Abstract: Covid-19 pandemic triggered a pay cut for Premier League players that received much attention from British society and the media, and the event is a good case study for understanding the relationship between sport, media and society in Britain during the pandemic. Using a mixed approach combining corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, the Daily Mail and the Guardian were selected to study the coverage of the event, and it was found that: the media image of the players in the Daily Mail was "rich but cruel", and the media image of the players in the Guardian was "sports heroes". The Daily Mail expects players to sacrifice for their clubs, while the Guardian expects players to contribute to the wider community. Both emphasize players' community responsibility, and both reflect a tendency toward social integration with "strong centripetal and weak centrifugal forces", demonstrating that the pandemic has shifted communities from "intimacy" to "normative altruism". The implications for China is to reconceptualize the community-organizing function of sports and to convey a responsible citizenship image of athletes.