Abstract

Sports always represented a composite and multi-faceted social phenomenon, and its journalistic coverage had to take into proper account this characteristic. Moreover, amongst the different disciplines, football in Italy is certainly the one that declines to the highest degree all the trends emerging in sports journalism, and in particular the hybridity amongst different journalistic genres. The presence of a variety of news values peaks during the FIFA World Cup, which represents (with the Olympic Games) the main sports «media event». The paper presents the results of the first phases of a research: first, the analysis of the news coverage offered by the Italian newspaper «Corriere della Sera»; then, interviews to key informants, selected amongst the speakers and the hosts of TV and radio broadcasts concerning the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil, ascribable to running commentary, comment and analysis, or entertainment and infotainment. The aim of the paper is to highlight how the issues connected with the World Cup affect the event's media coverage and the professionalism of who has to narrate it. Two main levels of hybridity emerge from the research: the first one is related to the framework represented by the World Cup; the second one is more strictly related to the main protagonists of the competition (football players in particular). These two hybridity levels affect significantly both the report of the events (with a progressive growth of hybridity while distancing from the sports issues) and the professionalism of people who have to narrate a huge and articulated event as the World Cup.