Media visibility and symbolic recognition: Press coverage of Portugal at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup

Abstract

The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand, marked a moment of expansion and heightened global visibility for women’s football. In this context, the debut of the Portuguese national team represented a symbolic milestone within the national sporting landscape. This article offers a comparative analysis of media coverage produced by the Portuguese sports press and the general press, examining how distinct journalistic fields discursively framed this event. Drawing on Foucauldian Discourse Analysis applied to a corpus of 24 newspaper articles, the study demonstrates that, despite narrative differences between the two fields, both converged in producing a regime of visibility grounded in the symbolic recognition of female athletes. The centrality of national identity, technical performance and heroic narratives legitimised women’s presence within the sporting sphere, while simultaneously limiting sustained engagement with structural gender inequalities. Media visibility thus operates ambivalently, articulating recognition and discursive containment.