Sports Mega-Events and Popular Politics: A Comparative Study of Mediation and Public Memory of the UEFA 2020 and Russia 2018 Football Championships

The growing interest in interplay between politics and popular culture lacks consideration of mediated sports mega-events (SMEs) like football championships.

This hinders our understanding of how popular sporting events reflect and impact political life, and how populations engage with and interpret political meanings through media events.

This project bridges this gap by investigating the lasting political significance of SMEs through an assessment of their mediation and public memory—both comparatively and retrospectively—in democratic and authoritarian contexts.The project’s research objectives are to 1) compare the mediation of SMEs across political environments, during and after the events, and vis-à-vis prominent political narratives surrounding them; 2) understand how members of the public remember the events, their mediation, and related political developments; and 3) explore the implications of the public and mediated memory of SMEs for their lasting political legacy, and how popular events reflect and influence people’s engagement with politics.Specifically, the project will comparatively assess the mediation and public memory of two recent football championships—the pan-European UEFA 2020 and the Russia 2018 FIFA World Cup—in the context of two crises affecting politics and public life in Europe: the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Brexit.

The two research strands, conducted in the comparative English and Russian national settings, include a) an analysis of media coverage of the tournaments and their legacies by national broadcasters; and b) focus groups with audiences of the SMEs.This project will develop a novel concept of ‘Mega-event Political Memory Ecology,’ which will have scientific, economic, and societal implications.

Marrying approaches from digital memory studies and popular geopolitics, this concept will account for the interrelationship between shifting public and mediated memories of SMEs and public understandings of the political world.