The Role of Media Coverages and Management in Promoting Sporting Events and Destinations: A Case Study on 2017 FIFA U-17 World Cup in Indian Soft Power
Malvika Sagar
Assistant Professor, Amity University, Greater Noida
Mentioning the 2018 Winter Olympics at South Korea, Jennifer Chan (2017) said “more than just a game, sports, and sporting events are becoming as an expression of soft power” to the host nation and relationship building force for participating nations. Sporting events directly help in the socio-economic development of a country through destination promotion, tourism, brand building, and corporate investments. There is research evidence available indicating a direct relationship with the role of media and stakeholders in the success of sporting events.
This paper is an attempt to study media coverage and the role of stakeholders in the 2017 FIFA U-17 World Cup which helped India in placing itself as a soft power country. 2017 FIFA U-17 held in six cities of India and gained record-breaking popularity in terms of stadium attendance, social media engagement, and media broadcasting. This paper will study media content that appeared in selected Indian national dailies that covered the event. For sampling, this paper narrows down the reports in the form of the sports page, social media post, front page and editorial of matches which were played by India, semi-finals and finals.
The content analysis of these reports will explore techniques in language style and form of the reports which portray the hosting countries in front. This outcome of the paper focuses on theory building which will in understanding the concept of soft power through sporting events.
Keywords: Media Coverage, Soft Power, India, Football, Social Media
The above paper is presented at National Media Management Conference on Communicating Tourism: Media, Soft Power, and Management powered by In-Depth Communication.
16 November 2019 | St. Xavier’s College, Kothavara, Vaikom, Kerala
All abstracts have been published in conference souvenir with ISBN 978-1-647337-82-7