The business of football: linguistic analysis of the chairman’s statement

Abstract

We present a brief overview of the analysis of football club Annual Reports from an EBP perspective. As previous research on the topic has proved (Morrow, 2005), this is a unique business model where both “success on the field” and “finance off the field” often converge in the Chairman’s Statement. Although other authors have researched on the financial and economic analysis (Barajas, 2004; Dobson & Goddard, 2011; Szymanski & Kuypers, 1999), it is our aim to provide a linguistic analysis of the narrative sections of football club Annual Reports. From this perspective, we will analyze the initial paragraphs of five 2009-2010 English football club Chairman’s Statements, trying to find a connection between the initial sequence of the structure developed by Fortanet-Gómez (2009), which was based on other industries (e.g., banking or telecommunication), and the introduction written by the chairman of a football club.