21 years later: Reflecting on femininity,masculinity,physicality and the English tabloid press

Abstract

During the summer of 2000, Harris and Clayton examined how the English tabloid print sports media created and represented femininity, masculinity and physicality over the course of the men's European Football Championship and the Wimbledon tennis tournament. The predominantly qualitative content analysis described seven dominant themes, including the relative invisibility of women athletes, the emphasis of traditional masculine traits of men athletes, the contradictory reporting of pain and sacrifice of men and women athletes, the creation of (male) heroes and national identities, the coverage of ‘appropriate’ women's sporting roles, non-task relevant commentary for women athletes and the eroticising of women's bodies. The present research reconsiders the efficacy of these themes 21 years later during the confluence of the Euro 2020 and Wimbledon 2021 tournaments, following a deductive analysis of 2081 sports-related articles over 30 consecutive days of coverage in the Sun and the Mirror newspapers (11 June–11 July 2021). Findings suggest that while the re.lative invisibility of women athletes remains a significant issue, there is more limited evidence to support the existence of the other gendered themes.

A number of developments have impacted the mediasport landscape in the last two decades. The increased commercialisation and commodification of sport have continued apace, and an accelerated digitalisation has also altered the ways in which sport is consumed (see e.g., Beaudoin et al., 2024; Pedersen, 2025). Nonetheless, there is resilience among the legacy news organisations and, despite decreasing circulation and viewership, print media and television maintain reasonably significant audiences, perhaps buoyed up by the loyalty of older populations (Deacon et al., 2024). Traditional media remains essential to the consumption of sport, and studies looking at newspaper and magazine articles (Beaudoin et al., 2024; Biscomb and Matheson, 2019) and television coverage (Cooky et al., 2021) of sport, over a similar timeframe to that focused on in the present study, highlight both continuity and change in the sport media coverage.

Harris and Clayton's (2002) study examined how femininity, masculinity and physicality were created and represented within the pages of the English tabloid print sports media over the course of the Euro 2000 men's football championship and the Wimbledon 2000 tennis tournament. This work has remained at the forefront of gender and mediasport studies in the years since, with 261 citations, including 71 citations since 2018, according to Google Scholar (as of January 2025). Moreover, many of the themes identified have informed the coding schema of further analyses of representations of gender in the sports media (e.g., Kian et al., 2009; Ponterotto, 2014), and the English context may remain especially significant where men's football and the Wimbledon tennis championship continue to be bastions of English national identity (see e.g., Gibbons, 2016; Wagg, 2019).

Given its continued prominence, then, a re-examination of Harris and Clayton's formula for tabloid print media's constructions of gender in sport seems appropriate. Two decades is a substantial period of time during which societal norms and policies have changed. This includes, for example, the consolidation and updating of equality legislation into the UK's Equality Act 2010, a significant and continued increase in representation by women politicians, contributing to legislation and policy (Cracknell et al., 2023), and improving gender sensitivity and awareness in media regulations themselves (Padovani and Bozzon, 2020). Despite these changes, there has been more limited research into print media representations of gendered athletes in recent years, with a few exceptions (e.g., Biscomb and Matheson, 2019; Bowes and Kitching, 2020). While the past two decades, then, seems an appropriate interval, we must account for the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, which meant that the 2020 European Football Championships (Euro 2020) were delayed, consequently delaying this research by a further year. By this time, all Covid-19 restrictions on major sports events had been removed, and there was no discernible impact of the pandemic on the play-out of either Euro 2020 or Wimbledon 2021. However, we do acknowledge potential known unknown impacts on sports journalism, including possible restrictions of access to athletes and greater reliance on alternative official or unofficial sources (see Velloso, 2022), which may have continued in some form following the lockdown of sports in 2020.

Harris and Clayton's (2002) predominantly qualitative analysis described seven dominant themes within the tabloid print media, including the relative invisibility of women athletes, the emphasis of traditional masculine traits of men athletes, the contradictory reporting of pain and sacrifice of men and women athletes, the creation of (male) heroes and national identities, the coverage of ‘appropriate’ women's sporting roles, non-task relevant commentary for women athletes and the eroticising of women's bodies. The authors argued that the print media took a dual approach of using sports reporting to promote ideals of manhood, masculinity and superiority of men and simultaneously misrepresenting women athletes as inferior ‘other’. The Russian tennis player, Anna Kournikova, was ever-present in the sports media at that time and accounted for two-thirds of all coverage of women's sport in the study. Harris and Clayton (2002) argued that this provided the most stark signifier that women's mediasport was a case of ‘survival of the prettiest’ (see Etcoff, 1999). This research, 21 years later, aims to see if these themes remain pertinent.

In the same issue of the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Bernstein (2002) tentatively asked if it was ‘time for a victory lap’ for women athletes in the sports media. She concluded that, while coverage of major tournaments was beginning to devote more time and space to women's competition, underrepresentation was still rife, especially in routine coverage, and women were generally being sexualised or framed as subordinate to men. Bernstein's review article served as a fitting, if somewhat unhappy conclusion to a period of more than two decades of intense feminist (and pro-feminist) interest in gendered portraits of athletes, which pointed to the sports media as a fundamentally sexist institution (e.g., Alexander, 1994; Daddario, 1994; Duncan, 1990; Hilliard, 1984; Luebke, 1989; Messner et al., 1993; Pirinen, 1997).

