Free kicks, dribblers and WAGs. Exploring the language of "the people's game"

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Free kicks, dribblers and WAGs. Exploring the language of
“the people’s game”
GUNNAR BERGH & SÖLVE OHLANDER
University of Gothenburg
“Football and English are the only truly global languages.”
Sir Bobby Charlton
1. Introduction
1.1 “The people’s game” – “the world’s game”
Football comes in many shapes and colours and goes by many names. One of
them, of course, is its synonym soccer – an “odious little word” in comparison
with football, according to Seddon (2004:3) – used especially to distinguish it
from the American variety, as in World Soccer, the well-known football
magazine. Other expressions are of a less objective, descriptive nature. Thus,
among football aficionados, football is often, and lovingly, referred to as “the
beautiful game”, a phrase gaining currency in the wake of the brilliant – and
aesthetically pleasing – football displayed by Brazilian national teams in the
1950s and 1960s. Another widely used term, of older standing, is “the people’s
game”.
1
The present-day status of football as the world’s most popular sport – “the
world’s game”, another frequent appellation (cf. e.g. the title of Murray 1996) – is
almost a truism. It may be illustrated and supported by some relevant figures,
drawn from the so-called Big Count carried out by FIFA (Fédération
Internationale de Football Association) in 2006: 265 million players (239 million
males, 26 million females), 5 million referees and officials, 1.7 million teams, 0.3
million clubs (cf. Kunz 2007). In other words, the grand total of people actively
involved in football amounts to some 270 million worldwide, a staggering figure,
to which should be added all those more passively involved as spectators, “live”,
via television or on the web. For example, as noted by Goldblatt (2007:x),
“[a]round half the planet watched the 2006 World Cup Final – three billion people
have never done anything simultaneously before.”
1
As to the phrase “the beautiful game”, whose origins are unclear, cf. the English title of Pelé’s
autobiography: My Life and the Beautiful Game (1977). (The great Brazilian himself was in all
likelihood more used to the corresponding Portuguese phrase: jogo bonito.) Incidentally, both “the
beautiful game” and “the people’s game” figure prominently as headings for two separate parts of
Goldblatt’s (2007) monumental history of football, as well as in the titles of various books on the
game.

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Thus, in terms of numbers alone, football in the early 21st century may be seen
as an unrivalled, still unfolding success story, the culmination of a cumbersome
journey where the road has been long and winding. The story, in outline, is well
known by now. The standard version will include at least the following
ingredients (cf. e.g. Goldblatt 2007):
 football’s humble beginnings in “the mob game of medieval Britain” (Wilson 2008:10),
a largely unregulated, often brutal, kick-and-rush village pastime, where rioting was
never far away – certainly “the people’s game”, hardly “the beautiful game”;
 the adoption and development of the traditional, wildgrown “street football” by English
public schools in the late 18th and early 19th centuries;
 the birth of the modern game by regulation (Laws of the Game) in the 1860s, in a
distinctly upper-class context;
2
 its somewhat paradoxical, increasing appeal to British working-class people, alongside
its gradual international spread, mediated by sailors, engineers and businessmen, within
and outside Europe, from the late 19th and throughout the 20th century;
 its close financial ties with the international media industry, in particlar since the mid-
1990s, ever-extending TV coverage paving the way for the big money.
The last few decades have seen football undergo an accelerating process of
commercialization, where merchandise, private ownership of clubs, sponsorship
deals, multi-billion TV contracts and stock market introductions have become
glaring features of its present-day environment. Top-level football has long ceased
to be a mere sport; it is just as much a socio-economic phenomenon, an arena for
big business and big businessmen around the globe.
In short, “the people’s game” has indeed become “the world’s game”, the
global sport par excellence, commanding the close attention of untold numbers of
people, regardless of social and political conditions, in most parts of the world. In
a local context, a successful football club may contribute substantially to the
perceived identity, and projected image, of smaller or larger places and
communities (cf. Andersson 2002, 2011). Internationally, today’s football –
especially of the professional, big-club brand – finds itself, more than ever, at the
crossroads of sport and the entertainment industry. In terms of coverage, the FIFA
World Cup makes up the world’s biggest media event, bigger than the Olympics.
Football, of course, has long been a conspicuous part of mass culture in many
countries, of historical and political importance, well beyond the domain of sport
alone. Goldblatt (2007:xiv) argues that “[n]o history of the modern world is
complete without an account of football.” In a similar vein, in a postwar European
context, the impact of football as a political factor is stressed by Judt (2007:782):
“What really united Europe was football.”
3
2
For a partly different, revisionist view of football’s early history, see Harvey (2005).
3
In this connection, cf. Seddon (2004:10), who argues that football is “routinely sidelined by
historians” – a judgment that may no longer be quite accurate, as evidenced by Judt (2007) above.

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1.2 Communicating about football: the English bias
In view of the fact that 19th-century Britain stands out as the undisputed cradle of
modern football, conquering countries and continents in a matter of decades
around the turn of the century 1900, it is no wonder that English was the first
language used in connection with the game, not only in Britain. For example, the
early 20th-century inaugural statutes of the White Rovers, an English-named club
in Paris, even stipulated that “all players must use the English language
exclusively when playing together” (Goldblatt 2007:116). At an everyday level of
cross-linguistic influence, obvious traces of the early English impact in the form
of loanwords like forward, dribble and offside are to be found in a number of
languages, although not to an equal degree (cf. Bergh & Ohlander 2012). With the
passage of time, however, many English football terms came to be rendered by
native-language equivalents across the globe, often in the form of semantic loans
or loan translations, such as Swedish hörna or hörnspark for corner (kick) and
German abseits for offside, but also as more independent native expressions, like
Italian calcio ‘football’.
In the past hundred years, as is well known, English has attained a historically
unique position as a global language, the lingua franca of the world (see e.g.
Crystal 2003, Mauranen & Hynninen 2010). During the same period, by a twist of
fate, football has become the world’s number one sport. In simplified terms, it
took a thousand years for English to achieve world dominance as a global
language, whereas football needed a hundred years to attain its present status as
the world’s most popular game – two separate developments coalescing, as it
were, in the latter part of the 20th century. Although not causally related, these
two historical circumstances, working in tandem and strengthened by the fact that
modern football was invented by English-speaking people, have created a strong
bond between football and the English language. The connection between football
and English as lingua franca may be seen at many levels. For instance, three
Swedish football magazines are called, respectively, Goal, Offside and
FourFourTwo, the latter two reflecting a well-known rule and a specific tactical
formation, respectively. At a more basic, interpersonal level, English is often used
in communication between coaches and players, as well as between players, in
many of today’s clubs, where multilingual backgrounds are the rule rather than
the exception (cf. Giera et al. 2008; Ringbom, forthcoming).
Thus, despite the global nature of today’s football, English continues to play a
prominent role in it – more so, in fact, than British national teams in recent years.
There may indeed be some truth to the statement – overstatement, some might say
– by the legendary English footballer Bobby Charlton, already quoted, to the
effect that “[f]ootball and English are the only truly global languages” (cf. Thaler
2008). On a similar note, Seddon (2004:8) argues that “football is the world’s
best-known word”.
It would seem, therefore, that English football language, loosely defined as the
English used in communication about football, in various contexts and settings, is
well worth exploring on a scholarly basis. A linguistic study of football language

