A Critical Discourse Analysis of Racism in Selected English Sports Reports on a Ballon d'Or Award 2024

Sports journalism in the realm of media landscape functions not only as a means for reporting outcomes but also as an influential discursive platform that creates social meaning, enhances dominant ideologies, and influences public perception. This study intends to investigate how racism and racial dynamics are framed in sports news reports, specifically, in the case of the Real Madrid football player Vinicius Junior (Vini Jr) and his exclusion from the 2024 Ballon d’Or. The problem addressed in the current study revolves around the way institutional injustice and racial bias are embedded in sports news reports and whether they resist or reinforce these biases. Accordingly, the study intends to identify the linguistic and discursive strategies used in the selected British and American sports reports to represent Vini’s exclusion from the 2024 Ballon d’Or. Moreover, it investigates the roles of the lexical choices used in the selected reports and how these reports frame racism. Finally, this study explores the ideological implications of the racial dynamics associated with the award through the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach. The analysis of the data selected is based on four questions, namely: (1) What are the discursive and linguistic strategies employed through the transitivity system to portray Vini’s exclusion from the Ballon d’Or 2024 Award? (2) What are the roles of the lexical aspects in representing racial injustice? (3) How do the British and American journals frame racism? and (4) What are the ideological implications associated with the 2024 Ballon d’Or award? To achieve the aims and answer the proposed questions, 16 extracts are analyzed from two British sports reports, including the BBC and the Guardian, and two American ones, including ESPN and the New York Times. The study has been conducted through a qualitative research approach adopting an eclectic model involving Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework (1989, 2001), based on Halliday and Matthiessen’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (2014), Fairhurst and Sarr’s Framing Theory (FT) (1996), and Delgado and Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory (CRT) (2001). The analysis findings have concluded that the British and American journals construct their reports based on the material and relational processes since they capture the major elements of how actions and relationships are represented in language. Moreover, ideologically, the British reports rely on the explicit declarations of racial injustice, while American journals focus on the ambiguity of reasons behind racism, avoiding direct claims to racial bias. Finally, the present study provides several recommendations and suggestions for further studies.