A lesson in Football English for people who hate football

The world's most popular sport has inevitably had an impact on is most popular language. Even business jargon is not immune

Harry Kane: I’ve just missed a penalty and we’ve been knocked out of the World Cup. What’s the word I’m looking for?

Well, that’s the World Cup done for another four years. I know plenty of people who couldn’t be more pleased about that. I’ve every sympathy with them.

Me, I’m never happier than when curled up on the sofa watching Cameroon take on Serbia and tweeting that Liverpool should try and sign the Serbian centre half. 

But my love if the game isn’t universally shared. And if you’re part of that non-sharing community, the past four weeks have probably been a bit of a bore. Even I, Googling which team that useful Moroccan midfielder currently plays for, will admit that the obsession with football, in the UK at least, has gotten well out of hand. We live in a nation where a preview of a World Cup group game (a match that doesn’t matter much in the early stages of the tournament) not only leads BBC TV’s Six O’Clock news, it takes up the whole first half of the bulletin. 

The BBC’s long-running football programme, Match of the Day, has had an equally long-running theme song based on an old Scottish ditty called Fitba Crazy. And you sometimes wonder if the whole world isn’t a bit too crazy about fitba.

That includes the world of business. So, what follows is designed for people who can’t beat the football nuts: so they might as well join them.

Billions of words are spouted about the game every day.  Inevitably, football-speak infiltrates every part of life. We have chosen a few in-the-know footy phrases which you can drop into everyday work use.

They are sure to impress colleagues, clients and shareholders, although there is a slight danger, akin to speaking a few words in a foreign language, that they may think you're more expert than you are – and then they ask you how you think Southampton will do away at Crystal Palace in the Cup. (Answer, just in case: they’ll probably get a draw).

GAME OF TWO HALVES

‘Two halves’. This image is also a knowing reference to the traditional half-time football snack

The genius of football language is, you take something literal and self-evident, then dress it up as a profound insight. A 90-minute game has a short break (that’d be half-time). Sometimes, the second half plays out differently to the first. The team that was rubbish in the first half suddenly starts playing well, and vice versa.

How to use it:

Use it hopefully.

Sales are down 17% to July, but the year, like, it’s a game of two halves…

HOSPITAL PASS

You would rather this didn’t happen

You kick the ball towards a team-mate with insufficient force. This enables the psychotic opposition player to reach the ball (and your colleague) at the same time. The subsequent collision may occasion a visit to A&E.

How to use it: 

Mate, leaving out the crucial revenue data in the board report was a bit of a hospital pass. That’d be your boss, packing up her office now. 

‘IT’S A CONTACT SPORT’

Older footballers-turned-pundits use this phrase when they think referees are being too soft, giving free kicks for robust (ie violent) tackles that would have been acceptable in their day. According to this world view, a few ‘knocks’ are ‘part and parcel of the game’.

How to use it:

Great if you are the kind of manager who thinks your office is full of snowflakes. When a customer is rude to one of your junior colleagues in a meeting, you say:

Sorry, Kieran, but it’s a contact sport, point-of-sale merchandising consultancy.

MORE IMPORTANT THAN THAT

Football’s greatest philosopher was a man called Bill Shankly, the former Liverpool manager. He demanded (and got) unswerving loyalty to the club, the city and above all, the fans. When one player complained about his injured knee, Shanks said: ‘what do you mean YOUR knee? It's LIVERPOOL'S knee!' (The player in question was lame for life after retiring: not that he complained).  

But Shankly’s most famous, or notorious, quote was this:

How to use it:

Try it in a job interview:

Am I passionate about this job? Put it this way, if someone asked me if multi-platform content marketing in the Mercia region was a matter of life or death, I’d say no, it’s much, much more important than that. 

OBVIOUSLY….

A South American lungfish: ‘obviously, we’re delighted to be off the bottom of the pond’

This is the adverb of choice for footballers in post-match interviews. Example: ‘Yeah, obviously I’m really pleased with the hat-trick, but obviously it’s the points on the board that matter’. 

Combined with a ruthless determination to avoid any eye contact with the reporter, the word successfully conveys the impression that the star would rather be anywhere in the world than here in front of the sponsors’ logos, answering stupid questions.