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may take its departure from a variety of perspectives, ranging from its
characteristic features – lexicological and other – as a “special language” to its
historical development and cross-linguistic repercussions over the last hundred
years or so.
2. Football language
2.1 A “special language” – and a public one
As noted by Seddon (2004:4), Dr Johnson’s famous English dictionary of 1755
does include the word football – but only in the concrete sense of the spherical
object itself, the ball. The sense of ‘footballing activity’, i.e. the game of football,
is missing, despite the fact that football as a rough sort of pastime was not
unknown in Dr Johnson’s days, although in decline (cf. Goldblatt 2007:19ff.). It
was only some hundred years later that football staged its great comeback,
gradually spawning what may today be regarded as the world’s biggest ”special
language”.
Now, special languages are obviously used to talk and write about special
subjects, whether of an abstruse nature, like theoretical physics, or of a more
readily accessible, down-to-earth kind, like football. They are defined as follows
by Sager et al. (1980): “Special languages are semi-autonomous, complex,
semiotic systems based on and derived from general language” (p. 68); further,
they are made up of “the totality of means of expressions used by specialists in
messages about their special subject” (p. 74).
4
Transferred to the “special subject” of football, the “specialists” are simply all
those people around the world involved in today’s football one way or another, on
or off the pitch. Collectively, when communicating about football, they produce
and are exposed to vast amounts of specialized language, i.e football language in a
wide sense, in a multitude of different countries and languages. Nonetheless,
despite the diverse settings in which it can be talked and written about, football as
a subject can be seen as “a well-delimited special domain” (Schmidt 2008:20). It
follows that football language, the original variety of which is football English, is
indeed a special language, albeit somewhat unusual in that its use is not restricted
to a relatively small number of specialists. On the contrary, it may well be argued
that it is the most widespread special language of all as far as the number of
people using it, in different parts of the world, is concerned. This also means that,
despite its function as a special language, football language is arguably, more than
any other, also a public language, a somewhat paradoxical state of affairs.
5
4
Since the terms “ESP” (English for Specific/Special Purposes) and “LSP” (Language for
Specific/Special Purposes) tend to be linked to language teaching with a special orientation (as in
the fields of Business English, Academic English, etc.; cf. Dudley-Evans & St John 1998:1f.,
19f.), we prefer the term “special language” with reference to football language; cf. also Svensén
(2009:70f.).
5
Concerning the notion of “football language”, cf. Dankert (1969). Public recognition of football
language as a special language, in a non-technical sense, is reflected in terms like footballspeak

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The public aspect of football language is not least due to the present-day media
coverage of the game. This, in turn, is closely related to the link between football
and the entertainment industry, with great commercial potential, as noted earlier.
However, today’s football can also be seen as “the most universal cultural
phenomenon in the world” (Goldblatt 2007:xii; cf. Herzog 2002). Like rock music
or computer games, it is part of popular culture in a wide sense. The term “mass
culture” is equally well suited to capture its divided identity between sport and
entertainment. As further testimony to the presence of “the beautiful game” in
modern consciousness, football has increasingly come to provide the setting for
fiction and films with a wider focus, e.g. Nick Hornby’s novel Fever Pitch (1992;
later made into a film), Friedrich Christian Delius’s Der Sonntag, an dem ich
Weltmeister wurde (1994) or films like Bend It Like Beckham (2002). The
Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s book on football, El fútbol a sol y sombra
(1995; Swedish translation 1998) may also be mentioned in this connection, as a
sign of the attention nowadays paid to football as part of contemporary
entertainment and culture in a wide sense.
The broad interface between football as sport and football as entertainment or
popular culture will naturally leave its mark on our perception of football
language as a special language, e.g. in terms of the vocabulary used when
communicating about various aspects of the game. Thus, football language is not
only about teams, free kicks, dribblers and offside; it is also about transfer
windows, silly seasons and signings, as well as chanting, fans and hooligans. It is
the language used about football in the Laws of the Game, on the pitch and on the
terraces, in the media, and beyond – a special and a public language rolled into
one. Speakers of football language literally run into millions, not to say billions,
from active players to armchair fans watching the game on TV or online.
In view of its public nature, an interesting question relating to football language
concerns precisely its degree of “specialness” or specificity. In particular, how
specific, i.e. how sharply delimited, is it from general language? As quoted above,
a special language is “based on and derived from general language” (Sager et al.
1980:68). In the case of football language, the boundary between football
language and general language is arguably more porous than in the case of most
other special languages, e.g. Aviation English and Legal English. For one thing, it
is impossible to talk or write about football without using ordinary general-
language items like the nouns goal, player and team, or verbs like win and lose.
These, as well as a host of other everyday words, make up an indispensable part
of football language at large.
In the opposite direction, as it were, English general-purpose dictionaries as
well as learners’ dictionaries regularly include many lexical items that may
reasonably be regarded as typical of the football domain, technical football terms
such as free kick and offside, which may thus also be seen as part of general
and football talk (cf. Seddon 2004). Cf. also footballese, mostly used about hackneyed phrases and
clichés in football reporting and commentary, like “It’s a game of two halves” or “The ball is
round”; see e.g. Hilton (2007).

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language (cf. Svensén 2009:71f.). In this way, it may be argued, there is a partial
fusion of football language and general language. A further indication of this state
of affairs is that it is not unusual for what are in fact technical football terms and
phrases to be adopted as metaphorical expressions in general-language contexts,
outside football. This applies, e.g., to an expression like score an own goal, as
evidenced by the following “headlinese” example given in the Oxford Dictionary
of English (2010; henceforth ODE): “Government scores own goal by assisting
organized crime in London”. In other words, the interface between general
language and football language is a blurred one, with a good deal of overlap: “[i]t
can be difficult to draw a clear line between words belonging to the general
language, on the one hand, and special football terms, on the other” (Lavric
2008:5).
Even so, the relationship between general language and football language is
somewhat more complicated than has so far been intimated. It could, in particular,
be argued that much of the transition from general language to football language
is mediated through another, more inclusive special-language level, i.e. that of
sports language (cf. Dankert 1969, Lindstedt 1986, Palmatier & Ray 1993, Beard
1998). This intermediate level includes all the lexical items that are also part of
football language in a narrow sense, like back-heel and diving header, as well as
more general expressions, like match, player and tackle. If the boundary between
football language and general language can be characterized as porous, this
applies to an even higher degree to that between sports language and general
language, as well as between sports language and football language.
6
The relations between the three levels are schematically described by means of
the figures below. Figure 1 provides an “external” view of football language,
illustrating its position within the larger notions of language and sports language,
where football language is part of sports language, which, in turn, is part of, e.g.,
English. Accordingly, the basic question here is: “What does a language consist
of?” Figure 2 reverses the perspective, taking football language as its point of
departure, thus giving a more “internal” view of this kind of language, answering
the question “What does football language in a wide sense consist of?”. Note
especially that the whole of the “pyramid” in Figure 2 represents football
language at large, including general-language as well as sports-language items,
but also lexical items that are specific, or exclusive, to football (like the noun
striker and the verb side-foot), i.e. football language in a narrow sense (top of
pyramid).
6
Within sports language, obviously, several other special-language levels could be reckoned with,
such as the special language of ball games or perhaps, from a different angle, the language of team
sports; cf. e.g. Tingbjörn (2003:8).

