Clubs as merchants, athletes as (tangible) assets: the ideological language of the Football Transfer Market. An English-Italian comparison

In economics, any form and representation of market implies a complex set of procedures and stakeholders that are regulated by delicate equilibriums. As a matter of fact, markets have intricate rules, especially capitalist-based ones (particularly in Western societies: Milanovic, 2019). In this perspective, sport is no exception also considering its professionalism nature and the consequent hyper-commercialisation it has been developing in recent years (Slack, 2004). It derives that many disciplines generate high turnovers, thus being affected by market rules and stratagems. Football, notably the most popular sport in the world, has been changing its nature from pure leisure activity to a proper business model with financial repercussions (Morrow, 2003). In this framework, football has its own market, in which athletes are proper assets and clubs turned into financial companies and even multinational corporations (Kuper, Szymanski, 2018). Transfer market, then, is an economic activity that captures the attention of a larger fanbase, which is eager to get updated information thus shifting its interest towards off-the-pitch events. Within the process of spectacularization of the media (Valdez-Lopez et al., 2019), transfer market can be interpreted as a language-related event which is part of the language of football, a multi-faceted communication that includes both specialised lexis and common expressions (Meledandri, 2019). Media play a major role in creating such language by interchanging facts with speculations and rumours, thus using elaborated expressions and images recurring to language devices such as metaphors and entertainment-oriented strategies: in this way, clubs undergo a personification process so that they appear as merchants operating in a globalised market, using their ‘human capital’ as trade goods. The aim is to keep the interest in the market alive, and to retain fans and users on their media outlets even in an extra-season period. This contribution aims at providing an overview of such language acts in an interlingual perspective, examining some examples taken from English and Italian outlets as well as specialised websites.