Authors : Ola Eid Ali Hussein

Volume/Issue : Volume 11 - 2026, Issue 7 - July

Google Scholar : https://tinyurl.com/37acw95x

Scribd : https://tinyurl.com/y5z7xymp

DOI : https://doi.org/10.38124/ijisrt/26jul1114

Note : A published paper may take 4-5 working days from the publication date to appear in PlumX Metrics, Semantic Scholar, and ResearchGate.

Abstract : The 2022 FIFA World Cup was the first World Cup hosted by an Arab and Muslim-majority nation, and Qatar's selection as host generated an unusually large body of Western press commentary both before and after the tournament. This study applies a qualitative-quantitative critical stylistic analysis to thirty Western sports-news articles published between September 2010 and March 2023, split evenly into a pre-event and a post-event corpus. Using Jeffries' (2010, 2016) textconceptual toolkit, the analysis focuses on four functions: naming and describing, the representation of actions, events, and states, prioritizing, and hypothesizing. These patterns are then interpreted through Van Dijk's (2006, 2009) triangulated theory of manipulation and Said's (1978) theory of Orientalism. Qatar emerges from the pre-event corpus through a recurring vocabulary of scandal, expense, and risk, while transitivity choices consistently hand Western institutional actors the discourse's verbal and mental processes of judgment and confine Qatari agency to nominalized or passive forms. Negative material is fronted more often than context or reform, and modal verbs let writers cast doubt as probability rather than open assertion. Comparing the two sub-corpora shows that this underlying Ideological Square persists after the tournament, though it takes a different shape: anticipatory scepticism gives way to a qualified, still-evaluative acknowledgment of Qatar's success, and a competing Arab-media counter-discourse enters the picture for the first time. The study argues that sportswashing works as a modern, self-sealing vehicle for the older Orientalist construction of the Middle East as excessive and morally suspect, and it offers a triangulated model for tracing how linguistic structure, socio-cognitive manipulation, and ideological hegemony interact in coverage of mega-events hosted in the Global South.

Keywords : Critical Stylistics, 2022 FIFA World Cup, Orientalism, Manipulation, Sportswashing, Media Discourse.

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