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Description
The purpose of this study is to explore the media discourses from major Spanish news agencies regarding female soccer players during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. 32 male and 26 female soccer games were held from July 21st to August 8th in 2021. Data were collected from Agencia EFE, El País and Diario ABC using keywords such as Juegos Olímpicos (the Olympic Games), Tokio 2020 (Tokyo 2020) and fútbol (football/soccer). A total of 90 articles have been collected as of January 2023. Goffman’s (1974) framing theory was used as a framework to understand the implications of media discourses in the frame building and frame setting processes of portraying female soccer players. In doing so, media reports on male and female soccer games from 60 days prior to 60 days after the Olympics were analyzed through a corpus analysis (Vaughan & O'Keeffe, 2015). Male soccer game reports were collected in order to make comparisons on coverage, word frequency and tones. Preliminary findings show that in the frame building stage, female soccer players did not receive sufficient or proportionate media coverage compared to males. Male players obtained more than 90% of media coverage, while female ones only received 7.1%. In the frame setting stage, the representation of female players was more negative than their male counterpart, and the media reports tend to emphasize their femininity instead of their sport performance. Through such framing, media discourses contribute to the gender stereotyping in sports (Koivula, 1999). Implications and future research directions will be discussed.
