Ligue 1 and Zlatan Ibrahimović. : A quantitative and qualitative comparative study of Sportbaldet’s reporting of the French football league

In this essay, we have studied whether the Swedish newspaper Sportbladet reporting on the French football league (Ligue 1) is different from the season before to season after Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s arrival at Paris Saint-Germain FC in the summer of 2012. The teories that we applied were news values, framing and personalization. In order to complete our investigation, we used two different methods: a quantitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis to see if the news valuation and framing are different, but also to see what impact Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s arrival has on the media coverage of the league. The result of the quantitative content analysis and the critical discourse analysis shows huge differences between 2011/12 and 2012/13 seasons. Sportbladet published ten times as many articles during Zlatan’s debut season in the league in comparasion with the previous season. The articles became generally larger, better placed in the newspaper and contained more columns about the subject. We could also note more focus on individuals in the articles. This change is mainly explained by the increased geographical and cultural proximity during the 2012/13 season, which arose in connection with Ibrahimovic’s transfer from Milan to Paris Saint-Germain. The result was pretty much as we had expected. The 2012/13 season was way more covered with a particular focus on Zlatan and his team in the articles. That shows what kind of importance a national super star like Zlatan Ibrahimovic has on the reporting from the French league.