The Same Genre for Different Audiences
79linked with specific settings or contexts of use, and exhibiting distinctive
linguistic features (register markers and features). While football language
registers display differences at the lexico-grammatical level, what binds
them together is common terminology. Words and phrases, such as: clean
sheet, equalizer, nutmeg, positional play, screamer or six-yard box are
arguably association football terms,^1 providing further evidence that the
language of football can be explored as a special language.
One of the most recognizable and best-known football registers is the
football match report (FMR), which is published in print and online media.
Also investigated as a sportswriting genre (see, e.g., Ghadessy 1988;
Andrews 2005; Steen 2007), an FMR, which is classified as a straight
news story, is composed of two major components or discourse phases: 1)
narrative content – a more or less detailed account of key episodes that
occurred during a football game, and 2) analytical (evaluative) content –
the sportswriter’s opinion on the game itself, the coaches’ game plans, the
teams’ and individual players’ performances, etc. The latter phase seems
to be taking precedence over the former in recent years in view of the
ever-increasing electronic media coverage of football games. Match
reports frequently defy the concept of the “inverted pyramid”,^2 which is
one of the distinctive features of hard news journalism. The main lexico-
grammatical characteristics of FMRs include the predominance of past
tense verb forms over present tense forms, a relatively high frequency of
conditional clauses (as compared to news reportage in general), modal
verbs and evaluative adjectives, and very high frequency rates for
adverbials of time and place (the spatio-temporal aspect plays a significant
role in this genre). As they primarily target football fans, match reports
contain a fair proportion of specialist terminology.^3 For more insights into
the linguistic features of FMRs see Ghadessy (1988) and Lewandowski
(2013: 64-99).
This chapter aims to compare and contrast football match reports
published in the online sports sections of selected British and American
(^1) Taborek’s (2014) multilingual dictionary of football language lists over 2,400
terms in Polish, Russian, English and German, many of which are unique to the
domain of football.
(^2) The concept refers to the most common format of a news story, where the most
newsworthy information is placed at the beginning while less important facts are
reported in the order of decreasing significance.
(^3) As Ghadessy (1988: 21) puts it, “[t]here is a large body of knowledge and values
assumed to be shared by the writer and reader. The specialist terminology used
need not be explained throughout the report unless a new term is coined”.