Through television, the World Cup is the most widely viewed event on the planet. We reflect here on the way that soccer is constructed as a social discourse by the television media and the consequences of the rhetorical choices (image – framing, camera distance and position, etc; text – voice tone and speed, and vocabulary) on the structuring of social imaginaries and personal identities. Evoking the recent World Cup, we seek to identify the values associated to the new sports icons, recognizing that the construction (and reading) of the images is the result of cultural processes. We conclude that through television mediation, soccer is being transformed from an agonistic game to one where representation (mimicry) is increasingly important.
Keywords: soccer ; television ; national identity ; gender
