Olympic values heroes and villains in football through the lens of Reddit

Abstract

This article proposes a narrative analysis of an online social network – Reddit – in order to understand the media coverage of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics by internet communities. An underrated Olympic sport, football (soccer), was chosen; due to its popularity and constant global presence, as a truly universal sport, it has the ability to keep alive the principles enunciated by Coubertin outside the restricted context of the Olympic Games. The objectives of the study were to find out how the protagonists of the Olympic football universe are constructed and how this construction confirms or disproves Olympic values. The narrative of the subreddits favours the collective over the individual, reinforcing Olympic values; the Reddit social network operates on a binary opposition of hero/villain, pitting national teams, teams and countries against each other. The analysis also confirmed the existence of a binary construction in the universe of figures that populate Reddit narratives, based above all on Olympic ideals and values, which are more conciliatory than what happens in other sports competitions. The heroicisation is preferably collective, and there are few individual sportspeople who stand out, which is explained precisely by the prevalence of contemporary Olympic values and ideals. The disruptive and critical dimension, on the other hand, points to external, institutional and political agents, revealing that the limits of Olympism in soccer are played outside the field.