The football digital narrative. Disintermediation of the agenda through the clubs’ social networks

Spanish First Division football clubs use a wide variety of social networks, allowing them to reach their global audiences directly. The objective of this research was to describe the digital narratives that clubs use in their aspects of hypertextuality, multimedia, interaction and informational agenda. To do this, a sample of 6,000 messages captured automatically and manually from the official pages on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram of the twenty clubs of the Professional Football League was analyzed, detecting a complete narrative structure that develops cyclically around a central event, the competition, and some main characters, the players, to build the club’s identity through a combination of multiple digital resources. It was possible to detect and describe differences between the content and formats most frequently published by the clubs on their networks and those that received greater digital engagement from users.