With the growth in the cultural power and place of social media, more recent analyses of the traditional media have been fewer, although Cheryl Cooky's updates to a longitudinal study of televised sports coverage (e.g., Cooky et al., 2015; Cooky et al., 2021; Cooky et al., 2013) have continued to map the gendered mediasport terrain. These works have shown that despite the significant increase in the number of women competing in sport, there has been an overall decline in the quantity of television coverage. Further, men's sport was found to be presented with more enthusiasm and excitement, while coverage of women athletes often remained focused on areas such as motherhood. Nonetheless, coverage was found to be of a higher quality and more respectful than it had been in the past, and that overtly sexualised commentary about women had all but ceased (Cooky et al., 2021).

Notwithstanding its focus on televised sports coverage and the North American context, Cooky's longitudinal research remains significant for the present study as a rare indication of patterns of gender (in)equity over time. Analyses of print media such as Biscomb and Griggs (2013) qualitative assessment of coverage of England in the women's Cricket World Cup, confirmed a similar pattern of both continuity and progress. Here, commentary was made up of largely positive descriptors, with no sexualised narratives or gender marking, but occasionally deteriorated into ambivalent reporting and unhelpful comparisons with men's sport (see also Bowes and Kitching, 2020). Similarly, Hovden and von der Lippe's (2019) Bourdieusian deconstruction of two online Nordic newspapers argued that the symbolic domination of men and masculinity remained, demonstrated by the limited coverage of women's sport, the infantilising women athletes (but not men) post-loss, and superordinate men's voices, but the authors noted a decline in stereotypical representations of women, especially where women demonstrated sporting excellence.

Petty and Pope (2019) have referred to this positive shift as the ‘new age’ of media reporting on women's sport. Later, Pope et al. (2024) as well as McConnell et al. (2021) adopted longitudinal content analyses of newspapers to map any change in the reporting of women's football, finding increased coverage overall as well as some improvement in the amount of task-relevant reporting. While the focus of these studies was exclusively on women's football, other recent analyses suggest somewhat improved print media representation of women across sports, while continuing to note plenty of room for further improvement (e.g., Biscomb and Matheson, 2019; Bowes and Kitching, 2020; Hovden and von der Lippe, 2019). Indeed, most scholars are quick to point out that while positive change has occurred, change remains slow (see especially Biscomb and Matheson, 2019) or to warn that change may only represent a commercial strategy to appear more inclusive by adopting a more feminist discourse (Daddario, 2021; Pope et al., 2024).

Sensemaking framework

For reasons of parity in this study, we employ the same neo-Gramscian sense-making framework of masculine hegemony that informed the analysis outlined by Harris and Clayton (2002) 21 years ago. Masculine hegemony critically reflects the cultural embeddedness of ideological masculinity and femininity and the processes for the reaffirmation of these ideologies and the consequent maintenance of patriarchy. Connell (1995, 77) defines hegemonic masculinity as ‘the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women’. The complementary concept of emphasised femininity is also implicated in the process of masculine hegemony, referring to patterns of behaviours of women that recreate the conditions for patriarchy by placing emphasis on traits of nurturance, fragility, beauty, empathy and compliance (see Connell, 1987). Sociologists of sport, such as Bryson (1987) and Messner (1992), have long argued that sport operates as a key, and perhaps one of the last remaining cultural sites for the maintenance of masculine hegemony because of the attention paid to muscular strength and other traits demonstrative of men's power and violence, which may legitimise the belief that men are naturally superior to women. While some have hinted at a gradual move away from masculine hegemony as a tool for framing feminist sports media studies (e.g., Antunovic, 2023), there remains significant continued use for sense-making in analyses of a variety of sports media (e.g., Demir and Baloğlu, 2024; Petty and Pope, 2019).

Aims, sample and procedure

Our aim in this study was twofold:

- To qualitatively evaluate the present-day relevance of the themes of gendered newspaper reporting identified by Harris and Clayton (2002) 21 years previously.

- To quantitatively assess the parity of coverage of men and women athletes in the newspapers.

In-keeping with the original study, the current research used a purposive sample of two popular English tabloid newspapers, the Sun and the Mirror (and their sister Sunday publications, Sunday Sun and Sunday Mirror), during their simultaneous coverage of the men's European Football Championships (Euro 2020) and the 2021 Wimbledon tennis tournament. ¹ Conboy (2021) argues that tabloid newspapers are more than simply a source of news and are a cultural phenomenon – a style, a particular approach to conveying information, using straightforward vocabulary and a high picture-to-text ratio, an emphasis on human-interest, entertainment and overstatement, which transcends distribution format. Despite most newspapers moving towards more online content and declining print sales, for consistency, we only analysed the daily print editions of the newspapers. It could be argued that print media now has less significance in the digital world, but both the Sun and the Mirror show relatively strong print circulation figures of 1,250,634 and 451,466, respectively, in 2020 (Mayhew, 2020) and remain among the most-read tabloid newspapers in the UK – as they were at the time of the original study – while also representing the mainstream political spectrum. Both publications propagate popularist, sensationalist and lurid content, but in some ways, the Sun maintains an allegiance to right-wing politics set against the Mirror's leftist values and historic support for the unions.

