Beyond the Game: Comparing Political News Coverage and Twitter Discussions during the 2022 FIFA World Cup
Björn Ross
The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar was as much a political event as a sporting one, marked by controversies over the death of construction workers, concerns over LGBTQ+ rights, and allegations of corruption. Drawing on 573,927 tweets from UK-based accounts and 15,812 excerpts from 66 UK newspapers, we examine how political and apolitical attention to the competition was distributed across mainstream and social media, how it varied across various Twitter sub-networks, and how UK journalists navigat