Heroes and villains: discursive strategies for (re)producing ‘myths’ of national identity in the newspaper coverage of international football

The aim of this paper is to explore, taking a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach, some of the discursive strategies employed by British newspapers to construct representations of national identity and unity in the reporting of a major sporting event. Taking the concept of ‘nation’ to be ‘imagined’(Anderson 1983) and thus an ‘ideologically constructed’ social group (Billig 1995), this paper considers how social representations serve to (re)produce myths of national identity through the reinforcing of national stereotypes based on narratives of heroes, villains and their deeds and the construction of social representations of in‑groups and out‑groups. The analysis presented in this paper supports the argument that the representation of social actors and action in news stories is clearly ideologically situated and can be used to great effect to cognitively reinforce a sense of ‘us’ v. ‘them’, a fundamental element of myths of national identity and the reiteration of collective national unity