News about sport and participation in Sport Associations
On March 10th, 2022, a group of students coordinated by Bogdan Voicu investigated the news sites across 20 EU countries. The students were enrolled in the class of Comparative Sociology at University of Sibiu. The whole process is depicted here.
In this post, Raluca Dincă (one of the students) and Bogdan Voicu discuss one result: to which extent European news sites included sport reports among their most important news.
10th of March 2022 was a Thursday. There were football games in European club competitions. In the previous evening, on Wednesday, late in the night, Real Madrid defeated PSG 3-1 with a hattrick by Karim Benzema, eliminating the French side from the UEFA Champions League, and acceding to the quarter-finals of the competition (that they eventually win against Liverpool).
However, the news on that Thursday were devoted mainly to the war in Ukraine, and the sport news that succeeded on the top of the agenda were coming from various sports, not only football.
Given the prevalence of war news, the first map includes the percentage of sport news as contrasted to non-war news.
% sport news in news that do not refer to war (10th of March 2022).
For countries colored in gray, no data was available.
Data show no clear geographical pattern. Romania has a high percentage, but in fact they also have a high percentage of war-devoted news. Italy and Spain have low percentages of sport news, but they Spain has also a low percentage of war-related news.
Raluca launched the hypothesis that one should see more interest in sport news when people join more frequently sport associations.
Data from the European Values Study illustrates this genuine "structure of opportunities". It turned out that Scandinavians, Dutch, British, Germans, Austrians, Swiss, Czechs, Slovenians, and Cypriots were more likely to join associations as compared to other Europeans. Lower propensity to such membership was found in Eastern and Southern Europe.
Data Source: European Values Study, 2017/2018.
The map was generated using the Atlas of European Values. White spots indicate lack of data.
When contrasting the two variables, we notice some effect. 10% of the variation in the relative frequency of sport news across Europe is indeed explained by membership in sport associations. However, the pattern is not linear. On the left side of the graph, a few Eastern European countries with low participation in sport associations display a higher percentage of sport news. Then, the percentage decreases only to increase again, with the increase in membership in such associations. If excluding Romania, Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Estonia, one could observe a linear pattern.
Anyway, it seems that we might have a connection between the interest in sports and the display of sport news by media: in societies where people do not join sport associations, media pays more attention to sport events, then the interest decreases, and then it blooms again when people actually practice sports....
Nevertheless, such analysis is very basic, and one needs better measurement of media's interest in sport. Observation should be repeated in all countries, and in more instances, as discussed when we have described the project.
However, we considered that even such unpolished results are import to be presented to a broader public.