Moral Judgment by Fans and Institutional Authority in Elite Football: Public Legitimacy Construction in BBC Sport Comment Sections

Sport controversies increasingly unfold within institutionally moderated public forums, where fans negotiate authority, morality, and legitimacy. This study investigates BBC Sport's comment sections as sociologically significant arenas for public judgment during the Mohamed Salah-Liverpool controversy. Rather than viewing comments as peripheral audience reactions, the analysis conceptualizes them as regulated spaces in which football fans engage in moral policing, boundary-drawing, and the allocation of responsibility among multiple actors. Employing a mixed-methods design, the study analyzes 18,634 comments posted across 16 BBC Sport articles. Dictionary-assisted mapping of interpretive themes, moral vocabularies, and evaluation targets is integrated with qualitative analysis of justificatory and sanctioning practices. The findings indicate that participation is episodic and closely linked to journalistic publication cycles, which repeatedly reframe the dispute around escalation, authority, match re-entry, transfer speculation, and legacy narratives. Across these contexts, a limited set of interpretive anchors (particularly authority, discipline, and media amplification) structures public judgment and stabilizes meaning. Moral language primarily serves as a mechanism of sanction rather than as a sustained emotional expression. During escalation phases, entitlement and ego are invoked to justify character-based condemnation, whereas professionalism predominates in authority-focused contexts, reinforcing norms of hierarchy, discipline, and organizational control. Responsibility and legitimacy are distributed among players, clubs, ownership, managers, and media actors, suggesting that football controversies function as relational legitimacy struggles rather than organization-centered crises. Situated within the sociology of sport, this study demonstrates that football fandom operates as a form of everyday moral governance, where legitimacy, authority, and moral worth are publicly negotiated within institutionally sanctioned arenas. The study contributes to Sport and Social Issues debates on fandom, celebrity labor, and institutional power by illustrating how legacy sports journalism structures the conditions under which moral judgment and legitimacy contests become visible and consequential.