How the British Media Framed Erik Ten Hag as the Scapegoat of Manchester United Losses: A Corpus Based Analysis

Abstract

In the high stakes’ situation of the modern football, the media plays a big role on shaping a narrative of the public audiences. In this case, the media simplified a complex chaos of club’s vision, transfer policies, and team failures that includes the players & others staff, into blaming one individual which are the head coach. This research analyse on how the British media shapes the public narratives into framing Erik Ten Hag as the scapegoat of Manchester United losses during the 2024-2025 football season. Using the approach of corpus assisted discourse studies (CADS), this study analyses 23 news articles from a well-known British media such as, Daily mail, The Guardian, The Sun, BBC and The Telegraph. The methodologies combines both quantitative keywords analysis and qualitative thematic analysis of (KWIC) keyword in context, and analyses all types part of speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs). The findings reveals that the British media construct a framing in four main aspects. First is displaying that Manchester United are in the states of crisis (manager, defeat, pressure). Second, the media diagnosed the problem as the incompetence of Erik Ten Hag as the manager that led to Ten Hag losing control of his players and dressing rooms chaos, and built through the words (Poor, woeful, looked, team, played). third, the media draws a moral judgement in which the Manchester United boards only option to do towards Erik Ten Hag (Manager, blame, pressure, bad,) finally, the media draws a remedies by firing Erik Ten Hag as the only option available for the Manchester United boards (go, manager, plan). In conclusion, the study found that scapegoating narrative is a powerful tool to diverts public attention from a complete club structural problems into creates a total blaming into one individual.