Beyond the Game: Comparing Political News Coverage and Twitter Discussions during the 2022 FIFA World Cup

Abstract

The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar was as much a political event as a sporting one, marked by controversies over the death of construction workers, concerns over LGBTQ+ rights, and allegations of corruption. Drawing on 573,927 tweets from UK-based accounts and 15,812 excerpts from 66 UK newspapers, we examine how political and apolitical attention to the competition was distributed across mainstream and social media, how it varied across various Twitter sub-networks, and how UK journalists navigated both arenas. Combining Topic Modelling, LLM-based classification, Social Network Analysis, and close reading, we find that political content accounted for 29.0% of tweets and 18.5% of news excerpts—a gap driven largely by Twitter discussion of issues only loosely tied to the tournament, particularly the Mahsa Amini protests in Iran. Consistent with Wright et al. (2015), we find that political talk routinely surfaced within seemingly apolitical conversations about teams, players, and matches—from debates over footballers’ working conditions to readings of Morocco’s run as a symbolic challenge to European footballing power. At the same time, political conversations on Twitter were quite segmented, with different sub-networks focusing on different political topics. Moreover, while the UK press emphasized LGBTQ+ rights and migrant worker deaths, Twitter hosted more sustained debate about perceived bias in Western media coverage of Qatar, especially within a community of users with ties to Arab countries and Islam. These insights offer unusually direct empirical support for counterpublic theory. Journalists, meanwhile, mostly used Twitter to push content but also engaged in disputes with one another over bias, accuracy, and the propriety of attending the event, reflecting a shift toward more assertive personal positioning consistent with broader trends in journalistic branding. We close by arguing that the framework of online “third spaces”—apolitical online fan environments into which politics occasionally intrudes—fits the World Cup poorly: the tournament’s scale, commercialization, and political salience make sustained apoliticism untenable, and a meta-debate over whether to “keep politics out of football” played out openly across both platforms. The concept may apply more productively to smaller, more bounded fan communities.