Subscriber Joan Planas Bartolí sends me a sufficiently forceful complaint about the treatment of handball in the Sports section: "Last Sunday (2/2/2025) the final of the World Handball Championship by Nations (between Denmark and Croatia) took place in Oslo, and in the copies. Incredible lapse and what contempt for this sport! Of course, about football, all the details every day, to get fed up.
I have forwarded the complaint to the head of the Sports section, Xavi Hernández Navarro, who responds to me immediately regretting "that there was no reference to the World Handball final. A brief one, at least, was deserved. Carelessness on our part." He then notes four decision criteria on the topics discussed. The first is general interest, on which the prevalence of Barça is built: "Based on the audience data we have on the website, we quickly reach conclusions about what interests our readers the most. And, fortunately or unfortunately, Barça takes the cake. Barça is interesting in all aspects, with special mention to the issues of offices and management (economic, board of directors, assets, etc.). Barça is the main fuel of our day to day and also of other Sports sections in the country."
If the first pillar that the head of Sports notes is the specific one, the second is the generic one, which can be shared by the entire newspaper and the majority of media, wherever they are from: the national interest, which, applied to the subject that subscriber Planas raises, illustrates that "when there are Catalan sportsmen, we put the Spanish one with handball followed the match with greater attention and we would have dedicated more information space. In fact, before the World Cup we did. A report with Ian, David Barrufet's son, one of the team's players." I thank Xavi Hernández for having made the effort to put his reflections in line with the complaint I am sending him, and also for noting in the third section of his, let's say, style guide for the section, "profiles, personal stories", that this aspect also arouses interest and with the topic Well, the perfect excuse to meet a young Catalan athlete. Is there a Dakar? Well, the ideal excuse to talk to Nandu Jubany, who was racing this year. In the end, a newspaper must provide these things, this added value. What about the Olympic Games? We sent a reputable reporter like Toni Padilla to tell good stories about the athletes who participate. To disseminate sports results, Google and Flashscore are already effective. A newspaper must reflect them equally, but it has a finite space that I understand must be reserved for more in-depth content."
Finally, in the fourth point, the head of Sports underlines the desire to provide "excellent coverage of Barça", without forgetting the "two other Catalan teams in the First Division (Espanyol and Girona)", in the desideratum of professional demand of "disseminating sport from one's own perspective, explaining news that no one else tells, monitoring the powers of the athlete, the person, and also curiosity".
One of the novelties that the interaction between new technologies and journalistic writing is determining is the presence of statistics in football chronicles; that if so much possession, so many good and bad assists, presence in own or opponent's half, goalkeeper saves, errors in defence, fouls for and against, shots that are goals and saves... This Defender, therefore, seeking the rhetorical interrelation between content and form, has developed a statistic error that must be assumed when the count is manual.
The results are that the Sports section has published 73 pieces, of which 46, 63.01%, are about football. The hegemony in this area is Barcelona, with 21 news items, 45.65%, which is 28.77% of the total published. Barça also wins the league of openings on the plain, 13, compared to 10 of the football outside the Nou Camp. Women's football was the subject of 11 news items, 15.06%, with 7 as headlines, with the precision that was not about sport but about the judicialisation of the Rubiales affair, with 6 entries; here I take the opportunity to refer to the follow-up of women's football that the subscriber Josep M. Puig i Baiget has sent me.
Basketball accounts for 14 items, 19.18%, noting that half of them are short. The presence of other sports in the section is almost anecdotal: 3 motor news items, 2 each on handball, skiing and sailing, and one each on rugby, hockey, tennis and cycling (due to a non-sporting issue such as the brief disappearance of Freire). The total number of news items on sports other than football or basketball is 13, 17.81% of the section, which would shrink if the unit of measurement were not the items but the characters and consequent space.
The subscriber Planas, claiming the presence of handball, has, therefore, in absolute numbers, reasons to complain, as might other fans who do not see the sports they like on the pages of ARA and who, in order to follow them, will consequently have to look for other media. Now, and in essential contrast, the interest rates invoked by Xavi Hernández Navarro are decisive, and even more so if we add the factor of news frequency, generated by the multiplication of competitions – at one time the European and Spanish Super Cups were invented, and now the final four of this and the play-off of the Champions League – which, with its pre-post information routines, a newspaper must attend to. All this makes football in general and Barça in particular phagocytize other sports. The same thing happens in politics, that the formations with institutional power and with more share Minorities are devoured, as they find it more difficult to make the news and, when they do, it is usually in the infrared range of negativity and the thinnest space. Hence the electoral campaign quotas, which are however also debatable.
The ARA Readers' Ombudsman, as a result of all this, considers that the Sports section should at least try to tend to mean what its brand denotes, even if it means adding protectionist criteria to its style book, and, despite maintaining the informative priority that the more than a club It requires journalism to pay more attention to more than one sport, especially when it comes to events, such as the Handball World Cup that this page has announced today.
To round off the section, I would like to highlight the quality of the Sports section, of the editors who chip away at the stone every day by going to training sessions, press conferences, early trips, making semantics where there is no grammar and even looking for the best metaphor. In the background, the annals of the literature that football has brought together, the paradigm of the articles by Xavier Bosch, who already in 2012, in the one entitled "Barça in verse", cited Alberti, Sagarra, Pere Quart and Ramon Solsona, author of the lyrics of the Centenary song, music by maestro Ros Marbà.
The Reader's Ombudsman pays attention to doubts, suggestions, criticisms and complaints about the contents of the newspaper in its digital and paper editions, and ensures that the treatment of information is in accordance with the codes of ethics.
By Contact the Reader's Ombudsman You can send an email to eldefensor@ara.cat or record a message of no more than one minute to the WhatsApp number 653784787. In all cases, identification with name, surname and ID number is required.
