Jannik Sinner seen by Giorgia Meloni: the populist co-optation of Italian sports heroes

This article examines how Giorgia Meloni’s populist radical right government symbolically appropriated the tennis champion Jannik Sinner between 2024 and 2026. Drawing on a corpus of 432 records − 396 press items and 36 public social media posts from Giorgia Meloni’s X/Twitter and Instagram accounts – analysed through critical discourse analysis, it traces how sporting success was translated into political and national capital across institutional, media and digital arenas. The article’s theoretical contribution is the concept of moral-national embodiment: the process whereby an athlete’s apparent political neutrality, public discipline and exemplary moral conduct are converted by populist actors into evidence of national virtue. This concept addresses a paradox that existing accounts of sport and national identity leave unexplained: namely, why the very neutrality that makes an athlete available for appropriation simultaneously makes him resistant to it. Sinner’s cultural liminality as a German-speaking Italian from South Tyrol renders his symbolic capture at once more productive and more fragile. The analysis demonstrates that co-optation is never a unilateral act but a contested process, repeatedly destabilised by media irony, counter-narratives and the athlete’s own refusals.