Building the Nation

Contributions from the mainstream Spanish sports press in 2006

Abstract

This paper deals with the creation of collective identities from the reception of sports contents of mass media. Maguire (1999) points out how sport mediated discourses increased, even more, the feeling of economic crisis in UK in 1993, when some sports failures on football and cricket happened. Maguire adds that sports discourses projected a feeling of nostalgia about glory days. But nowadays, the Spanish victory in the Basketball World Championship could be a good example to analyse how mass media used politically this success to reinforce the Spanish identity in the country, although Spain has several different identities.