First of all, the World Cup, Olympics and other international games work for easing tensions among different nations. For example, South and North Korea have football games regularly which give two nations a chance to understand each other deeply. In the mid 1990s, a hundreds of North Korean supporters came to South Korea with the footballers and they were very excited during the sporting events. Even if it sounds ridiculous, many South Koreans were quite surprised at that moment when North Koreans shouted and cried during the match.
We all realized that they were very normal sports fans even though they were occasionally very secretive.
Through the sports, two divided nations could reduce their political and ideological tensions and could feel the patriotic unity.
On the other hand, some sports matches can make international relations worse. For instance, football or baseball games between Korea and Japan are always big matches in two countries where full of tensions overflow. Sometimes, after the matches, the two rivals blame each other and their patriotic emotions explode in an aggressive way. Even much worse scenario is that the troubles caused by losing games affect the players directly.
In conclusion, I think that international sporting occasions can be one of the good ways to ease tensions or to release patriotism safely. However, I believe that games can not be the fundamental ways for the sound patriotism or peaceful international relations.