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Figure 1. The “external” view: football language as part of a language
Figure 2. The “internal” view: components of football language in a wide sense
In view of the preceding discussion, the above figures should be largely self-
explanatory. It should be pointed out that Figure 2 is not intended to mirror the
real quantitative proportions between general language, sports language and
football-specific language. In a more general way, however, the figure indicates
what is reasonably a valid generalization, i.e. that football-specific items are far
thinner on the ground than both sports-language and general-language items.
Thus, the bulk of any communication about football, spoken or written, is likely to
be made up of lexical items that are not specific or exclusive to football.
Apart from the different levels of specificity briefly discussed above, football
language can also be seen from a more sociolinguistic perspective, where the

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various participants in football communication will come to the fore. For instance,
not only do footballers and officials produce football language in a variety of
match situations, but the media – traditional and social – do so even more through
their near-exhaustive coverage of the game, from live reporting and commentary,
interviews and post-match discussions to news articles, written follow-ups and
blog forums.
At least four different strata, or domains, can be distinguished, reflecting
different angles or positions in relation to the game as well as different degrees of
linguistic formality, largely correlating with the oral–written dimension of the
communicative context. From a formal point of view, the innermost core of
football – its defining features – consists of the Laws of the Game, i.e. football’s
rule system, as decided on by its governing body, FIFA. Somewhat more broadly,
the various documents issued by FIFA, UEFA (The Union of European Football
Associations) and similar bodies, as well as national football associations, can be
said to make up football’s official domain, basically characterized by written
language with a fairly high degree of formality. Various club-level documents,
etc., also belong here. The style of this kind of football language may be
illustrated by the following example, taken from the Laws of the Game
(2008/2009; “The Field of Play: Field Surface”): “Matches may be played on
natural or artificial surfaces, according to the rules of the competition.” In stark
contrast to this formal language, there is the domain of what may be called the
performers of football on or off the pitch, basically the players and referees, but
also, e.g., managers and coaches. The oral communication among these
participants – before, during or after training sessions or games, e.g. in pre- or
post-match interviews – is naturally of an informal, or very informal, nature. A
typical example of “pitchspeak” is the warning call Man on! (Sw. Akta rygg!); cf.
Seddon (2004:140).
The two opposing strata of official, “abstract”, written language versus
“concrete”, situation-bound participant talk represent the two most fundamental or
central domains of football language. Both rules and participants are criterial to
football, i.e. football as an abstract rule system determining the boundaries of
football as concrete performance in specific games.
7
Apart from these two core
domains, there are other, more “peripheral” contexts where football language is
produced, by people not actively involved in the game. Here the language of
football commentators and that of supporters and spectators come readily to mind.
There can be little doubt that, in terms of sheer quantity, these two domains jointly
give rise to vastly more football language than the two core domains. Football
commentary is a well-known feature – or genre – in all kinds of media, produced
by various, more or less professional experts (often referred to as “pundits”). It
may be spoken or written, displaying wide stylistic variation. The following
example, taken from Seddon (2004:221), illustrates the way a “co-commentator”
7
Cf. the similarity to Saussure’s langue–parole and also, from a different perspective, Chomsky’s
competence–performance distinction.

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might describe or explain to radio listeners what just happened on the pitch:
“Owen drove into the box, beat the defender, gave him a little nudge which the ref
didn’t see, and stroked it home.” This kind of spoken language contrasts with that
produced by ordinary fans and spectators, whether on the terraces or in front of
the television or computer screen. It is almost exclusively spoken – except when
appearing in, e.g., fanzines or supporter blogs – being stylistically more restricted
than commentary (cf. e.g. Krøvel & Roksvold 2012). A distinctive form of such
language is that of chanting, i.e. repeated rhythmic phrases typically shouted or
sung in unison by a crowd, as in the famous You’re not singing any more!.
8
Needless to say, the picture just outlined is an oversimplification; obviously,
there is considerable overlap between the four basic domains involved in football
language, e.g. with regard to the vocabulary used, not least in the media. Yet, it
makes sense to distinguish between them, for various reasons. Stylistic
considerations have already been mentioned. Each domain may in fact be said to
represent a specific text type, or genre, with its own characteristics. Different
sociolinguistic settings produce different types of football language, also in terms
of subject matter. For example, neither the Laws of the Game nor footballers’ talk
during or after a game are likely to refer to things like hooliganism or sponsorship
deals, as opposed to the language produced by football commentators or fans.
Further, from the point of view of linguistic research, the four domains differ
considerably in terms of accessibility, written source material naturally being
more readily available than spoken.
2.2 Football in linguistic research
In view of its status as the world’s number one sport as well as a mass cultural
phenomenon, it should come as no surprise that football has attracted a great deal
of scholarly attention, increasingly so in recent years. Thaler (2008:392) notes that
football as a “global cultural phenomenon” is nowadays “widely discussed in
academic discourse”, mentioning such diverse fields as linguistics, religion, art,
psychology, pedagogy, aesthetics, economics and philosophy; history and
sociology could also be mentioned (cf. the bibliography in Goldblatt 2007).
However, despite the fact that Thaler (2008) mentions linguistics in connection
with football, it would appear that comparatively little scholarly attention has been
paid to football language as a special language, especially in comparison with
more traditional ESP fields like Business English or Academic English (cf.
Dudley-Evans & St John 1998). Football language, as already argued, makes up
the most widespread special language of all in terms of the number of people
using it, as regards speaking and writing as well as listening and reading. It
should, therefore, be of obvious linguistic interest, as should sports language in
general (cf. section 2.1). Nonetheless, at least to the best of our knowledge, no
8
Another well-known example of chanting is Carefree, sung by Chelsea fans: “Carefree, wherever
we may be/ We are the famous CFC/ And we don't care/ Whoever you may be/ 'Cause we are the
famous CFC.”

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large-scale, systematic inventory of English football vocabulary has so far been
undertaken; there is no comprehensive, let alone scholarly, dictionary of English
(nor of any other) football language.
9
This lack of lexicological and lexicographic
coverage may be contrasted to the existence of special-language dictionaries like,
to name but a few, the Oxford Dictionary of Business English (1993) or the
Cambridge Air and Space Dictionary (1990) – not to mention the field of
Academic English, to which especially large amounts of scholarly as well as
pedagogical interest have been devoted in recent years (cf. e.g. Biber et al. 1999,
Schleppegrell 2004, Carter & McCarthy 2006:267–294, Longman Exams
Dictionary 2006).
In actual fact, Lavric et al.’s The Linguistics of Football (2008), dealing with a
plethora of languages, may be seen as a pioneering work, as indicated by its
publication date. In her “Introduction” to the volume (p. 5), Eva Lavric stresses
the potential of football as a field of linguistic inquiry:
This volume is meant to illustrate the richness of linguistic analysis in connection with
football. Combining these two fields – football and linguistics – has hardly been attempted
before, but the articles in this book clearly show how promising and fruitful, in terms of
insights into both domains, such an undertaking can be.
In other words, interest in football language is a fairly recent scholarly concern,
except, it may be argued, with regard to English loanwords in other languages, to
which considerable attention has been paid, especially concerning sports
language at large (cf. e.g. Schönfelder 1954, Fisiak 1964, Tingbjörn 2003).
Despite this, however, the total volume of research specifically devoted to football
language may be described as relatively limited.
10
To be sure, Lavric et al. (2008) do account for a great deal of interesting work
on football language, English and other, mostly relating to reporting and
commentary in different media (e.g. Chovanec 2008, Vierkant 2008; cf. also
Ferguson 1983, Anderson 1994). Fields dealt with include, among others,
vocabulary and phraseology (e.g. Levin 2008, Schmidt 2008) as well as grammar
(Müller 2008, Walker 2008, Wiredu & Anderson 2008); two articles (Nordin
2008, Vierkant 2008) specifically treat the use of metaphor in football
9
The existence of practically oriented word-lists of football terms, e.g. BBC Learning English –
Vocabulary, Football (2010) and England Football Online. Glossary of Football Terms and
Phrases (2005), does not affect the general picture. This also applies to a work like Leigh &
Woodhouse (2006), which, however, despite its popular and somewhat idiosyncratic nature,
provides a wealth of linguistically relevant information about football language, as do Leith (1998)
and Seddon (2004). Although not a strictly scholarly work, Burkhardt’s (2006) Wörterbuch der
Fußballsprache, a monolingual dictionary accounting for and exemplifying 2200
“Fußballbegriffe”, also deserves mention in this connection. A more linguistically sophisticated
project, although of limited scope, is the “Kicktionary”, aiming at an electronic multilingual
football-language resource (Schmidt 2008).
10
Cf., however, the bibliography on “football and language” compiled by The Innsbruck Football
Research Group (2008). The reason for linguists’ relative lack of interest in football language can
only be a matter for speculation.

