling national teams from countries with unstable political situations), but on the other hand football field constitutes a mixture of various influences, different kinds of “cosmopolitanization” (“coerced”, “latent”, “non-deformed”) and local dimensions of modernity. In the case of football fans it is justified to cover every day experiences with football by notion of “banal cosmopolitanization”. The author considers necessity to create the new units of analysis in exploration of contemporary football. Units from classical sociology, derived from world of first modernity need to be replaced (or enriched at least) by ones prepared in result of cosmopolitan turn in social sciences. Simultaneously, like other spectrums of social life (science, politics, identities and so on), football is found under influences of conditions of global manufactured uncertainty and risk. In article there are a few instances of risks connected to football.

When the spotlight exposes too much: Qatar’s image problems in the context of the organization of the 2022 FIFA World Cup

This paper analyses the role of global sport within Qatar’s international strategy, most notably through the successful bid to stage the 2022 football World Cup. The article investigates how sport is used as a foreign policy tool to build relations with as many countries and people in the world as possible to gain soft power. I see the hosting of sports mega-events as the practice of public diplomacy: host states may use these events to change their international image. I examine issues of reputational risk with regard to critical comment surrounding Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 World Cup. In order to illustrate Qatar’s image problems, I will use examples from the Polish language Internet media.