Dr. Veronika Macková
Researcher and Associate Lecturer at the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. Her areas of research interest include sports journalism and artificial intelligence journalism. In her academic publications, she focuses mainly on Paralympic sport. She is a former TV sports journalist.
Email: veronika.mackova@fsv.cuni.cz
Dr. Ondřej Trunečka
Researcher and Associate Lecturer at the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. He focuses his research on sports journalism. He is a former editor-in-chief of one of the biggest sports websites in the Czech Republic.
Email: ondrej.trunecka@fsv.cuni.cz
The media coverage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, such with any other major sporting event, creates stories that often culminate in triumph or end in disappointment. This broader mechanism may also be evident in Czech sports journalism, where media coverage appears to generate high expectations surrounding the national team’s success and, following disappointing performances, shifts attention toward assigning responsibility to individual actors.
The qualitative analysis of more than 300 articles published by Sport.cz, iSport.cz, and iDnes.cz revealed five distinct stages in the media framing of the Czech national football team during the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The examples presented below serve as illustrations of the dominant narratives identified in each stage.
During the opening phase of the tournament, before the first match of their national team, the three Czech online news outlets predominantly centered their content on expectations, optimism, and hope, in light of their first appearance at the World Cup since 2006. The Czech national team qualified after a dramatic play-off run, where they won two penalty shoot-outs against Ireland and Denmark. As a result, the players, together with the head coach Miroslav Koubek, were portrayed as national heroes.
The articles framed them as capable of progressing further in the tournament, considering the competition between South Korea, South Africa and Mexico and the fact that three of four teams in the group qualified for the knockout stage. For example, they highlighted the strengths of the Czech team and suggested that the opponents viewed them as a serious threat.
The second stage was labelled as still largely supportive, although increasingly critical. Explicit support for the Czech national team before the second game and then before the decisive group-stage match was present mainly in interviews (for example, with the captain Ladislav Krejčí) or in stories about young players that presented their potential and emphasized the importance of the upcoming fixture. On the other hand, some journalists in their own analysis or commentaries pointed out the weaknesses and advised: “Stop living in an illusion. The players must admit their mistakes.”
The third stage can be characterized as criticism and disappointment, reflecting the immediate media reaction following the Czech Republic’s elimination from the tournament. Already on the day of the decisive defeat, headlines included similar expressions such as “Czech Misery”, or even much harsher: “Adiós, World Cup! The National Team Exits the Tournament Humiliated After a Debacle, Finishing Bottom of the Group”. The latter one illustrates the use of highly emotional language. Similar texts described the tournament as a disaster, a source of despair, or sad reality, framing the Czech participation as a significant failure rather than simply an unsuccessful sporting performance.
The fourth stage, blame, illustrates a further shift in media framing. During the five days following the Czech Republic’s elimination, coverage moved away from evaluating individual matches and increasingly focused on identifying those responsible for the disappointing outcome. Headlines such as “Nothing but Shame Remains! The ‘Glorious’ World Cup Qualification Ended in Complete Failure” illustrated this shift. The dominant frame no longer concerned sporting performance itself but rather responsibility and the causes of failure, with particular attention directed towards head coach Miroslav Koubek, accused of being responsible for the “toxic atmosphere”, and the leadership of the Football Association of the Czech Republic.
The final stage can be labelled as accountability and change. At this point, media attention shifted towards discussing potential solutions and the future direction of Czech football. Coverage increasingly focused on questions of who should replace head coach Miroslav Koubek, what structural reforms were needed, and how Czech football could become more competitive at the international level. Rather than analyzing individual performances on the pitch, journalists framed the tournament as evidence of broader systemic shortcomings, using the World Cup as a catalyst for debates about the future of Czech football.
This transition from initial hope to slowly growing criticism and disappointment ending with the stages of blame and change during only the twenty-day period analyzed might seem so abrupt that the tone of coverage changed almost instantly from one extreme to the other, from the optimistic framing to a narrative of failure. On the one hand, some critical tendencies were visible in some articles between three Czech matches. On the other hand, the media expressed hope until the last game, so the narrative transformed rapidly after the elimination.
The final evaluation corresponded to poor performances that resulted in the last place in the group having collected only one point. Moreover, the journalists after the elimination of the Czech team remained consistent in their criticism towards the head coach, while the national football association supported him at first, but he stepped down after all.
The analysis confirmed that journalistic narratives reflected sporting outcomes. Considering countless different scenarios that participation in such a great tournament can offer, this story of the Czech national football team with dramatic downfall could hardly end with any conclusion other than: from heroes to villains.
