Are Sweden’s men’s and women’s national teams monitored in the same way? : A quantative content analysis of Sportbladets coverage during the football world cups in Russia 2018 and France 2019.

The aim of this study was to compare how the Swedish men’s national football team and the Swedish women’s national football team are reported on in Sportbladet during their respective world cups. I also wanted to find out the differences in how they are framed respectively from a gender stereotypical point of view. The study were made by analysing all the articles written online at Sportbladets website during the periods of the men’s world cup in Russia 2018 (June 14th – July 15th) and women’s world cup in France 2019 (June 7th – July 7th). The gender of the reporters who wrote the articles were also part of the analysis, to conclude if the different genders are reporting differently regarding the framing. I used a quantitative content analysis as my method to answer my research questions. With this method, I was able to implement an analysis where I found out how many articles were written about the respective national teams, and which articles that were written by which gender. The results of my quantitative content analysis showed that the men’s national team got more articles written about them during their world cup, compared to what the women got in theirs. It also showed that both the women’s and men’s team are written about in a gender stereotypical manner in more than a third of the total amount of articles written. Although, the articles written without gender stereotypes were majority in total, with around half of all the articles. The results also showed that female and male journalists writes similarly about both national teams, with the only significant difference being that, when they used gender stereotypes, female journalists used female stereotypes more often than anything else, and male journalists used male stereotypes. The studie also came to the conclusion that Sportbladet writes in a positive way more often towards the women’s team, which was a surprise considering the historic aspect with female athletes being written about in a negative way throughout most of the 20th century