The duration of Euro 2020 was 30 days (11 June–11 July 2021), while Wimbledon 2021 ran for 14 days (28 June–11 July 2021), and we identified a total of 2081 sports-related articles (1002 in The Sun and 1079 in The Mirror) in this period. Sports-related articles were defined as any section of text, with or without accompanying images, not including advertisements, that reported on sport or used the name or imagery of any athlete, other sports professional or worker, club, team or tournament, located in the main newspaper, but not in ‘pull-outs’ or supplementary ‘glossy’ magazines or flyers.

The sports covered in the sample were football, tennis, Mixed Martial Arts, cricket, Rugby League, Rugby Union, horse racing, golf, cycling, boxing, Formula 1, athletics and skateboarding. The vast majority of articles were about football, with tennis a distant second. We recognise, of course, the selection bias inherent in this approach to the research, where the sample is predominantly articles about men's football and further sports and perhaps a higher quantity of women's sport might feature in the newspapers outside of the Euro 2020 schedule. However, our aim was to remain as consistent with the approach to the original study as possible. Further, we maintain that the Wimbledon tennis tournament may be one of the relatively few opportunities in any calendar year for certainty of coverage of women athletes in the tabloid newspapers, and, we argue, coverage of an international men's football tournament may present a unique opportunity to explore masculinising language in the media.

The research employed both qualitative and quantitative forms of analysis, and we aimed for a design that was uncomplicated, pragmatic and transparent with the express purpose of making a direct comparison with the study of 21 years prior (Harris and Clayton, 2002). Therefore, for the qualitative component, we opted for a deductive thematic content analysis and quasi-statistical analysis of the newspapers in which we simply wanted to determine if there was evidence to support the themes generated by the original study and, in some cases, how much support. These themes were (NB Harris and Clayton's seventh, quantitative theme, ‘invisibility of women athletes’, is discussed later in this section):

Emphasis of traditionally masculine traits of men athletes

Gendered communication of pain, anguish and sacrifice

Creation of male heroes and androcentric national identity

Representation of women in ‘appropriate’ sports roles

Gendered task-relevant/task-irrelevant commentary

Eroticising of women athletes

The study was, therefore, limited in scope and only sought to assess progress in relation to pre-established themes of gendered media reporting using a purely deductive analysis of a focused sample of newspapers. We acknowledge that the analysis did not seek emerging themes and that sports coverage, like in the original study, was skewed in favour of tennis and men's football.

The analysis went through several stages, each one further reducing and refining the dataset. In stage 1, the first and second authors independently read through the newspaper’s cover to cover, reading the entirety of the relevant articles twice each, coding using the above themes. This was done on separate word-processed documents, noting the edition of the newspaper and page number(s) and a brief description of the content under headings for each theme. In stage 2, the authors came together to discuss any coded material and peer-check each other's coding between and following the two readings. This was preferred to a more formal inter-coder reliability check, which might be epistemologically problematic, seeking to discount subjectivities of interpretative qualitative researchers, even in a more deductive qualitative analysis such as this (see Braun and Clarke, 2013). At this stage, we entered the pre-determined themes as column headings in a table and then began to populate columns with quotes or descriptions of content from the newspapers, which allowed us to visualise the data and assess the strength of the themes in terms of both the quantity of data supporting each theme and the clarity (or ambiguity) of the messages about masculine hegemony. Up until this point, our coding had sought to determine if extracts from the newspapers represented the broad themes, not if and how they might represent masculine hegemony per se.

In stage 3, then, the first and second authors collaboratively reviewed the table, adding short-hand notes about how or why articles, units of text or images may be coded in this way and/or may demonstrate masculine hegemony. Any extracts that were agreed to, perhaps represent the broad theme, but were not considered to be ‘gendered’ were removed. This included, for example, under the pain, anguish and sacrifice theme, extracts that may have noted, briefly, the fact of an athlete's injury but were attached to no adjective or other meaning-making text. We also made the decision at this point to remove any coded data that relied on direct quotes by sportspersons themselves, because these were not deemed media representation but more factual reporting and not the focus of our research. Through discussion, further coded data were excluded where meanings were agreed as too ambiguous or tenuous. In stage 4, the third-named author independently reviewed the remaining extracts under each theme, alongside the first and second-named authors’ notes, and suggested further extracts for removal. All the suggestions made by the third author were discussed and accepted by the first and second authors.

As well as bringing to the analysis our interpretive-qualitative curiosities about what was said and shown in the newspapers, we were also interested, broadly, in how many articles or extracts of data supported some of the original themes. This interest is reflected in some quasi-statistical statements through our commentary below about the amount of support for selected themes. Further, as with the work of Harris and Clayton (2002), we included a basic quantitative comparison of the amount of coverage given to men and women athletes, using a simple coding of all newspaper articles as ‘men or men's sport’, ‘women or women's sport’, ‘both men and women athletes’, ‘trans or non-binary athlete’ or ‘neutral’ (a sports-related article where gender was not identified/identifiable). We then simply sought to calculate the percentage of total articles in each code. We also included basic counts of the times individual women athletes and women's sports were featured, as well as the number of articles, which were judged to be, on balance, task relevant/irrelevant for men and women athletes. All of these basic quantitative measures were also a feature of the study by Harris and Clayton (2002).

