In this paper, we critically investigate the media portrayals of the EU-Western Balkans relations through the metaphor POLITICS AS A GAME/SPORT MATCH. We apply the analytical framework of critical metaphor analysis to study this metaphor in a corpus of 123 online news articles published in Montenegro, Serbia, and Bosnia and Hercegovina, between January 2018 and September 2019. The results show that the roles of the EU and the WB are presented asymmetrically, where active agency is attributed to the EU and a passive role to the WB. Their current relations are depicted either as a one-sided match with the EU as the dominant player, or as a match in which the EU is one of the global players and the WB is a mere playing field. In both cases, the role of the WB is marginalized. The EU-integrations are also manipulatively presented as a competition between the WB candidates. Game and sport match metaphors, which invoke the idea of rules and merit-based outcomes and which can drive up readers' engagement, inspire loyalty to one player/team and motivate them to read media articles, were used to simplistically and binarily present complex political situations governed by fluctuating rules.