“Football killed him and football didn't want to know”: A corpus-assisted examination of UK newspapers’ reporting on association football-related traumatic brain injury and dementia

Sport-related traumatic brain injury (TBI) is increasingly recognised as a risk factor for dementia.This chapter is specifically interested in the UK print media's coverage of TBI and dementia risk in the context of football (i.e., soccer).It presents a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of how UK national newspapers report on football and dementia across a decade (2013-2022, inclusive).The chapter's approach combines quantitative data sampling strategies with qualitative analysis, focusing first on how the link between football and dementia risk from TBI is reported over time, and then on how some of the key stakeholders are positioned in relation to this link, focusing on newspapers, football authorities, footballers and footballers' families.Findings indicate that the newspapers tended to align themselves with footballers and family members campaigning for better understandings of, and support for footballers experiencing, TBI and dementia.Indeed, there are multiple examples of newspaperled campaigns, which often draw attention to the inadequacies of football organisations.While seemingly supporting footballers and their families, evidence points to how the newspapers also risk contributing to the stigmatisation of dementia.The chapter concludes by reflecting on the study's limitations and recommending future research directions.