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commentary, although not with regard to English.
11
There are also articles on
English loanwords in various languages (e.g. Pintarić 2008, on Croatian; Sepęk
2008, on Polish). Dosev (2008:63), discussing Bulgarian, points out that “in most
European languages” such loans “are the most characteristic way of providing
football-specific lexis”; cf. Bergh & Ohlander (2012). It should be noted that the
majority of the contributions in Lavric et al. (2008) are focused on other
languages than English.
It might be thought, in view of its obvious social dimensions, that football
should have left, more or less, an “open goal” for a wide variety of sociolinguistic
research. This, however, hardly seems to have been the case, as noted by Gerhardt
(2011):
Considering the wealth of sociological literature on football … and the range of topics
involved (e.g. politics, economics, media, nationalism, racism, globalization, fan cultures,
social identity), it seems surprising that this domain has not been investigated in any depth
in sociolinguistics.
12
To summarize, the general impression is that, from a linguistic point of view,
football may be regarded as an under-researched but potentially rewarding field of
inquiry, largely uncharted territory in need of further exploration. This applies to
football language in general, in a global perspective, but also to English football
language. In a way, this can be seen as a paradoxical state of affairs, given the
history of the game and the role of English as a source of inspiration and supplier
of loanwords to football languages around the world.
3. Exploring English football language: a research project
The picture emerging from the preceding section clearly indicates a need for
further research into football language in general, and English football language in
particular. The ongoing project described in the following pages, initiated a few
years ago, should be seen as an attempt to address the relative scarcity, so far, of
in-depth linguistic accounts of various aspects of English football language. The
title of the project is: “English football language: exploring the ‘special language’
of a global sport.”
13
3.1 Aims and overall structure
The primary purpose of the project is lexicological, aiming at a thorough account
of the vocabulary used in communication about football, along a variety of
contextual settings (cf. section 2.1). In part, this will be done from an English–
Swedish contrastive perspective. A concrete result of the inventory of the lexical
11
For English football metaphors, see e.g. Beard (1998:53ff.), Chapanga (2004), Bergh (2011).
12
In this connection, football in relation to gender should provide a particularly interesting angle.
13
Apart from the authors, the project team includes Christian Sjögreen, University of Gothenburg,
in charge of various computer-related aspects of the lexicographic part of the project.

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items – words and phrases – will be a scholarly bilingual football dictionary
(English–Swedish, Swedish–English). The lexicological/lexicographic description
makes up the core of the project. This is a logical reflection of the fact that “the
lexicon of special languages is their most obvious distinguishing characteristic”
(Sager et al. 1980:230; cf. Svensén 2009:72).
The lexicological core of the project is also intended to provide a platform for a
number of studies on more specific aspects of English football language. In
particular, this “periphery”, accounted for in more detail in section 3.4, aims to
elucidate the following set of topics:
 language specificity: how sharply delimited is English football language from general
language and sports language, especially with regard to vocabulary? (cf. section 2.1);
 lexical patterns: phraseological and semantic properties of English football vocabulary,
focused mainly on collocation and polysemy;
 grammatical features: particularly football-specific syntactic characteristics of certain
verb constructions as regards the number and types of complements (valency) that
certain verbs may take;
 metaphorical expressions: the use of different types of metaphor relating to English
football language;
 historical development: diachronic aspects of English football vocabulary, as related to
the continuous development of the game, its organization, settings, etc., since the 19th
century;
 cross-linguistic influence: the extent to which English football vocabulary has affected
other European languages, especially with regard to direct borrowing and loan
translation.
The overall architecture of the project – its “core” and ”periphery” – can be
visualized as follows:

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Figure 3. Structural outline of the present project
3.2 Material and some methodological aspects
The aims and scope of the project build on the collection and analysis, from
various perspectives, of large amounts of authentic material, spoken as well as
written. Since there is no shortage of readily accessible football-related material,
the problem is, if anything, one of embarras de richesse.
The written material includes, apart from the Laws of the Game and similar
official publications, news articles and commentary from (electronically
published) British newspapers, e.g. The Guardian, The Independent, The Sun, The
Daily Mail; correspondingly, in a Swedish context, Swedish newspapers like
Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten are used. Follow-up
reporting and further commentary in magazines like World Soccer, FIFA
Magazine and When Saturday Comes (WSC) provide equally valuable sources, as
do, for Swedish, Offside and FourFourTwo. Other written material includes books
on football history, e.g. Goldblatt (2007), Lyons & Ronay (2006) and Wilson
(2008). Fiction like Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (1992), mentioned earlier, as well
as, e.g., David Beckham’s autobiography My Side (2003), along with their
Swedish translations, also contains large amounts of football language, including
dialogue; so does, for Swedish, Zlatan Ibrahimović’s bestselling autobiography,
Jag är Zlatan Ibrahimović (2011).
English
football
language
1. Language
specificity
2. Lexical
patterns
3. Gram-
matical
features
4. Meta-
phorical
expressions
5. Historical
develop-
ment
6. Cross-
linguistic
influence

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A kind of written-spoken hybrid language is to be found in the minute-by-
minute match reporting and commentary written on the Internet while a game is
being played (cf. Chovanec 2008, Bergh 2011:85f.). When it comes to spoken
football language, the main sources are provided by TV and radio, match
reporting and commentary, post-match interviews, etc. These resources, in turn,
are complemented by selected language corpora and other textual collections,
containing mainly written texts but also some spoken material. For English
reference, The British National Corpus (BNC) is a valuable source, containing
some 100 million words of sampled text, of which 10 per cent consist of
transcribed speech, as well as the huge TenTen web corpus provided by Sketch
Engine (cf. Kilgarriff et al. 2004), amounting at present to some 2.7 billion words;
for Swedish reference, the various collections at Språkbanken are useful,
primarily those featuring blog material (“Bloggmix” – 267 million words) and
other web-related texts (“SweWaC” – 115 million words; see further
http://spraakbanken.gu.se/korp/).
A special resource, in the form of a corpus of some 87,000 words, may also be
mentioned here. It is made up of downloaded minute-by-minute reporting and
commentary on all the 31 games played in Euro 2008, deriving from the web
edition of The Guardian. Even though this corpus will need to be considerably
expanded to provide reliable data on all aspects of authentic football language, the
potential of such a corpus can be illustrated by the following brief extract of the
“Guardian corpus”, showing the frequencies, absolute as well as relative, of the
word goal and a number of words having goal as its first element:
Table 1. Extract from the “Guardian corpus”
341 0.3927% goal
2 0.0023% goal-bound
1 0.0012% goalie
1 0.0012% goal-ish
13 0.0150% goalkeeper
2 0.0023% goalkeepers
6 0.0069% goalkeeping
4 0.0046% goal-kick
2 0.0023% goalless
6 0.0069% goalline
2 0.0023% goalmouth
41 0.0472% goals
3 0.0035% goalscorer
2 0.0023% goalscoring
1 0.0012% goalside
9 0.0104% goalwards
As to Swedish football language, we have at our disposal a unique material in
electronic form, namely all the articles published in the Swedish football
magazine Offside over a period of ten years. This material has been organized into
a corpus of close to 1.8 million words, with some shallow tagging added in terms
of authorship, year and issue. As such, it is much larger than the above-mentioned
“Guardian corpus”, enabling various types of relevant searches on Swedish
football vocabulary. Like the English example from the small “Guardian corpus”,
the example below from the “Offside corpus” involving the word mål ‘goal’ and a
set of words having mål as its initial component, gives an idea of the relevance