We frame the following analysis as a summary description of data supporting the predetermined themes and a reflective comparison with the evidence presented 21 years earlier. We then locate the findings in the current literature and discuss the implications through a lens of masculine hegemony and attempt to explain the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of any progress, and the efficacy of Harris and Clayton's (2002) gendered formula for the English tabloid press.

Analysis: femininity, masculinity, physicality, and the English tabloid press reconsidered

Invisibility of women athletes

It would appear that there has been little change in the quantity of coverage afforded to women's sport compared to 21 years ago. The analysis of the newspaper sports coverage during Euro 2000 and the 2000 Wimbledon Championships revealed that just 6% of articles focused on women's sport, and 34% of those featured Russian tennis player and tabloid-touted sex symbol, Anna Kournikova (Harris and Clayton, 2002). In 2021, articles solely about women's sports or athletes still accounted for 6% (n = 124) of total sports-related articles, with a further 1.4% (n = 30) of articles featuring both men and women athletes. If we include the latter in our calculations, women's sports or women athletes featured in 7.4% of total articles and men's sports or men athletes featured in 90.3% (n = 1880). With Kournikova long since retired, British tennis player Emma Raducanu took over as the most cited woman athlete by featuring in 18.2% (n = 28) of all articles relating to women's sport. However, while coverage of Kournikova predominantly focused on her looks, Raducanu gained attention because of her unexpected success at Wimbledon (as an 18-year-old wildcard entry reaching the fourth round) and as a rare British success story in women's tennis. Eventual Wimbledon champion, Ashleigh Barty, was the second most cited woman athlete, featuring in 7.1% (n = 11) of articles relating to women's sport, and then US tennis player, Coco Gauff, in 4.5% (n = 7) of articles. The only non-tennis player to garner reasonably, or relatively, significant coverage was British track athlete, Dina Asher-Smith, featuring in 3.9% (n = 6) of all articles relating to women's sport.

Emphasis of traditionally masculine traits of men athletes

Harris and Clayton (2002) argued that the tabloid sports media used aggressive, often threatening language, especially but not exclusively in headlines, which implied physicality and power of men athletes. Men were regularly pictured in action, demonstrating skill, power or commitment, or roaring or celebrating with closed fists and flexed muscles. Women athletes, by contrast, were most often pictured during times of inaction or transition rarely was reporting suggestive of skill or power. In 2021, we found this a more difficult theme to characterise and corroborate. Certainly, aggressive, threatening, war-like language pervaded the coverage of the football, tennis and other sports besides, and there was a strong theme of photographs representing powerful action and belligerent celebration. This included reference to England's men's footballers as ‘grizzled gladiators’ (the Sun, 12 July p.2), the ‘brutality’ of batting of cricketer, Jos Buttler, in England's win of Sri Lanka (the Mirror, 24 June p.56) and the ‘extraordinary fighting qualities’ or the ‘warrior’, Novak Djokovic, in his Wimbledon semi-final victory (the Sun, 10 July p.62).

However, the degree to which these extracts, or the coverage overall, substantiated a ‘gendered’ message in the service of masculine hegemony was the subject of some debate. Photographs were predominantly action shots for both men and women athletes and while aggressive language and the sport-as-war metaphor might evoke historical associations with men and men's sport, there were several examples of the same style of reporting about women athletes, such as the ‘battling’ Katie Boulter, ‘grittily coming through’ her Wimbledon match (the Mirror, 29 June p.50) and Ashleigh Barty's ‘crushing’ of Ajla Tomljanovic (the Sun, 7 July p.50).

Gendered communication of pain, anguish and sacrifice

Like the use of masculinised, aggressive and war-like language, a focus on pain, anguish, and sacrifice remained a stalwart of English tabloid sports reporting in 2021. While reporting on sporting victories was understandably more common, stories of defeat or retirement through injury or illness were ever-present, especially where there was English/British interest or a ‘big name’ involved. Harris and Clayton (2002) argued that these stories were gendered, either in general or through the use of specific descriptors, highlighting the bravery and determination of men athletes overcoming defeat or injury while simultaneously using the same principles to communicate the fragility of women's bodies and minds.

In the present study, implied heroics and machismo were sometimes used to frame men athletes’ injury struggles. This included a story of ‘no pain, no gain’ for cyclist, Geraint Thomas, in which the Mirror (3 July p.53) argued that ‘lesser mortals would have abandoned the race after suffering a dislocated right shoulder […] but Thomas does not curl up his toes easily’. Such narratives were infrequent, but we found no evidence of expressions of bravery or heroics in stories of women athletes’ injury and illness, and instead, there were examples of arguably more patronising coverage. Emma Raducanu's retirement from the fourth round at Wimbledon with stomach problems was met with curiously similar comments in both the Sun (6 July p.48) and the Mirror (6 July p.44) about the pressure ‘probably [getting] a bit too much’. Earlier in the tournament, ‘a tearful Serena [Williams] limped out’ (the Sun, 30 June, p.48). She had ‘tried to carry on through the tears […] but collapsed on the court in agony before admitting painful defeat’ (the Mirror, 30 June, p.51). Just across the page, the Mirror also reported on the ‘tearful Carla [Suarez Navarro] exit’ following recent cancer treatment (p.50).

