What Scotland can learn from Morocco’s footballing diplomacy

The match provides a compelling illustration of football’s significance. It is simultaneously a football event, a cultural encounter, a diplomatic opportunity, and an economic platform.

Football has successfully paved the way for hard geopolitical returns. Scotland has successfully leveraged, a variety of sporting events into the country but unlike Morocco it has yet to strategically understand, fund and use football as an intentionally planned driver of international engagement and cooperation.

For Morocco football is a central pillar of foreign policy with a $5 billion fund to support investment in and partnership with Morocco. It is strategically executing a state-led sports diplomacy strategy that leverages its co-hosting of the 2030 FIFA World Cup to structurally transform its trade relationships with Europe and position Morocco globally. Morocco’s experience demonstrates how football can be integrated into a wider international development strategy that delivers both football and non-football returns through football.

Morocco’s approach demonstrates that football can be strategically leveraged not merely to win matches, they are ranked seventh in the world, but to strengthen international influence, attract investment, support economic modernisation, and enhance the country’s global standing.

Morocco is not alone. Australia is executing a sports diplomacy strategy and a strategically intentionally planned green and yellow decade of sports events.

Scotland has sporting assets, but it does not have a strategic plan or intent to value and place football and sport at the centre of its international and or global efforts in the same way as a Morocco or an Ireland. Prior to a Trump administration US sports Aid was a valued international engagement tool. Scotland’s culture and or external affairs portfolios have never funded targeted sporting exchange programmes.

If you look at the Scottish cabinet responsibilities, there is hardly a portfolio that would not benefit from a top slice of its budget going to sport. Including external affairs, culture, economy and tourism, business, international development as well as the well-trodden path to health and sport.

The rationale for the use of football, might recognise several policy drivers: attraction, national brand, promoting national culture, promoting co-operation and international engagement, regional influence, diaspora engagement, geopolitical influence, domestic engagement, building networks, strengthening outreach and supporting the domestic economy. The extent to which these opportunities are realised depends upon the existence of a coherent strategy capable of aligning sporting ambitions with wider diplomatic, economic, and national development objectives.

The value of Scotland’s Tartan Army is not incidental. When thousands of Scots arrived in Miami or Boston, dressed differently, singing loudly, and then quietly donating to a local charity they are projecting a version of Scotland as generous, self-deprecating, and outward looking that no marketing campaign could manufacture. The Tartan Army exemplifies how football supporters are carriers of national reputation, transforming football participation into a form of public diplomacy and people-to-people engagement.

Football is an asset. It is Scotland’s most popular sport for both men and women; per head of population more people come through the gates to watch football in Scotland than any other country in Europe; the game in Scotland and ideas from Scotland influenced the spread of the global game; the Scottish Football Association (SFA) were in at the start and remain, with other associations, guardians of the rules of the game. Football is an important part of Scotland’s efforts to bring major sporting events (It is part of the UK Euro 28 football championships and is part of a sole bid to host the 2035 Women’s World Cup) to Scotland.

Scotland has numerous areas of potential engagement including sports event expertise, coaching, sports science, sports diplomacy and fan engagement consultancy. Sports technology and data analytics are other areas – building upon Scottish University expertise in artificial intelligence and ethics, as well as golf and outdoor sports, university student exchanges in sport and knowledge exchange in sport including youth and grassroot exchanges. Meanwhile, Morocco already seeks an ultra-modern digital infrastructure and stadium logistics for 2030.

Scotland has access to a wide range of international platforms. Not only through Scotland House and the Scottish Office but also an extensive UK diplomatic network. Gareth Bale was a big part of the Welsh plans at Japan Expo 2025.

Yet it does not have a dedicated sports diplomacy and external affairs strategy to leverage the infrastructure and sports ambassadors that it has access to. Scotland’s future may be outward looking, ambitious and connected but it’s failure to have a dedicated and specific international engagement framework for sport remains a lesson that Scotland can learn from Morocco and closer to home Ireland.

With Government ministers at the World Cup, you would hope Scottish and UK Ministers will have learned from Morocco and urgently place sport strategically, intentionally, and financially closer to the heart of its international engagement and co-operation efforts.

The World Cup and the experiences of Morocco and Scotland illustrate two contrasting approaches to the mobilisation of football as a soft power resource, with Morocco pursuing an increasingly coordinated strategy and Scotland still seeking to define the role that football and sport might play within its wider international engagement framework.

Grant Jarvie is Chair of Sport at the University of Edinburgh