Abstract
This article examines the responses by users of the social media platform, Twitter, to the English Premier League's (EPL) support, via four tweets from their official Twitter account, for the annual Rainbow Laces anti-homophobia in football campaign. Locating our analysis within the corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda of the EPL, the four tweets received a total of 24,997 'likes', 4,951 retweets, and 1,865 comments. Of those comments directly responding to the campaign and wider CSR agenda of the EPL (n = 407), 236 contained supportive comments and 171 contained negative comments. Despite support for the Rainbow Laces campaign, the comments also reflected some resistance to the overall CSR agenda of the EPL. Here, responses called for a greater focus on issues outside of LGBT+, such as mental health and reducing the financial burden placed on fans to consume football.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 302-316 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Sport in Society: Cultures\, Commerce\, Media\, Politics |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2023 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Open Access - Access Right Statement
© 2022 the Author(s). published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.Keywords
- corporate social responsibility
- Football
- homophobia
- LGBT
- social media