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and usefulness of this kind of material, for example in decisions concerning which
words to include as headwords in a bilingual dictionary of the kind planned within
the project.
Table 2. Extract from the “Offside corpus”
2247 0.1270% mål
11 0.0006% måla
1 0.0001% målaptit
1 0.0001% målburen
31 0.0018% målchans
1 0.0001% måldiffen
2 0.0001% målfacit
3 0.0002% målfarlig
2 0.0001% målfattigt
2 0.0001% målfest
1 0.0001% målgest
11 0.0006% målgivande
1 0.0001% målglada
24 0.0014% målgörare
1 0.0001% målis
1 0.0001% måljingel
Naturally, the Internet is also a great supplier of football language from a variety
of sources, such as the home pages of FIFA and UEFA, lengthy football entries in
Wikipedia, electronic fan blogs and fanzines as well as other kinds of informal
commentary, often approaching the informality of spontaneous speech.
Furthermore, Google searches provide a virtually unlimited source of more
specific information on authentic football language, especially with regard to the
frequency of individual words and phrases, as well as collocational patterns. From
a lexicographic point of view, the Internet is an invaluable asset, serving as a
complement to the time-consuming manual excerption of lexical items qualifying
for inclusion in the dictionary; it is also an inexhaustible source of authentic
examples.
Finally, a number of dictionaries – English as well as Swedish – have been
found indispensable for various purposes, such as determining the degree of
football specificity of certain lexical items, like offside and striker, or establishing
the approximate date of first occurrence for a certain football term, like crossbar
and yellow card (see further section 3.4). Both general-purpose dictionaries and
learners’ dictionaries, from OED and ODE to Longman Dictionary of
Contemporary English (LDOCE) and Macmillan English Dictionary for
Advanced Learners (MED), are of great help in such endeavours.
3.3 The lexicological core
According to Lavric (2008:5), “[t]he language of football is first and foremost
terminology.” Thus, it is only to be expected that the core of a research project on
football language should be of a lexicological nature. As already implied, the lexis
of the football domain may be more many-splendoured than that of most special
languages, due to the wide variety of settings – from narrowly technical to
extremely public – in which football finds itself at centre stage. Despite this,
Schmidt (2008:20) finds it reasonable to characterize football language as having
“a large but manageably-sized vocabulary”.

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Our main lexicological concern is English – more specifically British English –
football vocabulary, its forms (words and phrases) and meanings, especially in
relation to the vocabulary of general language. Its aim is to provide as complete
an inventory as possible of the lexical items of this special language, including all
its subdomains, on or off the pitch. The theoretical interest of such an undertaking
should be obvious, providing a rich material for linguistic research along formal,
semantic and sociolinguistic dimensions. A more practical, lexicographic, result
will be a scholarly bilingual English–Swedish dictionary. As far as we know, it
will be the first of its kind, i.e. a “special dictionary” in the sense of Malkiel
(1967:23): such dictionaries of “highly specialized vocabularies of trades, crafts,
arts, and sciences” – and sports, it might be added – deal with vocabularies that
are “unrepresentative of the common core of the lexicon”.
14
The basic
lexicological and lexicographic challenge, then, is to establish the line of
demarcation between the specialized vocabulary and the “common core” of the
lexicon. With regard to football language, as already noted, this demarcation line
may be more difficult to determine than for most other special languages.
Compiling a bilingual football dictionary means that the project’s main focus on
English football vocabulary has to be supplemented by a contrastive perspective,
involving Swedish. Such a perspective will be consistently applied in our work on
the dictionary. However, although the dictionary is planned to be bilingual,
providing Swedish equivalents (translations) for English headwords as well as the
other way around, thus consisting of two parts (i.e. English headwords – Swedish
equivalents, Swedish headwords – English equivalents), it is intended mainly for
Swedish users. As noted early on by Harrell (1967:51), in his discussion of
bilingual lexicography, “[i]t is clearly impossible to pay equal attention to both X-
speakers and Y-speakers in one and the same work.” In technical terms, the
football dictionary under way will thus be a bilingual dictionary of the
“monodirectional” rather than “bidirectional” kind.
15
This will, in certain respects,
affect the types of linguistic information supplied. For instance, information
concerning the gender and plural formation of Swedish nouns – e.g. mål ‘goal’ or
frispark ‘free kick’ – will not normally be given, such knowledge being presumed
for speakers of Swedish. Further the metalanguage, i.e. the dictionary’s
description language, will be Swedish, such as labels indicating the degree of
formality for a specific lexical item, like spot kick (referring to the penalty spot) as
an informal alternative to penalty (kick), both corresponding to Sw. straff(spark);
or the marking of a certain word as historical or obsolete, e.g. centre half,
nowadays roughly corresponding to terms like centre back or central defender (cf.
also stopper, sweeper, libero; see Leith 1998:42).
14
For a typology of “specialized dictionaries”, see Svensén (2009:30ff.). Malkiel’s term “special
dictionaries” (1967:22f.) corresponds roughly to Svensén’s term “technical dictionaries”; cf.
Atkins & Rundell (2008:24). See also Bergenholtz & Tarp (1995).
15
For a thorough discussion of bilingual dictionaries, focusing on the monodirectional–
bidirectional distinction, see Svensén 2009:16ff., 28f.); cf. also Atkins & Rundell (2008:39ff.),
Haas (1967) and Al-Kasimi (1983:18ff.).

