Corpus Sinner–Meloni (January 2024–June 2026): Media and political discourses on Jannik Sinner in Italy

The aim of this research is to analyse the “Sinner-Meloni case” through the key concepts of sports sociology and political-media discourse analysis: populism, cultural hegemony, soft power, hegemonic masculinity, and symbolic nationalism. This study is guided by the following research question: how did Giorgia Meloni and the populist radical right government discursively appropriate Jannik Sinner’s sporting successes to consolidate a populist radical right identity narrative, and how did media actors and public commentators contest or reproduce this frame? To address this question, we conduct a qualitative discourse analysis of media texts, based on a corpus of 424 records. The dataset is organised into two matrices: a press corpus of 390 items and a social media corpus of 34 public posts from Giorgia Meloni’s X/Twitter and Instagram accounts. The press matrix includes institutional press releases, policy statements, leading national newspapers (e.g., Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, La Stampa), news agencies, sports newspapers and online platforms (e.g., Fanpage.it, TGcom24, Rolling Stone Italia, Open).