As "sports diplomacy" enters the mainstream, this framework distinguishes itself from cultural and corporate diplomacy through its unique initiators, shared benefits, and the universal "lingua franca" of athletic competition.
As Congress prepares to pass the American Decade of Sports Act, the term “sports diplomacy” is gaining steam among policymakers. A simple Google Trends search shows the term surging into the popular lexicon in 2025 after decades on the periphery. World leaders, including Nelson Mandela, have long recognized that “sport has the power to change the world," but with more eyes on the topic than ever before, practitioners must clearly define what the field of sports diplomacy entails.
What makes sports diplomacy a unique tool? Is it simply an offshoot of cultural diplomacy? What can sports diplomacy practitioners learn from the also new but more established framework of corporate diplomacy? Answers to these questions will sustain sport’s newfound prominence in the United States’ diplomatic repertoire and ensure that it is deployed effectively.
Conceptually, sports exchanges differ from other related exchanges in three overarching ways: the primary initiators, the primary beneficiaries, and comprehension of the lingua franca.
Sports diplomacy is closely related to the field of cultural diplomacy, which has a history extending as far back as ancient times. In the United States, cultural diplomacy has manifested in forms such as the jazz ambassadors of the 1950s-1960s and the American Culinary Corps founded in 2012.
The first US sports diplomacy programs were organized as cultural exchanges, and even today, the US State Department’s Sports Diplomacy Division is housed under the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). As diplomatic tools, sports and culture share important characteristics, such as an emphasis on people-to-people exchange and an appreciation of shared values. However, there are now key distinctions between the cultural and sports exchanges of today.
Whereas cultural diplomacy is typically initiated by individual envoys, modern sports diplomacy is led by both individual athletes and sports organizations. When Louis Armstrong toured Europe in 1955, he was celebrated as Louis Armstrong the individual, not as a representative of Decca Records. On the other hand, when Cal Ripken Jr. visited Japan in 2011, he was there as both a baseball player and as a face of the MLB. The recent success of international games hosted by every major US professional sports league proves that individual athletes and their leagues work best as co-initiators of diplomatic exchange. This was recently reinforced by an agreement between the State Department and the NFL that, in part, formalized the recruitment process of Sports Envoys.
While organizations hold a prominent role in initiating sports diplomacy exchanges, this role is not as primary as it would be in the context of corporate diplomacy - a related diplomatic framework that gained scholarly traction in the early 2000s and accelerated in practice through the 2010s. Corporate diplomacy is concerned with strengthening a company’s capacity to operate globally while ensuring success in the host countries it is committed to. Central to this framework is maintaining a “social license to operate” through strategic relationships with the government and local stakeholders. Though this framework does not draw on the “stardom” of the individual members of a firm, it does translate to how leagues leverage stars in their interactions with civil society. At the same time, corporate diplomats at the executive level can play a crucial role in smoothing global engagement and expansion.
Participating governments are the long-term beneficiaries of any diplomatic exchange, but understanding the immediate and primary beneficiaries on the ground helps to further differentiate sports diplomacy as a unique diplomatic framework. In today’s sports exchanges, the primary beneficiaries are, to an equal degree, the host community and the organization that an athlete represents at home.
The initiators of cultural diplomacy are tasked with exposing foreign audiences to artistic forms that may elevate global perceptions of a country. While US Arts and Music Envoys, for example, may, as part of their mandate, share “American cultural products…to enhance the appeal of American brands,” it is rare for these envoys to strongly associate with specific brands or corporations when serving abroad. Their primary focus is conducting mentorship, workshops, and performances. Athlete-diplomats, on the other hand, are inseparable from their home teams and leagues, many of which are globally recognized brands.
US professional leagues directly benefit from their athletes fostering positive perceptions, especially as they pin their sustained growth to global expansion strategies. One needs only to look as far as Basketball Hall of Famer Dikembe Mutombo who, in addition to serving as one of the first US Sports Envoys, supercharged the popularity of the NBA in his home country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and across Africa as a whole. Beyond his work as a coach and organizer for local projects, he laid the foundation for the Basketball Africa League (managed by NBA Africa). Since then, the NBA’s presence in Africa has matured from centering on youth clinics and local outreach to broad investments in economic ecosystems.
Continuing with the example of professional basketball, the NBA’s corporate diplomacy strategy has also yielded significant but distinct results. After a public relations crisis with the Chinese market in 2019, the NBA returned to China with two preseason games in Macau to start the 2025-2026 season. This was the result of a robust corporate diplomacy strategy that restructured overseas offices, adapted social media strategies, and engaged Chinese officials and diplomats with well-connected team executives like Joe Tsai. In this context, the primary beneficiary of corporate diplomacy is the domestic organization with relatively little consideration for the host community. While US sports diplomacy can learn from how the NBA’s corporate diplomacy leveraged public and private in-country connections to reestablish influence, the concept of primary beneficiaries further distinguishes sports diplomacy as a unique framework.
There exists a host of diplomatic strategies, whether under the umbrella of an established framework (such as art, music, culinary, film) or emerging from other fields (such as science, space, digital or cyber). With so many potential diplomatic strategies sprouting, does it really matter what traits distinguish one practice from another? As the US works to maintain a position of global leadership, the test for diplomacy is in fostering peaceful relations and advancing shared interests through mutual understanding. To that end, sports are uniquely valuable for fostering mutual understanding. As a lingua franca, no medium of diplomacy is more widely spoken and deeply understood.
In a film exchange or a concert, the core product may require translation, or the audience may need introduction to a new genre. A corporate or scientific forum requires participants to have highly specialized knowledge to create pathways for mutual understanding. The core product of sport, however, is largely the same across countries. While minor differences may exist, the rules of basketball or soccer, for example, do not change substantially whether played in the US or abroad.
Even more fundamentally, the ethos of sports competition is universally shared. Just as the US State Department tasks Sports Envoys with “sharing sports skills, as well as lessons in leadership, teamwork, and conflict resolution,” governments across the globe do the same. Italy, for example, tasks their sports ministry with “[celebrating] the values of sports, starting with perseverance and hard work.” While the shared values of sports can drive global movements like Olympism, they also deliver a precision and depth to grassroots outreach that even children and young adults can understand.
As the US hosts the 2026 FIFA World Cup and prepares for the Olympic Games in 2028 and 2034, there is an opportunity to gain fluency in sports like soccer, cricket, and rugby. To draw a lesson from corporate diplomacy, successfully executing tournaments in each sport and developing those sports domestically will strengthen the US’ “social license to operate” in communities abroad.
With the high degree of comprehension for the lingua franca of sport - more so than the language of shared corporate interests or even that of cultural and artistic exchange – the American Decade of Sports can accelerate global partnerships and forge lasting relationships. To that end, the US sports diplomacy framework must leverage individual athletes and sports organizations together as co-initiators of exchange, while delivering equal benefit to both public and private entities across the global sports ecosystem.
