It is often believed that the only verb form available for recounting events in past time is the English Preterit form. Every single available academic grammar of the English language supports this view, relegating the Present Perfect to a whole series of other possible uses, such as experiential past, past events with present repercussions, and so on. However, it is an indubitable fact that in some forms of English, the Present Perfect is used as a narrative tense, and it is equally indubitable that this usage is associated especially with football, as this paper will attempt to justify on the basis of a corpus of sports interviews. Secondly, it will show that narrative Present Perfect does exist outside football, and will reflect on whether it is simply a non-standard form that has gained a certain 'visibility' in the light of the recent explosion in the amount of televised coverage, or whether footballers might be taking the English language down a road towards a narrativisation of the Present Perfect, a path that many other languages have followed before English.