The present work is a sociolinguistic study of English and Polish football language, investigated as a special language with broad public appeal, which consists of several situationally-motivated varieties, employed in a number of communicative settings. The book, which draws on the theory of register, as developed by Halliday, Biber, Conrad and other researchers, aims to demonstrate the range of cross-language and cross-register variation. Its major empirical fi ndings come from corpus-based investigations of footballers’ communication on the field of play, the lexico-grammatical and discourse features of football reporting in the media (match reports, television and online written commentary) as well as football metaphors, which are approached from a cognitive perspective.