The Politics of Visibility: Gendered Language and Framing in German and UK Media Coverage of the Women’s Euros

Women’s sports have been experiencing a surge in attention this decade, attracting more fans, investors, political attention, and media coverage. Between 2019 and 2024, women’s sports media coverage tripled and now makes up 16% of overall sports coverage (UN Women, 2024). While these are promising trends, unequal coverage and sexist stereotypes persist in women’s sports coverage which can have substantial effects on perceptions about women’s sports and women’s equality more broadly. In 2025, the UEFA Women’s European Championships attracted record numbers of spectators and substantial political attention, including debates about women’s equality policy and funding for women’s sports initiatives. In this paper, we explore how this was reflected in news coverage visibility and framing of the tournament and how this may impact gender equality policy in sports and culture. Gendered media coverage is often rooted in socio-political contexts as well as gendered language which continues to persist as a journalistic norm. To examine how such factors affect women’s sports coverage, we conduct a comparative analysis of UK and German news media coverage of the 2025 Women’s Euros. German is, by nature, a very gendered language and we thus expected to find more gendered coverage in this context. In the UK, on the other hand, the language is far less gendered and recent international tournaments have brought much success for England’s Lionesses, increasing their representation and positive framing in the media. Using corpus-assisted discourse studies methodology, we examine the gendered language and framing in online news articles of public broadcasters BBC (UK) and ZDF (Germany) about the 2025 Women’s Euros. Initial results of the analysis reveal that the ZDF coverage in Germany was indeed more gendered in its language as well as its framing, suggesting that both the linguistic and the socio-political contexts play a role in women’s sports coverage. Visibility also varied with differences in the volume and prominence of coverage between the UK and Germany. Overall, the paper contributes to our understanding of gender inequality in news coverage and gendered language in sports journalism. How this may translate to various effects on culture, society, and politics will be discussed.