This study investigates the discourse analysis of football texts. The choice of football texts from the Nigerian newspaper was motivated by my personal interest in football and the popularity soccer has gained in recent years across the world. The study covers the football texts selected from Complete Sports which dominated the Nigerian sports’ news market. The largest number of sports lovers across the country source their information on sports most especially football news from the selected newspaper based on its popularity and accurate reporting of sporting activities the world over. Lead article from each of the newspaper were selected for a period of one month during 2010 world cup making a total of 30 lead articles. Ansary and Babai 2005 discourse Generic Structure Potential was applied to unmask the discourse structure of football text in newspapers and it contextual configuration. Talking about the discourse Generic Structure Potential (GSP), it is the total structural resources of text genre. This organizational sequencing are classified as obligatory, optional and recursive elements. Each of these classifications serves specific purposes or functional role in the texts.
Keywords: Discourse, Football, Generic structure, Genre, Sequencing, structural resources
