Between boos, controversies and losses

frameworks of Neymar Jr's public image in the 2019 retrospective of O Estado de São Paulo online

Abstract

This article aims to verify whether the choices of images and texts used in the 2019 retrospective on Brazilian football player Neymar Jr., produced by the website of the newspaper Estado de São Paulo, contribute to a negative characterization of the player. We start from the idea that the media, due to its relevance and legitimacy as a social actor, influences the production of social consensus in the society to which it belongs. From the operationalization of the concepts of framing, event, public image and retrospective, we produced an analysis based on Panofsky's semiotic method and on Barthes and Butler's considerations on the rhetorical and expressive relationships of images with the texts to which they are linked. We conclude that the narrative conveyed by the retrospective of the Estado de São Paulo newspaper chooses to rescue the troubled and controversial episodes in Neymar's trajectory that year, fixing predominantly negative meanings to his public image.