Eusébio: la construcción del héroe en la prensa escrita

Abstract

The translation of the football player Eusébio’s body to the National Pantheon was quite controversial in Portugal. The discussion was based on the correctness of having a football player buried in the Pantheon, a place reserved for national heroes. A hero is someone who lives most of the time as the others, but in certain conditions stands to a position of demigod (Rubio, 2001). From that moment, it earns the right to sit in a space reserved for all (pan) gods (theos). But how does a football player becomes a god, a sports hero? For his actions, obviously, but mainly by how the media tells the public his exploits. At the time of Eusébio’s death, January 2014 his history had been recovered by the media. Thus an excellent opportunity was presented to study the way journalism has reconstructed the image of a global player whose career was played when football had not the current media coverage. This work studies the news releases published on the day after his death. The hypothesis is that newspapers seek to contextualize semantically the sports phenomenon in a mythological scene. Using content analysis methodology, we tried to find examples of the hero’s construction in a quantitative (repetition of words associated with the universe of the hero) and qualitative (discourse to exalt the character) analysis.