Men athletes were not exempt from being painted as tearful and emotional, but rarely as a result of pain and injury and, instead, because of the anguish of losing or relief of winning. The clearest examples of the former were to be found following England's loss on penalties to Italy in the final of Euro 2020. This ‘most heroic failure of them all’ (the Sun, 12 July p.54) caused ‘tears on the pitch […] as the players collapsed in despair’ (the Mirror, 12 July p.2), resulting in descriptors of ‘brave’ on the front pages of both newspapers. No such descriptors were used in reporting on Emma Raducanu's exit from Wimbledon despite what had been hyped, until then, as unparalleled success for the British player.

Creation of male heroes and androcentric national identity

The analysis of the 2000 European Football Championships and Wimbledon tournament highlighted an interrelationship between national pride and heroic masculinity. British women athletes were never associated with national pride or athletic heroism. However, we acknowledge that there were no clear British women's interests in tennis at that time and that it was men's football that dominated the newspapers’ coverage. 21 years later, with more recent successes and a rise in the rankings of players such as Jo Konta, Katie Boulter and Harriet Dart, British women's tennis garnered more attention. While all three of these players received some coverage during the tournament (even though Konta withdrew prior to her first match), none were treated by the newspapers as strong hopes for success or the bearers of national pride. Even Dart, despite reaching the mixed-doubles final, was only mentioned five times across both newspapers alongside partner Joe Salisbury, and always within smaller ‘stubs’ reporting on their wins, rather than larger articles celebrating their success as British heroes.

Emma Raducanu, though, was ever-present in the newspapers following her advancement into the third round of Wimbledon. A wild card entry and previously unknown, Raducanu was the most covered woman athlete in the sample of newspapers, featuring in 28 articles, nearly three times as many as the eventual Wimbledon champion, Ash Barty (n = 11). ‘The last Brit standing [won her third-round match] in front of delirious home fans’ (the Sun, 4 July p.68) and even after retiring in her fourth-round match, she bore the mantle of ‘British tennis['s] new golden girl’ (the Mirror, 5 July p.11). It is difficult to say if this focus on Raducanu suggests a shift in tabloid media reporting away from a purely androcentric transfer of national pride. Certainly, Raducanu raised a similar patriotic expression to Tim Henman 21 years previously when he emerged as the only British player to have some success at Wimbledon 2000 (also reaching the fourth round). National pride, then, is likely attached to any national success story where successes are rare, regardless of gender. It is worth noting, however, that while Raducanu invited various affirming labels including ‘history-maker’ (the Sun, 4 July p.17), ‘Brit girl’ (the Sun, 4 July p.57) and ‘Brit sensation’ (the Mirror, 4 July p.66), unlike Henman, she was never afforded the moniker of a British ‘hero’.

Several of England's men's football players, and the team as a whole, were directly referred to as heroes over the course of Euro 2020, where they eventually finished as the tournament's runners-up – the best performance by the team in a major championship since winning the World Cup in 1966. From the first day of coverage, the Sun adopted a strong patriotic tone, pronouncing ‘we’ll be there as you kick every ball. We’ll have your back when things go wrong. In return, you can give this football-mad nation hope, unity and, perhaps, some joy’ (the Sun, 11 June p.1). En route to the final, on ‘a night made for heroes’ (the Mirror, 29 June p.1), ‘Gareth Southgate's [England manager] fearless heroes’ (the Sun, 30 June p.6), defeated longstanding football rivals, Germany, purportedly allowing ‘the nation [to] move on from a Second World War fixation with the Germany enemy’ (the Mirror, 30 June p.5). This latter extract was the only clear reference to the World Wars when, 21 years earlier, a good deal of reporting alluded to the historic conflicts between the two nations when they met in Euro 2000.

We acknowledge, of course, that our analysis here, like in the original study, was skewed in favour of tennis and men's football, and that no direct comparison between women tennis players and a men's football team can be made. With the significant development of women's football and the recent successes of England's women's national team, it could be interesting to review this theme during the time of a major women's football tournament (see e.g., Petty and Pope, 2019).

Representation of women in ‘appropriate’ sports roles

In the summer of 2000, women often featured in appropriately feminine roles in the pages of the tabloid press (Harris and Clayton, 2002). This included women competing in what Pirinen (1997) suggested were accepted outlets for women's athleticism, including tennis and track athletics, as well as inactive, supporting roles, such as wives and girlfriends of men athletes (now commonly referred to as ‘WAGs’) or in the glamorous and amatory promotion of men's sport, especially football. In the present study, little seems to have changed. Understandably, during the Wimbledon fortnight, featured women athletes were overwhelmingly tennis players (n = 28), as well as six track athletes, with footballers (n = 2), cyclists (n = 1) and skateboarders (n = 1) the only other women athletes to claim any coverage.

