‘We’re all in this together’: Perspectives from within the Gulf Cooperation Council Women’s Games

Sport has often been advocated as a tool to achieve various social development (SD) goals. It has also been used as a way of expanding soft power (SP) influence. Combining both concepts provides an opportunity to understand how SP and SD may interrelate through the use of domestic SP strategies in sport. In this paper, we discuss the identified themes of unity, pride, and collective identity that arise from a regional women’s sporting competition in the Arabian Gulf among the Gulf Cooperation Council members, as factors that strengthened the prominence of athletes’ shared identity and connectedness. Using the perspectives of the authors who were immersed in the sporting competition, we argue that this information is important for sports organisers to use as bases for SP strategies to achieve inwards-focused social goals.