The article addresses the role of sport metaphor in the headlines of online newspapers which are perceived as verbal and visual text per se, and the integrity of metaphor, visual effect and the pragmatic effect that is made onto the reader. Nowadays, an increasing number of English language units which have two meanings, a terminological one and a metaphorical one, increases as the penetration of terms from various areas of knowledge in everyday language tends to expand, too. Terminological phraseological units originated from sport terms are characterized by their dual meaning: a direst, terminological, sportive meaning, and a phraseological one. The focus of the article lies in the fact that mass media texts where sport metaphors are used alongside with the selected pictures have become numerous for the last decade. The lexical units in the published articles as well as the visual impact of the pictures are scrutinised and the attempt to look at all three important parts of polycode text: the headline, the pictures and the pragmatics of the text under the analysis is made. Such approaches as content analysis, discourse analysis, the method of phraseological identification were used to prove the importance of pragmatic role of sport metaphor in the mass media text. The aim was to prove that terminological phraseological units which are based on the sport terms, as well as the choice of lexical units in the mass media texts, should be taken into consideration while approaching the notion of polycodeness.