Інновації в сучасній українській футбольній лексиці / Innovations in modern Ukrainian football lexicon

The research is devoted to the description of innovations of the late 20th and early 21 th centuries in one of the subsystems of the Ukrainian language – the language of football – the most popular sport in Ukraine and the world. The focus is on examining a new thematic group of football titles – “Management in Football”, which appeared as a result of the rapid commercialization of this sports game over the past four decades, when economic relations in Ukraine were transformed in accordance with the principles of the free market, according to which world football functions. The subject of the study is the lexical-semantic and structural features of the latest football names. Factual material for the investigation was drawn from journalistic texts on football topics in printed and online sources – on news and sports websites of mass media, official websites of Ukrainian football clubs and governing institutions of domestic football. The article analyzes in detail the semantics of football names that refer to innovations related to football management, club sponsorship, advertising of football events, and non-football activities of companies, which are based on increased interest of fans in football events. Four subgroups of neologisms in football vocabulary are identified that describe the development of football management: “Transfer activities of football clubs and football sponsorship”, “Ensuring formal aspects of the functioning of football clubs”, “Advertising sphere in football and dissemination of information about the activities of clubs”, “Commercial activity around football”. Lexical and semantic neologisms, as well as foreign-language loans, are described. The large number of foreign-language names in the studied group of football neologisms indicates not very courageous attempts by modern football specialists to create Ukrainian equivalents to loans from foreign languages. Structurally, most football innovations are compound hybrid names formed as a result of analytical derivation. Many variant football neologisms have been recorded, which is evidence of an active search for the most successful and comprehensive names in the modern football lexicon. The functioning of football innovations is illustrated by examples of the use of these names in contexts.