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Now, as regards the bilingual dictionary under construction, it goes without
saying that the lexicological inventory forming its basis is likely to yield a good
deal of interesting information on the relations between the vocabularies involved
in the domain of football. Inherent in any bilingual dictionary is a detailed
account, involving thousands of lexical items, of explicit and implicit similarities
and differences between the lexicons of two specific languages. Here only a few
indications of some large-scale dimensions in the overall relationship between
English and Swedish football vocabulary can be given.
First of all, with regard to similarities, it must be noted that Swedish, along with
many other languages, European and other (cf. section 3.4), has internalized
numerous English football terms in the form of direct loans, integrated to varying
degrees into Swedish, phonologically and/or morphologically.
16
Examples (in
Swedish) may be taken from various subdomains: match, derby, back, forward,
playmaker, dribbla, tackla, hat-trick, foul, offside, supporter, huligan. Even more
frequent than direct loans are semantic loans, where an already existing, single
Swedish word has taken on a new, football-related sense, e.g. Sw. hörna < corner,
and the closely related category of loan translations (calques), usually involving
compounds, e.g. Sw. frispark < free kick. Other examples include skjuta < shoot,
mål < goal, försvarare < defender as well as fotboll < football, gult (rött) kort <
yellow (red) card, avspark < kick-off, inkast < throw-in, mittfältare < midfielder.
For some Swedish expressions, however, it may be difficult to determine whether
it is a true loan translation or an independent creation that happens to coincide,
semantically and morphologically, with its English equivalent. For example, a
compound like Sw. måltorka looks like a deliberate, literal translation of goal
drought – but need not be; nor should it be a problem from a purely lexicographic
point of view.
In many cases, the relationship between the two languages is of a less
straightforward kind. This occurs when an English expression corresponds to a
more independent, native Swedish equivalent, with the same meaning but not
related to the corresponding English word. For example, the English noun draw ‘a
game ending with scores even’, as in The match ended in a goalless draw,
corresponds to Sw. oavgjort (resultat) ‘undecided (result)’. Similarly, what in
English is referred to as a set piece – mainly involving free kicks, penalty kicks
and corner kicks – is in Swedish called fast situation ‘fixed situation’. The English
noun dive (as in the phrase take a dive) corresponds to Sw. filmning ‘playacting,
putting on a show (to influence the referee)’, a different kind of metaphor from
the English expression; its exact Swedish equivalent, i.e. the literal translation of
the English metaphor, would be dykning – which, incidentally, is not unheard of
in Swedish football reporting as a synonym of filmning, thus a semantic loan (cf.
above) indicating English influence.
17
16
For different types of English loans in Swedish, see Ljung (1988:60ff.) and Stålhammar
2010:22ff.). Cf. also Edlund & Hene (1992:32ff.), Andersson (2001) as well as Haugen (1950).
17
In the expression diving header, corresponding to Sw. språngskalle, diving is used in another,
more literal sense.

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Occasionally, the relationship between English and Swedish football language
may be characterized as one of false friendship. False friends, of course, make up
a familiar and troublesome phenomenon for language students at large (cf. well-
known English–Swedish cases like actual – aktuell ‘current’ and eventual –
eventuell ‘possibly occurring’).
18
For example, goal kick has nothing to do with
scoring a goal, as the literal Sw. equivalent målspark might suggest; the correct
Swedish translation is inspark (literally: ‘in-kick’). Another example is the
Swedish noun tunnel (cf. also the transitive verb tunnla), which means ‘playing
the ball through the legs of an opponent’; Engl. tunnel, however, refers to the
passage (Sw. spelargång) through which players enter the pitch (for somewhat
obscure reasons, the English equivalent of Sw. tunnel/tunnla is nutmeg, less
frequently used by British commentators than tunnel by their Swedish
counterparts).
A few words should also be said about the frequent absence of a one-to-one
correspondence between football vocabulary in English and Swedish. To be sure,
many lexical items in the two languages display a one-to-one relation, where a
specific word or phrase in one language corresponds to one – and only one – word
or phrase in the other, as testified by examples like pass – passa, referee –
domare, goalpost – målstolpe, and throw-in – inkast. However, there are also
numerous instances of the opposite situation, where either English or Swedish has
two (or more) lexical items corresponding to only one in the other language. This
means that, in many cases, one of the two languages has more synonyms (or near-
synonyms) than the other. Our impression so far, however, is that English appears
to have more synonyms than Swedish with regard to central football vocabulary.
In fact, English examples of such synonymy seem to be in relative abundance. A
typical case involves the two words team and its synonym side, both
corresponding to Sw. lag – which, incidentally is why David Beckham’s
punningly titled autobiography, My Side (2003), could not find an equally
ambiguous title in Swedish translation (Mina ord). Other examples are provided
by the two English words equivalent to Sw. (lag)kapten, i.e. captain and skipper,
as well as by offside rule and offside law corresponding to Sw. offsideregel;
similarly both tackle and challenge translate into Sw. tackling (or tackla). Further,
the Swedish term straffområdet is equivalent to the penalty area, the penalty box
or the 18-yard box, often shortened to simply the area or the box.
19
In many cases, both English and Swedish may boast more than just one
expression for (more or less) the same basic concept, e.g. Engl. added time, injury
time, stoppage time – Sw. tilläggstid, stopptid. Generally speaking, however,
English appears to have more alternatives than Swedish in such cases, too. For
instance, when talking about imparting spin to the ball, e.g. in performing a free
kick or a cross (cf. below), English has a wide range of verbs to choose from:
bend (cf. the film title Bend It Like Beckham), curl, curve and swerve; spin, by
18
For some discussion of false friendship, see Ohlander (1997).
19
In Swedish football reporting, the direct loan boxen (‘the box’) as an alternative to straffområdet
has become increasingly common in the last few years or so.

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contrast, is mostly used in games like tennis and cricket, according to ODE.
Swedish normally uses the verb skruva or, informally, knorra; Engl. screw, on the
other hand, would qualify as an extremely false friend in a footballing context, but
not in games like billiards and snooker in the sense of ‘backspin’ (ODE). At the
same time, it should be noted that both languages have a variety of expressions for
basic notions like the way a kick is executed: belt, boot, cannon, chip, clip, crash,
dink, flick, lash, power, side-foot, ram, slam, tap, wellie, whip, etc. (cf. Seddon
2004:125ff.); or how an opponent can be defeated: beat, bring down, crush,
defeat, dump out, hammer, outclass, see off, thrash, upset, etc. In Swedish, there is
a similar range of expressions, e.g. dundra, klippa till, panga, smeka, slå, smälla,
stöta, trycka, as well as besegra, mosa, krossa, köra över, slå, utklassa.
Clear examples where Swedish has more synonymous expressions than English
are harder to find. A possible example involves the notion of ‘hitting the ball with
one’s head’, where English normally uses the verb head, and occasionally nod,
while Swedish has the verbs nicka, skalla and – informally – knoppa. Another
example might be Engl. cross, corresponding to either inlägg or cross(passning)
in Swedish. Strictly speaking, however, this is hardly a genuine example of
Swedish synonymy since the two Swedish terms, though semantically related,
mean different things. The English football term cross should rather be seen as a
case of polysemy, where each subsense has its own Swedish equivalent.
20
Still, of
course, two Swedish words correspond to one polysemous – and thus ambiguous
– word in English. A similar lack of exact “fit” between the two languages is to be
found in the Swedish distinction between kortlinje and mållinje, both of which
may be rendered by goalline in English (cf. e.g. Norstedts Comprehensive
English–Swedish Dictionary); on its own, then, a sentence like The ball passed the
goal line is embarrassingly ambiguous, corresponding to two Swedish
translations. On the other hand, there is also the word byline (or byeline), not
given in Norstedts Comprehensive Swedish–English Dictionary but defined in the
ODE as ‘the part of the goal line to either side of the goal’. Again, this is – in
either language – hardly a case of synonymy as the meanings of the various words
are not identical, or even near-identical.
21
A different kind of example illustrating poor “fit” between Swedish and English
football vocabulary involves Sw. utspark, similar but not identical in meaning to
inspark (goal kick; cf. above). English apparently lacks a single equivalent for this
Swedish term – which means, roughly, that the goalkeeper, e.g. after a save where
the ball has not passed the byline, kicks the ball upfield for his or her team to pick
up for a new attack.
22
Words like drop kick, mainly restricted to rugby football,
20
Cf. ODE (cross): ‘a pass of the ball across the field towards the centre close to one’s opponent’s
goal’; this definition, it appears, fails to fully cover the distinction between the two subsenses of
cross.
21
Cf. the Laws of the Game (2008/2009; “The Field of Play: Field Markings”): “The two longer
boundary lines are called touch lines. The two shorter lines are called goal lines.”
22
For the distinction between inspark and utspark, see Svensk ordbok. Interestingly, Norstedts
Comprehensive Swedish–English Dictionary states that Sw. utspark corresponds to goalkick; this

