The Main Thing is that You did Your Best : a comparative study about how a male respectively a female failure from Swedish national teams in football is portrayed in tabloids

The Main Thing is that You did Your Best - a comparative study about how a male respectively a female failure from Swedish national teams in football is portrayed in tabloids aims to examine how Swedish tabloid is influenced by current societal ideologies in their portraying of failures performed by the male respectively the female national team in football. To examine this, the study uses three main theories with perspectives considering power-settings in society. Philosopher Antonio Gramscis theory about hegemony helps the study to understand how different social groups dominate eachother. Linguistic professor Norman Faircloughs theory about discourse gives tools to understand how this dominance and power is confirmed or challenged in language and in this specific study in text. The final theory that this study uses is sociologist Raewyn Connells ideas about that there is a patriarchal hegemony in the society and theories about how it arises. Rooted in these theories the study uses Faircloughs three-dimensional model as the method and tool to investigate the material for traces of power-structures between women and men. The main result of the study shows that the male failure receives far greater critique from the tabloids, despite the fact that the female failure based on pure performance was at least as big. The male failure was in that sense portrayed as more important than the female equivalent. The results also shows that when the female athletes got critique, their abilities were portrayed as amateurish. Another interesting result was that in our study there were no trace of objectifying the women. which opposes the result of other studies about the subject. These results add to the conclusion that there is a patriarchal hegemony surrounding the tabloid portrayal of failure performed by the Swedish national teams in football. A hegemony which to some extent is challenged