Violent Words and Aggressive Behaviors on and off the Pitch: A Study in Critical Discourse Analysis

The strong connections between the violence of football as a sport and the violence of the language used within and without the football field to describe and talk about it, have had important implications at many levels. In particular, as my paper intends to prove, the language adopted by the media during the period in which the problem of violence in and around football reached its climax (namely the last three decades of the 20th century), contributed, at least in part, to the problem. The aim of this paper is therefore to analyse—mainly from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis—the way in which some of the periodicals of the time depicted the phenomenon of hooliganism and, through a comparison with articles of recent publication, assess whether (and how) the language used nowadays by the press has changed. In particular, the paper will focus on a corpus of headlines which appeared in quality papers such as The Times and The Guardian and tabloids such as The Sun on occasions of important matches such as the European cup final from 1985, the world championships of 1986, 1990, and 1994, etc. These results will be then compared to the headlines which appeared on newspapers on the occasion of the European Championships and the world championships in the new millennium.