Press Coverage of Jagiellonia Bialystok Football Matches in the Context of the Corruption Scandal Related to the 2003/2004 Season

Abstract

The popularity of football impacts the development of pathological phenomena such as corruption. At the beginning of the 21^st century, one of the biggest corruption “scandals” was initiated in Polish league games. Press made a significant contribution into the unmasking of those involved in this practice. The main aim of the article is to analyse press coverage of Jagiellonia Białystok football matches in the season of 2003/2004 in the context of detecting unfair sports competition by journalists of the time. The research was based on the comparative and philological methods. In case of social history or the history of sport, it undertakes a novel, previously unexplored subject matter. The analysis of football matches was based on the list of descriptions from national and local daily newspapers, i.e. “Przegląd Sportowy” and “Kurier Poranny”. It was enriched with publicised information regarding a broadly-understood corruption scandal in sport of the first decade of the 21^st century. The results of the analysis pertaining to the first aforementioned title showed doubt about two out of 16 matches (13%), whereas in the local Białystok press this statistics was higher and equalled 6 out of 16 games (38%). Those considerations led to the demonstration of the problem concerning the identification of corrupt match connections, especially in national press, which shows the difference in engagement of journalists often unrelated to the region. It is confirmed by the local daily which achieved a much higher rate of unmasked corrupt behaviour.