Racist and neo-Nazi panic in the Euro 2012 coverage by the British press: a discursive failure in interculturalism

Abstract

The article demonstrates how the discursive strategies of sport reporting by the media may collide with the vision of sport as a means of promoting intercultural understanding, a generally anticipated cultural effect of mega sport events. This is done by a critical discourse reading of 35 news articles that appeared across the British national press in May and June 2012, directly before the opening of the 14 th UEFA European Football Championship (Euro 2012) jointly hosted by Poland and Ukraine. Influenced by a BBC television documentary and linked by the central topic of the two countries as strongholds of racism, xenophobia and vicious hooliganism, these articles constitute an instance of a moral panic. A discussion of the panic as a mode of discourse leads to the conclusion that the priorities and practices of British newspaper journalism acted against the culturally integrating potential of Euro 2012.

Nationalism and Sport: A Review of the Field

“…Indeed, prior to the Russian World Cup in 2018, numerous journalists and scholars expressed worries about the connections between racism and football culture (Arnold and Foxall 2018;Arnold and Veth 2018;Glathe 2016;Gorshunov and Gorshunova 2015). Similarly, before the 2012 Euro championship finals in Poland and Ukraine, there were concerns about racist fans, which some argued was in fact a reflection of the insecurities of those reporting such concerns (Wawrzyczek, 2017). Fortunately, no major racist incidents occurred at either the 2018 FIFA World Cup or the 2012 Euro championships, and sport has instead been at the forefront of attempts to promote the civic and inclusive definition of the nation.…”