This article investigates the use and non-use of objects with six transitive verbs in a corpus of English football match reports. The verbs were selected on the basis of their frequency as well as their lexico-grammatical features of "footballness" and transitivity. The study suggests that object omission may not be as pervasive as hinted at in previous studies (e.g. Bergh and Ohlander 2016; Ruppenhofer and Michaelis 2010). Regarding potential reasons for object omission, it is uncovered that the football verbs-net, save, play-are more prone to object omission than the general verbs: feed, create, take. This is attributed to the strong attraction of the former to recurrent collocates such as goal and ball. This suggests that verbs used to report on unremarkable and canonical situations (to the game of football) more readily omit the object, albeit not on a general basis, as individual differences between the verbs also emerge.