The Language of Football: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the FIFA World Cup 2022 Social Media Coverage

Abstract

       Sports events are global phenomena around the world. Football is the most common and effective language when it comes to sports. Each language has its own set of tools to achieve ends.  The year 2022 witnessed a distinguished sporting event on Arab lands in the area of the Middle East, the FIFA World Cup. It was the most prominent, important and widely debated event. Qatar hosted the World Championship. It is the first version of the World Cup to be held in a Muslim country in the Middle East, which made it surrounded by a lot of arguments over a number of issues since the announcement of Doha hosting the tournament in 2010. Though the World Cup was held before in controversial countries such as Russia, particularly, regarding its human rights record and stance on LGBT issues, however, no previous tournament has been as controversial as this one. Social media, newspapers and TV channels covered the event with different reactions from one side and contradictory ones from the other. This study uses critical discourse analysis to show how international media entities portrayed the FIFA World Cup version of 2022 hosted by Qatar. The main aim of the study is to understand how the specific characteristics of social, political, and religious issues impact the media discourse and influence the portrayal of the host country. The study also aims at clarifying the most common ideologies that the Western media has presented about the Middle East and the Arab Muslim world. To fulfill the above aims, the study hypothesizes that (i) Western media has presented Qatar World Cup 2022 as a negative version, and (ii) the negative ideologies about the Arab Muslims countries are employed rather directly in different ways. The data are collected from the YOUTUBE channel of BBC NEWS. The data are analyzed linguistically and ideologically within Van Dijk's (1995, 2011) approaches. The study concludes that: (i) the Arab Muslim world is presented as a place suppressing differences, restricting freedoms and gaging mouths in regard to human rights. (ii) the Arab Muslim world is presented as the other whose values and religious ideologies are de-emphasized throughout the negative representations and strategies used in the data under analysis . The politicization of social media to drop the tournament held in Qatar was among the priorities of the Western media to boycott the tournament.