Included in the inactive roles of women, ahead of England's Euro 2020 final against Italy, British television and radio personality, Amanda Holden, posed legs outstretched, wearing only an England shirt, with the punned headline ‘They think glitz all over: TV Amanda leads support’ (the Sun, 11 July p.7). While several celebrity men were also quoted with messages of support, the photograph of Holden dominates the page, and she is the only well-wisher to actively pose for a picture. Earlier in the tournament, German supermodel, Heidi Klum, was pictured posing with her thumbs up in bikini bottoms and a short-sleeved t-shirt, which fails to cover her breasts, ‘wish[ing] her boys luck for their match against France’ (the Sun, 16 June, p.15). While clearly sexualising women models and celebrities to support and promote men's sport, we would argue that this practice is not widespread, since these were the only two examples agreed upon by all three authors in the present study.

Instead, it is the WAGs that almost exclusively now shoulder this burden. While also mentioned regularly in articles about their male partners, WAGs were the central focus in 26 articles across the sample of newspapers. These were mainly WAGs of football players playing in Euro 2020 and, in the Sun more often than the Mirror, were usually accompanied by sensual or provocative images of the women. Indeed, four of the 16 such articles in the Sun were published on page 3, a page historically associated with pictures of topless women models until the newspaper ended this 44-year practice in 2015. (S)exploitation of the WAGs began on the opening day of the tournament when the Sun dedicated a two-page spread of pictures (all in swimsuits) and short biographies of WAGs of 18 football players from across Europe, with the headline ‘Here Wag go!’ (11 June pp.14–15). Later, the Sun introduced its readers to some of the ‘great dames’ of three Danish players, all pictured in bikinis. The newspaper exclaimed, ‘here are some of the great Danes for England fans to keep an eye on – and their footie star partners aren’t too bad either’ (the Sun, 5 July, p.5). In tennis, the wife of Novak Djokovic appears on page 3, posing, lying across a sun lounger in a polka dot swimsuit, accompanied by the text ‘Djok wife is spot on […] Jelena shows why she's still courting his attention’ (the Sun, 28 June p.3).

Gendered task-relevant/task-irrelevant commentary

Following a good deal of pro-feminist scholars (e.g., Chisholm, 1999; Urquhart and Crossman, 1999), Harris and Clayton (2002) previously argued that women athletes were more likely to be subjected to task-irrelevant observations and commentary in the sports print media. Here, we define task-relevant commentary as reporting on the role as athlete and irrelevant commentary as reporting on non-athletic roles and actions. In our analysis, we were concerned with the general crux of whole articles, of whatever size, as opposed to smaller extracts within articles, which might be task-relevant/irrelevant. Indeed, a large proportion of articles about both men and women athletes included some task-irrelevant commentary. In the original research, 6% of articles about men athletes were judged to have been task-irrelevant and 39% of articles about women athletes. While no statistical strength is claimed here, it would appear that women athletes now appear to be afforded better quality reporting, with 11% of articles deemed to be task-irrelevant (n = 14), compared to 5% of articles about men (n = 88). We note, however, that 29 of these task-irrelevant articles about men athletes were connected to Christian Eriksen, a Danish football player who had collapsed on the pitch after suffering a cardiac arrest on 12 June, which was an exceptional event. If we exclude these articles, just 3% of articles about men were considered task-irrelevant.

The nature of the task-irrelevant reporting, too, presents an improved picture from that of 21 years earlier, where this commentary was regularly sexualised (Harris and Clayton, 2002). In the present study, the task-irrelevant commentary about women athletes did not differ greatly in tone or subject from that of men. For example, both women's tennis player, Johanna Konta (the Mirror, 27 June p.64), and male golfer, Lee Westwood (the Sun, 13 June p.62), were featured in articles about their relationships and impending marriages, while Russian tennis player, Elena Vesnina (the Sun, 2 July p.55), and England football player, Declan Rice (the Sun, 10 July p.66), headlined in stories about recently entering parenthood, perhaps a reflection a cultural shift towards more equal maternal and paternal roles (e.g., Gurkan et al., 2021). Holidays, fashion and outside (of sport) commercial and charitable interests were the focus of stories about men and women athletes alike, with no ostensible gendered bias.

Eroticising of women athletes

The frequent eroticised images and reporting about selected women athletes were, arguably, the most expressive marks of traditional femininity in the sports media in Harris and Clayton's (2002) study. This showed how Russian tennis player, Anna Kournikova, optimised the idea of ‘survival of the prettiest’ (see Etcoff, 1999), accounting for two-thirds of all coverage of women's sport, nearly always pictured in seductive, non-active poses, accompanied by descriptions of her ‘beautiful’, ‘slender’ and ‘supermodel physique’ (Harris and Clayton, 2002). The eroticisation of women athletes, 21 years on, is more notable by its absence. While there remains frequent eroticising of women in general in the two newspapers, and regularly associated with men's sport (see above ‘appropriate’ roles for women), athletes themselves were treated with more sincerity and respect by comparison. While the Mirror quoted a brand consultant suggesting that Emma Raducanu is ‘very attractive, and looks matter’ (6 July, p.11), we found no references to women athletes’ looks made by sports writers in either newspaper. On the contrary, there was some occasional and limited mention of men athletes’ physical attractiveness, including reference to footballer, Jack Grealish, as ‘pretty boy’ (the Sun, 21 June, p.52) and tennis player, Matteo Berrettini, who ‘will be a hit with the ladies at SW19 [Wimbledon]’ (the Sun, 21 June, p.47).

Discussion: 21 years of progress?

