Efficiency of language, as far as message transmission is concerned, in a particular communication occurrence or in a given context, is based, apart from classical procedures, upon speakers' creativity and language innovation. Said speakers step in to increase the information in such a way as to arouse listeners' attention and, to do so, the speakers resort to figures of speech such as metaphor. That's the case of general, common language. If language boasts all these expressive possibilities by means of which it may fulfill different functions, can the specialized discourse of football "enjoy"the same expressive procedures of general language so as to express its dynamism in a suggestive manner? We therefore ask ourselves the question whether the specialized discourse, that of football in our case, avails itself of such procedures as metaphor to render the speech more dynamic, more expressive in such a way that football-related speech be perceived as a distinct, living language capable of transmitting the excitement of a football match. On the other hand, football, as a masculine sport by definition, is most of the times seen as a competition, as a fierce competition between two sides, each of them struggling for victory over the opponent. Such competitiveness is under no circumstances limited to the football match itself: it goes beyond such match as such and is to be found in the football-related discourse; the competition is now manifest, on the one hand, on the football gound, and, on the other hand, in the speech. We then ask ourselves again: can war metaphor account for this type of language and behaviour that's to be found in almost every football-related commentary? The objective of this paper is thus to analyse the metaphor as a figure of speech and mostly to account for war metaphor in football-related discourse. The corpus we turned to in order to respond to the questions we asked ourselves is made up of articles from sports newspapers, in paper format on online papers such as Gazeta Sporturilor, Prosport, L'Equipe, France Football, www.gsp.ro, www.prosport.ro, www.lequipe.fr, www.sport24.lefigaro.fr
