Minute-by-Minute Football Commentary:
A Corpus-based Discourse Analysis of Tense and Community within Online MBM

Abstract
One of the ways in which it has evolved is the expansion of minute-by-minute
commentary of live sports events, particularly association football. This article seeks to
explore the genre and examine it from three perspectives, namely to what degree it fits
Swales’ (1990) discourse community framework, what are its predominant patterns of
tense, time and aspect, and how does interaction take place within it. The article
concludes with ways in which minute-by-minute commentary can be used by students
and suggestions for further research into the area.

Introduction
Sports coverage is just one example of how the growth in popularity and
accessibility of the Internet has changed modern journalism and communication.
Amongst a myriad of web-based resources such as the online presence of traditional
media outlets such as television stations and newspapers, club web pages, Facebook
groups, Twitter accounts and fan forums, Internet minute-by-minute (MBM) commentary
of professional sports has also evolved. MBM coverage of association football
(hereinafter “football”, also called soccer), is very common. Football is a multi-billion
dollar industry widely believed to be the most popular sport in the world. For instance,
3.2 billion people, accounting for 46% of the world’s population, saw at least some of the
2010 World Cup in South Africa, the latest for which figures are available (FIFA, 2010,
p. 9). In its most basic form, MBM is a simple, objective description of the main
events of a single football match on a regularly updated webpage, chiefly a feature of
media outlets such as newspapers and TV stations. However, the genre as it exists on
some web pages has developed into something more complex, consisting of pregame
build-up, in-game simultaneous reporting on multiple games and post-match reaction and
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE
provided by Asia University Academic Repositories analysis. Added to this is the interactive nature of the genre which allows for and indeed encourages contributions of readers. While still predominantly a sub-genre of sports journalism, MBM also has clear elements of social (interactivity) and new media (on
demand access across platforms) and should be viewed as a genre unto itself. Indeed,
Chovanec (2009, p. 110) argues that it is “an institutionalised genre of journalism”.
Figure 1 illustrates this model of MBM as presented on the British Broadcasting
Corporation’s (BBC) Football page https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/ , the basis of
this study.