How to use it:

Don’t. If something is that obvious, you don’t need to say it. And whereas footballers don’t care what impression they make on the person speaking to them – perhaps because they are paid £150,000 a week whether they are thoughtful and articulate or not – the rest of us should.

POTENTIAL BANANA SKIN

A metaphor waiting to happen

We are approaching the Third Round of England’s FA Cup, when the big teams you’ve all heard of get thrown into the hat with a lot of small teams you won’t have. At some point on the TV, someone will refer to, say, the Premiership’s Aston Villa’s against League Two’s Stevenage game as a ‘potential banana skin’.

You don’t go to football-speak for relentless logic. Of course (you’re thinking), they mean an actual, or at the very least, a metaphorical banana skin on which the big team will potentially slip. The subject should be attached to the adjective/adverb, not the object. Do write to Gary Lineker and point this out. 

How to use it:

I know the client described the quarterly meeting as a routine catch-up, but for me, it’s a potential banana skin. 

PUT YOUR FOOT THROUGH IT

Note to people for whom English is not a first language. I am sorry about the way we change the meanings of verbs by randomly attaching prepositions to them. Putting your foot through something is not the same as putting your foot in it. 

Now, you can put your foot through thin ice, which is bad. But in football parlance, putting your foot through something – in this case, a ball – is often recommended.

The context is all. As the game has become more sophisticated, so the beefy, no-nonsense style once popular in England has fallen out of fashion. But every so often, the new-fangled style lets a player down. They concede a goal by trying to be tricky instead of hoofing the ball into the stands (note, at this point, an Old-School Pundit may refer to Row Z – as in, ‘Harry just needed to put that one in Row Z’). At the other end, a too-clever-by-half striker may try to coax the ball in a gentle arc around the goalkeeper. If the ball is saved, our OSP is sure to say ‘sometimes you just need to put your foot [or, increasingly, ‘your laces’] through it’. 

How to use it:

The proposal’s five days overdue and Brand Development are still Googling images of cuckoo clocks. Sometimes, you just have to put your foot through it. 

TAKE EACH GAME AS IT COMES

There is no cliche more durable and shameless than a football cliche. But even professional footballers (perhaps the hardest species on the planet to interview, and that includes the South American lungfish and other animals that lack vocal chords) blush a little when using this one.

It appears, inexorably, when a team is doing well in several competitions, and an interviewer, who should know better, but somehow never does, asks the player how they are coping with the pressure and what strategy they have for ultimate success. At this point, they are contractually obliged to say that they are not getting distracted by winning the Premier League/Champions League/Hackney Marshes Invitational Over 40s Cup at some far-distant point. Instead, they are relentlessly, piously, and perhaps laser-guidedly focussed on the next game, because, Gary, we take each game as it comes. 

How to use it:

Useful in performance reviews with ultra-ambitious staff.

You're doing great as executive administrative support assistant. Just don’t think too much of the CEO role just now. Take each game as it comes.

THEY ONLY NEED ONE CHANCE

In some games, your star centre forward, or striker, the one who is meant to score the goals, hardly gets a kick. You almost forget they are on the pitch. Then they pop out of nowhere and get the winning goal. Expert summariser opines: ‘Harry (or Mo, or Beth) only needs one chance’. You may also add, like Henri Bergson proposing a new paradigm for understanding time, ‘it only takes a second to score a goal’.

Very useful if you have to defend that not-very-hardworking member of the team who nevertheless has a habit of landing big contracts.

He’s a lazy sod, but he only needs one chance. 

TRACKSUIT MANAGER

Don’t you love it when your line manager sits next to you and offers helpful feedback?

We know the type. They get promoted, and you never see them again – too busy swanning around with the shareholders and chairman’s friends. This happens in football, too. However, a tracksuit manager is one who refuses to wear a suit and instead spends as much time as they can on the pitch getting their boots dirty

How to use it:

I see Emma has given up her office and plonked herself on the floor with the rest of us. Thinks she’s a tracksuit manager, does she?

If you are an international football superstar looking to improve your grammar and communication skills, contact us here: hello@forthwrite.co.uk or visit this place.