A comparative study of after-match reports on ‘lost’ and ‘won’ football games within the framework of critical discourse analysis

Abstract

In spite of the obvious differences in research styles, all critical discourse analysts aim at exploring the role of discourse in the production and reproduction of power relations within social structures. Nowadays, after-match written reports are prepared immediately after every football match and provide the readers with the apparently objective representations of important events and occurrences of the game. The authors of this paper analyzed four after-match reports (retrieved from Manchester United’s own website), two regarding their lost games and two on their won games. Hodge and Kress’s (1996) framework was followed in the analysis of the grammatical features of the texts at hand. Also, taking into consideration the pivotal role of lexicalization as one dimension of the textualization process (Fairclough, 2012), vocabulary and more specifically the choice of specific verbs, nouns, adverbs and noun or noun phrase modification were examined. The results indicated that reporters, consciously or unconsciously, foreground and highlight their team’s strengths and advantages when the team wins. On the other hand, they try to mitigate or euphemize their losses by backgrounding their weaknesses or bad performance. In addition, in both cases (winning or losing a game), the focus is almost exclusively on one’s own team.