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and punt do not cover the specific meaning of utspark; a term like kick-out, so far
absent from English football language, would be sorely needed to fill the gap …
Similarly, the precise equivalent of the Swedish noun djupled, increasingly
frequent in football reporting over the past twenty years or so, not least in phrases
like löpa/passa i djupled or compunds like djupledslöpning/-passning, has caused
a good deal of bafflement among a number of otherwise well-informed native
speakers of football English. The meaning of the Swedish expression is not in
itself the problem, implying movement along the length of the pitch, especially by
attacking players in their opponent’s half. Different people have come up with
different suggestions, like running from deep or make a (vertical) run for löpa i
djupled. None of them, however, seems to capture the essence and wide
applicability of the Swedish term. Our conclusion so far is that there seems to be
no readily available, standard equivalent in English for the ubiquitous Swedish
expression – a literal translation like in depth obviously will not do.
Naturally, there are also cases where an English expression lacks a concise one-
word Swedish equivalent. For example, the normal Swedish expression
corresponding to the pivotal English football verb score, as in She scored twice, is
the verb phrase göra (or lägga) mål (literally: ‘make/lay a goal’).
23
An even
clearer example is provided by the English verb wrongfoot, as in Messi’s free kick
took a deflection, wrongfooting the poor goalkeeper. The meaning of wrongfoot is
transparent enough and can hardly be missed. In Swedish, however, there is no
corresponding verb, simple or compound; several words are needed to convey the
meaning of wrongfoot (cf. ODE: ‘play so as to catch (an opponent) off balance’).
In this connection, the English word WAG may also be mentioned. A fairly
recent invention, the word is an acronym, derived from Wives And Girlfriends,
specifically of football players. Again, Swedish lacks a concise expression of a
similar kind, being stuck with a clumsy phrase like spelarfruar och flickvänner.
Our discussion in the preceding paragraphs has been intended to show the
occasional lack, at different levels, of a one-to-one correspondence between
English and Swedish football vocabulary, resulting in a poor “fit” – or
translatability – between the two languages. Such discrepancies, of course, are
legion in general language as well. Before we leave this aspect of lexicological
comparison, having obvious implications for the compilation of a bilingual
football dictionary, a few words should be said about the classical lexicographic
problem of how to handle homonymy versus polysemy in the dictionary – with
regard to wordclass distinctions (e.g. attack as noun or verb) as well as semantic
differences (e.g. leg as ‘limb’ or as ‘match, round’). This is not the place to
embark on a full discussion of this issue; the main arguments are well known (see,
e.g., Lyons 1977:550ff.; Cruse 1986:80; Atkins & Rundell 2008: 191ff., 280ff.;
is hardly correct, however, as indirectly implied by Norstedts Comprehensive English–Swedish
Dictionary, where the headword goalkick gives inspark as its only Swedish equivalent.
23
In early 20th-century Swedish football language, scora (like goal or gål) was in common use as
a direct loan in Swedish (see Tingbjörn 2003:488). Swedish football commentators occasionally
use verbs like näta (cf. Engl. to net) and måla, but neither of them is very frequent.

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Svensén 2009:94ff.). Suffice it to say here that, mainly for reasons of user-
friendliness and transparency, we have decided to (1) use separate headwords for
different wordclasses of “the same” lexical form, e.g. one headword for draw as a
noun and one for draw as a verb (as in ODE); (2) use semantic subsections,
whether of a polysemous or homonymous kind, within the same headword (such
as the different meanings of draw as a noun, or of draw as a verb (as in LDOCE).
This approach is illustrated below:
1draw noun
1 oavgjord match The match ended in a goalless draw
2 lottning The draw for the World Cup placed Sweden in the group of death
2draw verb
1 spela oavgjort Bolton drew 2-2 with Leeds
2 lottas i Italy and Brazil were both drawn in Group A
3 locka, dra Racing Club drew the third-biggest crowds in the country
4 finta bort, dra He advanced down the left, drew two men, and played the ball inside to
Torres
The same basic principles apply to Swedish headwords. However, Swedish
lexical items may, in a few rare cases, appear as distinct headwords because of
formal differences below wordclass level, such as gender. One such example is
Sw. straff ‘penalty’, where the gender difference also indicates a difference in
meaning, manifesting itself with regard to articles, definite form and plural
formation: ett straff, straffet, straff (zero plural) ‘penalty (general sense)’ versus
en straff, straffen, straffar ‘penalty (kick)’. The differences are exemplified
below:
1straff noun [non-neuter] penalty (kick) Rooney converted a penalty on 60
minutes
2straff noun [neuter] penalty Rooney’s penalty was a two-match ban
3.4 The periphery: some specific studies
The lexicological core outlined and illustrated in the preceding section, from a
predominantly contrastive English–Swedish perspective, provides a point of
departure not only for a bilingual dictionary but also for a number of specific
studies of football language (cf. section 3.1). Here, too, our main focus will be on
English football language, even though a cross-linguistic dimension will be
present to some extent, especially concerning Swedish but also some other
languages.
The set of studies – some of which are in progress – can be said to belong within
the following broad areas of English football language: its delimitation in relation
to general language and sports language; language structure, involving, in
particular, specific features of some English “football verbs”; historical

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development, i.e. the emergence of English football vocabulary and its gradual
influence on general language; its relation to other European languages, i.e. the
impact of football English on other football languages. The former two areas
concern distinctive features of football language from an “internal”, purely
synchronic perspective, while the latter two relate to wider, more “external”
dimensions in time and place, focusing on diachronic and cross-linguistic aspects.
Below a brief outline of the studies in question will be given, along with some
exemplification.
As already pointed out, a basic question concerns language specificity, to which
one of the special studies is devoted. It is related to the fact that, like other special
languages, football language is partly made up of lexical items and other features
that are shared with general language – or, in the case of football language, with
sports language (cf. section 2.1). The study thus aims to identify, on the basis of a
selection of frequently used lexical items and mainly in quantitative terms, the
relationship between football language, sports language and general language,
vocabulary being its main focus. The key issue is to what extent the lexical items
in English football language, with regard to form and/or meaning, are more or less
exclusively football-oriented (e.g. free kick), or whether they are also part of
either sports language (e.g. semi-final) or general language (e.g. win). In other
words, how specific is football vocabulary, as measured by the proportion of
specifically football-related words and phrases, i.e. how sharply delimited is it
from general language and sports language?
To investigate this, well-established general-purpose dictionaries such as the
ODE and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COED) will be used as
benchmarks. Thus, if a football term is not included in such dictionaries, it will be
classified as outside general language, i.e. as being either specific to football
language or as being part of sports language. This applies, for instance, to the verb
bend in its special football sense (cf. above) and also to the adverb home in
connection with goal scoring, as in Gerrard headed home (‘Gerrard headed the
ball into goal’). The following table provides an illustration of how general-
purpose dictionaries like the ODE and the COED can be of use in determining
specificity:
Table 3. Inclusion of some football terms in general-purpose dictionaries
ODE (2010)
COED (2011)
full back
+
+
wide man
–
–
own goal
+
+
away goal
–
–
free kick
+
+
bicycle kick
–
–
libero
+
+
catenaccio
+
–

