Search

Considering that soccer is a highly political sport and places itself in the crosshairs of capital questions such as membership and identity, the goal of the present article is to analyze how the discourse of Spanish identity is constructed in the sports press. To that purpose, the author conduct an exhaustive content analysis focused on the four main daily sports papers with the highest print run and circulation in Spain. Specifically, it studies the information published about the Spanish team during its participation in the 2006 World Cup in Germany. The article focuses on the role that the sports media currently plays as active agents of ideological transmission of a banal nationalism, and points out the differences that this media process of constructing a Spanish nationality shows compared to non-democratic periods. The article also highlights the existing discrepancies between the ways in which this identity is formed in the sports papers edited in Madrid (centralist) and the ones edited in Barcelona (autonomist). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]