Media coverage of football: A game placed under control

This article analyzes the transformations of the media coverage of professional football in Europe since the 1980s through the French coverage of European competitions. Basing itself essentially on interviews, the current investigation shows that it is less a process of “Europeanization” than an increasing transnationalization and economization of this entertainment sport. The subspace of sports journalism is structured along a continuum of positions linked in part to the volume of economic capital of the media, which partly determines the holding or not of “television rights,” i.e. co-producers’ access to the “show.” Indeed, the media space has become so strategic in the co-production of social representations that most professional agents and structures are increasingly seeking to keep journalists at a distance. This intensification of commercial logic in the professional football space has an impact on journalistic practices and contents between those who are in the “game” and those who are partly excluded from the “game.”