Leistungsvergleich und Emotionalität: Die mediale Präsentation von Fußball

With its plentiful displays of emotions, football participates in many fields of meaning. Television in particular creates clearly defined images of emotions; their status, however, is ambivalent: They contribute to very specific communications on sports, at the same time alluding to discourses and meanings that are beyond sports. Thus, emotions in sports are much more than mere embellishments originating from commercialization. Using examples from the Soccer World Cup 2006, the paper shows that emotions contribute to a process of semioticizing which facilitates the ‘scientific’ comparison of performances that constitutes modern sports. Nevertheless, the visualization of emotions also opens this rationalized comparison of performances to cultural meanings that do not necessarily belong to this rather rational realm. Involving the codes of sports, science, common sense, and popular culture, the display of emotions intensifies the interconnection of specialist and interdiscursive modes of knowledge so characteristic for contemporary sports.