Harris and Clayton (2002) argued that the approach taken by the English tabloid press was a dual one, promoting ideals of manhood, masculinity and superiority of men, while simultaneously representing women athletes as inferior ‘other’. They further suggested that this amounted to the construction and maintenance of hegemonic masculinity and emphasised femininity, recreating the conditions for patriarchy and endorsing sport as a bastion for masculine hegemony (see also Bryson, 1987; Messner, 1992). We acknowledge that our use of deductive analysis in the present study, and the often reifying and reductionist consequence of using a lens like masculine hegemony, might have caused us to simply confirm this position 21 years later. However, on the contrary, we would suggest that there is more limited evidence to support those original conclusions.

Certainly, the relative invisibility of women athletes remains, with articles solely about women's sport or women athletes accounting for just 6% of the total sports-related coverage in the sample. This diminutive figure remains in line with more recent research of both print and televised sports coverage (e.g., Biscomb and Matheson, 2019; Cooky et al., 2021; Godoy-Pressland, 2014). The disparity suggests that the tabloid press continues to frame women's sport as less important than men's sport, feeding the wider, historical narrative of sport as a masculine domain. It can be argued that the relative exclusion of women athletes is the single biggest indicator of the sports media's perpetuation of masculine hegemony (Hovden and von der Lippe, 2019; Sherry et al., 2016). Despite Bernstein's (2002) claim that women athletes were, at that time, becoming increasingly visible, research across a variety of media forums since shows very low levels of coverage of women's sports compared to men's (e.g., Adá Lameiras and Rodríguez-Castro, 2021; Biscomb and Matheson, 2019; Cooky et al., 2021; Women in Sport, 2018).

There remains also a connection between pain, anguish and sacrifice of men athletes and narratives of heroic, hegemonic masculinity juxtaposed with more patronising or dreary reporting about ‘tearful’ women. Sabo and Jansen (1998) argued that the media regularly frame the ability of men athletes to endure pain and disappointment as an essential component of both masculinity and men's sport, and something that separates men from women (see also Miele, 2020). Women's tearful responses to loss, injury and illness, reasonably frequent in our analysis, might be connected to ideas of powerlessness, itself a core characteristic of emphasised femininity (Fischer et al., 2004). While tearful men athletes were no less frequent, these occurrences were captured by the newspapers only in relation to losing sporting competition, not injury or illness, and never within a narrative of mockery, as was the case 21 years earlier. Perhaps this is a reflection of changing wider narratives about men's emotions and masculinity (e.g., McQueen, 2017), or a more established acceptance of ‘manly emotion’ in traditional men's sports (Wong et al., 2011).

There was continuity, too, within the theme of women's presence in the sports media in appropriate roles. Women athletes were recognised across the newspapers in only a select few appropriate sports, predominantly tennis and track athletics. Some sports may be more clearly identified as being stereotypically ‘feminine’ (see Riemer and Feltz, 1995) by embodying ideals such as beauty, glamour and sex-appeal (Daddario, 1997; Fink, 2015), more appealing or, at least, more acceptable to the hegemonic masculinity gaze. Nonetheless, women football players appeared to have achieved some relative acceptability in the present study and, certainly, now command more attention than they once did (Petty and Pope, 2019; Pope et al., 2024; Ravel and Gareau, 2016; Woodward, 2017). There remained also the (s)exploitation of women in supporting, non-athletic roles, especially as the WAGs of men athletes. The narratives surrounding their coverage in the newspapers tended to be ones of devoted and beguiled partners, and/or sexy trophies. Associations with desirable women and the implied affirmation of active heterosexuality can be powerful images for the reproduction of the masculine hegemony of men's team sport, especially football (Clayton and Harris, 2004). Similarly, the prominent place of the WAGs in the newspapers demonstrating support and admiration for their male partners’ endeavours might further subordinate women's role in sport to one of traditional, emphasised femininity (Clayton and Harris, 2004; Thompson, 1990).

Despite these continuing instances, overall, we would argue that the gendered reporting of sport in the English tabloid print media has changed markedly compared to 21 years ago. Aside from continued, perhaps even increased, sexualisation of WAGs, the eroticisation of women more generally, within sports-related content, was very limited, and women athletes were at no point eroticised in either images or reporting. The eroticisation of women athletes in the media, especially Anna Kournikova, was previously reported as the single biggest indication of the masculine hegemony of sport (Harris and Clayton, 2002). Bruce (2016) suggested that the sexualisation of women athletes remained a key ‘rule’ of gendered sport media well into the 2010s, but the present study confirms the reported decline of this trend in more recent years (Cooky et al., 2021; Hovden and von der Lippe, 2019). Other themes identified in that study, too, now present only very limited or tenuous evidence of being gendered. That is to say, there is evidence to suggest that the use of aggressive, ‘macho’ language, use of athletes as representatives of national pride, and task-irrelevant interest in athletes remain themes of print sports media reporting, but they are not ostensibly gendered because they are applied to men and women athletes alike with no clear, emerging patterns. This is not to suggest gendered equity, as women athletes are still more likely to feature in articles that are substantively less task-relevant than men athletes are by a ratio of nearly four-to-one, but this is significantly reduced from the almost seven-to-one ratio of 21 years ago. And while women athletes remain more likely to attract task-irrelevant commentary, which might detract from their identity as athletes and work to strengthen the logic of sport as a masculine domain, the irrelevant topics themselves are not necessarily gendered. For instance, notwithstanding Cooky et al.'s (2021) observations about the continued (but declining) framing of women athletes as wives, girlfriends and mothers, we would suggest that men athletes may be similarly framed as husbands, boyfriends and fathers.

