Sports management

The second entry is le fair-play financier, and the loanword at its head has picked up a piece of grammar that English never gave it. As a noun it behaves as expected: masculine, hyphenated as it is here, le fair-play for the spirit of the thing and le fair-play financier for the rules on club spending. But French also uses it as an adjective, which « fair play » does not do in English, where the same idea needs « sporting » or « a good sport ». Il a été très fair-play says he took the defeat well; une adversaire fair-play is a gracious opponent. As an adjective it stays frozen. It agrees with nothing and takes neither -s nor -e: des joueurs fair-play, des supportrices fair-play, the same form each time, which is how dictionaries treat it. What does agree is the word that follows it in this entry: financier is masculine singular because le fair-play is, and it would change the moment the noun did. The recommended native term, le franc-jeu, exists, and is heard far less often than the borrowing.