Abstract

Studies on the discourse of representation often involve good or bad values to indicate polarisation. Nevertheless, in the context of sports, literature on sportsmen's associations with both values reveal that those who tend to be praised despite their flaws are socially included and deemed as the heroes. Meanwhile, those who tend to be blamed despite their good traits, can be regarded as the villains who are socially excluded. Thus, the paper aims to examine how the heroes and villains in the corpus of football news of an English local daily newspaper are represented to further investigate whether or not they are associated with both values. Based on the constructionist approach in the theory of representation, the study centralises on the analysis of social actors that is founded on the dimensions of good and bad which define their social inclusion or exclusion as stated according to van Dijk's polarisation strategies. Based on the concordance analysis, the findings indicate that the actors became the heroes if their actions bring desirable outcomes and turned into the villains as they caused undesirable circumstances for their team. Hence, this may contribute to a new dimension of polarisation in which both good and bad values can define the socially included and excluded actors.