The censorious, pro-feminist analyses of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, then, may no longer represent the traditional mediasport reality. We would suggest that it is not yet time for Bernstein's (2002) ‘victory lap’, but there is plenty to celebrate while the pro-feminist work continues. The apparent decline of the more overt stereotyping, eroticising and trivialising of women athletes is likely a reflection of wider social developments in gender relations. For instance, the social media-fuelled #metoo movement generated unprecedented awareness of the scale of sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence against women (Bhattacharyya, 2018) and was regularly associated with notions of toxic masculinity (Nilsson and Lundgren, 2021; PettyJohn et al., 2019). For some, such as Kupers (2005) and Parent et al. (2019), toxic masculinity is related to hegemonic masculinity; men's behaviours that legitimise men's dominant position over women and the subordination of marginalised groups of men (Connell, 1987, 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). For Harrington (2021), toxic masculinity is not a useful analytical concept, but, unlike hegemonic masculinity, the term has entered mainstream rhetoric and brought wider attention to the adverse relationship of masculinity and men's health and well-being, as well as the effects of misogyny.

We posit that this has likely led to more ‘reasonable’ coverage of sport where the media are concerned at least with the appearance of not objectifying or discriminating against women, if not with philogyny, perhaps as a result of greater media scrutiny and changing guidelines (e.g., Antunovic and Cooky, 2024). Changes to the performance of gender, too, may have influenced the nature of mediasport reporting. As Weeks (1995) noted nearly 30 years ago, the old traditions, which securely locked us into certainties of gender and sexuality, are gradually breaking down, which has created a fragility and hybridity of social identities. Here, the meaning and significance of gender have become hotly debated in academic, vocational, social and legal spheres, and it has given rise to ‘emergent identities’, which do not wholly conform to hegemonic masculinity and emphasised femininity, and have garnered relatively rapid and fervent acceptance and celebration in part because of media proliferation (Clayton and Harris, 2009; Cover, 2018; Speechley et al., 2024).

Concomitantly, sociological theories of masculinities and femininities have developed to explain greater diversity. Anderson (2010), for instance, has argued that with diminishing homohysteria, there has been a palpable change in the way that adolescent men perform masculinity, which is more ‘inclusive’ of feminised and gay behavioural tropes. Inclusive masculinity theory has been employed and developed in empirical sports research to show how men athletes favour and perform a softer version of masculinity while being critical of traditional, orthodox behaviours and expectations of behaviours of men (e.g., Magrath, 2021; Murray and White, 2017). However, this is by no means universal, and there remains a good deal of support for orthodox masculinity in men's sport (Stick, 2021), and there is caution in the scholarly literature about the suggestion that sport has become more inclusive of alternative identities (Pringle, 2024).

Others, using a post- or late-modern sociological lens, have argued that masculinities and femininities have evolved to become individualised, where historical, grand narratives of gender are not rejected per se, but borrowed, parodied, altered, discarded or overwritten to suit any individual in any given context (Budgeon, 2011; Clayton, 2010; Gonick, 2004; Sa’ar and Simchai, 2023). Here, there is a reported separation of orthodox masculinity and men's will to power and orthodox femininity and women's sense of womanliness. What these theories have in common is that they have been developed from an empirically conspicuous, increasingly multifaceted and fluid notion of gender. When coupled with the growing public and political scrutiny that followed the #metoo movement and critiques of toxic masculinity, it is perhaps inevitable that media representations of gender have also changed.

Conclusion

Our aim in this paper was to reflect on recent tabloid print media coverage and consider the present-day efficacy of the gendered formula for reporting on men's and women's sport (Harris and Clayton, 2002). The relative invisibility of women's sport remains a significant problem, while the eroticisation of women athletes appears to have ceased entirely. The other themes suggested 21 years ago remain efficacious but require further research and review, where evidence suggests either an improving situation, which needs to be monitored, or data are quite limited or interpretations tenuous. These developments are perhaps not surprising in light of the findings of continued feminist analysis of the print media, which has highlighted less explicit, although perhaps more insidious, forms of sexism (e.g., Biscomb and Matheson, 2019; Bowes and Kitching, 2020; Pope et al., 2024) and improved guidelines for sports journalism (Antunovic and Cooky, 2024). Nonetheless, most recent studies advise caution in suggesting that times have changed and recommend continued research and monitoring (e.g., Biscomb and Matheson, 2019). While alternative forms or media, especially social media, may now be more prominent, we would argue that there is still a need to conduct research on the print media as a significant mode of communication about sport and gender. Such studies have been scarcer in the past two decades, and we hope that this paper serves as a partial update, alongside the work of Cooky et al. (2021) and a few others, about the sport/gender nexus and the continuing problem of women's sport coverage. However, as Fink (2015) acknowledges, this kind of research alone does not resolve the issues, and we rely on wider dissemination of messages, campaigning, and, ultimately, media action. Nonetheless, continued research and the updating of outcomes remain an important step, and we are seeing some encouraging results.