UniversidaddeCádiz

The Spain Women’s Football Team made history last August when they won the 2023Women’s World Cup. During the celebration, the President of the Spanish Federation Association, Luis Rubiales, kissed one of the players, Jennifer Hermoso. The national and international press echoed the incident immediately. However, certain headlines revealed that Rubiales and Hermoso were not being treated equally by the media. For this reason, this research aims to analyse headlines from the national and international newspapers covering the kiss to study how social actors are represented in the texts. The social actor theory and corpus linguistic analysis were used to analyse the headlines and identify instances of sexism. The press, as the ‘fourth state’ which has the power to shape people’s minds, should not contribute to such practices.