Politics and Sports Documentaries: A Case Study of Football Club Shakhtar Donetsk as Emblematic of Ukrainian Identity and Nationalism

This case study explored how football and politics intertwined within the Paramount+ docuseries Football Must Go On . The award-winning docuseries chronicled Ukrainian football club Shakhtar Donetsk’s participation in the 2022–23 Champions League against the backdrop of Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country. The framing analysis conducted indicates that the docuseries effectively illustrated how the football club became emblematic of Ukrainian nationalism and identity. This was achieved through four main frames: resilience, representation, disruption, and dislocation. Together, these frames documented how participation in European football demonstrated resilience and represented Ukrainian nationalism and identity, while also detailing the disruptive and dislocating effects of war from a Ukrainian perspective. The case study concludes with a discussion of the findings as they relate to intertextuality, the sport–war intertext, and sport mediatization.