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Further, domain labels given in dictionaries – e.g. “sport”, “football” or “soccer”
– are obviously useful in determining the relative specificity of expressions used
in football language. The following (simplified) examples from the ODE will
illustrate the point at issue:
goal noun 1 (in football, rugby, hockey, and some other games) …
corner noun 5 (also corner kick) soccer …
nutmeg verb soccer, informal …
24
Since all the three words are included in a general-purpose dictionary like ODE,
they can all be regarded as being part of general language, as opposed to, e.g.,
football words like bend and home in the senses commented on above. On the
other hand, they are all marked as sports terms, goal being used in a variety of
sports, whereas – at least according to ODE – corner (kick) and nutmeg are
exclusive to football (soccer). Of the latter two, corner (kick) is, intuitively
speaking, much less specific and more frequent than nutmeg, as also indicated by
its absence from learners’ dictionaries like LDOCE or MED.
As the above discussion will have shown, determining the specificity of football
vocabulary is not an altogether straightforward matter. The borderlines between
the three lexical levels of general language, sports language and “exclusive”
football language are not always, in individual cases, easy to establish, not even
with the help of different general-purpose and learners’ dictionaries.
The special character of football language manifests itself in other ways, too,
beyond individual words and their meanings. This applies not least to
phraseological and semantic features in multi-word combinations, especially with
regard to collocation and polysemy. Such properties of football language provide
the field of inquiry for a specific study of lexical patterns.
Listening to live football commentary, one is often struck by the number of
frequently recurring phrases, or collocations, that make up a large proportion of
the flow of words (cf. Levin 2008). Unmistakable instances include noun phrases
such as a goalless draw, a glorious goal, a reckless challenge – the latter often
more or less synonymous to a late tackle. A somewhat more surprising example is
an educated left foot (cf. Leigh & Woodhouse 2006:63), to be compared with Sw.
en känslig vänsterfot (‘a sensitive left foot’). Equally surprising – but only from
the point of view of the general-language sense of the verb award and the noun
penalty – is the collocation to award a penalty, as in Arsenal were awarded a last-
minute penalty; the verb award normally collocates with “positive” nouns as its
object, like prize or scholarship. In football language, however, the phrase is
24
Cf. Seddon (2004:9), complaining that “our national game is shoddily treated by that large body
of literature known as ‘word books’”, using the purported absence of nutmeg in the OED to prove
his case; in the current online OED, however, nutmeg as a football term is actually included (first
occurrence as a noun: 1968; as a verb: 1975).

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never perceived as a paradox or contradiction, unlike in normal life (cf. e.g. the
absurdity of a sentence like *The murderer was awarded the death penalty / a life
sentence). On the contrary, it is perfectly normal football usage: in football, a
penalty implies an advantage for the attacking team, a very clear opportunity to
score a goal. The specific sense of penalty thus paves the way for an otherwise
unexpected collocation, so common that it may be regarded as a fixed phrase. In
fact, football language – especially, perhaps, in connection with events on the
pitch – seems to provide a rich field for investigating those “chunks” or ”prefabs”
that make up a large proportion of ordinary language use, often referred to as the
“idiom principle” (Sinclair 1991). In assessing the specificity of football-language
collocations in relation to general language, collocations dictionaries like the
Oxford Collocations Dictionary (2002) and the Macmillan Collocations
Dictionary (2010) will be drawn on (cf. Ohlander 2004).
A slightly different kind of lexical patterning, although related to collocation,
involves the use – unconventional, from a general-language perspective – of a few
common verbs of position in specific football contexts. This is shown by the
following examples illustrating the use of stand, sit and lie: The referee let the
goal stand (i.e. allowed the goal despite some previous controversy), The
midfielders were sitting (lying) deep (i.e. playing in markedly defensive
positions). In the last example, the synonymous phrases lie deep and sit deep (cf.
also drop deep), not usually included in dictionaries (cf. e.g. ODE and LDOCE),
can be said to have a special, idiomatic football meaning, basically depending on
the adverb deep in the special sense of ‘defensively, in a defensive position’,
again not to be found in most general dictionaries.
25
The examples all demonstrate
the kind of idiosyncratic – rather than “regular” or “systematic” – polysemy that
may arise from frequent everyday words used in a figurative, not completely
predictable sense in a certain context, such as football (cf. Malmgren 1988, Atkins
& Rundell 2008:286f., Svensén 2009:209).
Phrases and idioms of the types just discussed are as typical of football language
as single words with specific meanings. This also applies to certain grammatical
features of football language. For instance, the unconventional use of the present
perfect in English football reporting and commentary has been noted (see Walker
2008). Similarly, the widespread use of the present – a variety of the historic
present, it would appear – rather than the past tense by players and coaches in,
especially, post-match interviews, is a characteristic feature of Swedish football
language.
Our study of some grammatical features of English football language will focus
on certain aspects of verb syntax, particularly questions concerning valency. In
this field – related to the idiomatic nature of phrases like sit (lie) deep, mentioned
above – the grammatical behaviour of some verbs with regard to their
complement structure may be seen as unexpected, at least from a conventional
25
Nor, as a rule, are phrases like sit deep and lie deep to be found in special idiom dictionaries; cf.
e.g. Cowie & Mackin (1985).

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grammatical perspective. Consider the following sentence: Rooney was awarded a
penalty but failed to convert. To speakers of English football language, the
meaning is perfectly clear: Rooney did not score but missed the penalty kick, i.e.
he failed to convert the penalty into goal (cf. Sw. omsätta straffen i mål). This use
of the verb convert, without any sort of complement, deviates from normal usage
and seems to have gone unnoticed in most dictionaries; for example, there is no
mention of it in learners’ dictionaries like LDOCE or MED.
26
Another case of
missing object involves the specific use of the verb concede without an object or
other complement, as exemplified in Chelsea conceded again a minute from time
(i.e. Chelsea let in a goal just before the final whistle). A related – but not
identical – case is illustrated by the following example: Ronaldo tested the keeper
once more but was denied a second time (i.e. Ronaldo failed to score).
Other examples of more or less deviant verb usage include cases like the
following: The manager decided to rest two of his key players, Sir Alex played
none of his favourite midfielders in the derby, Many top clubs in Europe
systematically sign African players. In all these examples, a verb (rest, play, sign)
is used with a type of object, denoting human beings, that is unconventional from
a general-language point of view. Normally, you can rest your case, play a game
or sign a contract – but hardly people.
27
In all three sentences, the verbs are used
in a kind of pseudo-causative way, somewhat reminiscent of generative semantics
of the 1970s; cf. clumsy semantic paraphrases involving the verb cause: rest ≈
‘cause to rest’, play ≈ ‘cause to play’, sign ≈ cause to sign (a contract)’.
As the above, necessarily brief outline and exemplification will have suggested,
verb syntax may prove a worthwhile field of inquiry with regard to certain
football-specific properties of common verbs, especially concerning their valency.
It seems clear that football language, as well as sports language at large, displays
characteristic properties that are, to a greater or lesser extent, at odds with more
conventional patterns of English grammar. Verb syntax is unlikely to be the only
such field. For instance, the use of articles and prepositional expressions in
football language may also be worth looking into; cf. expressions like in midfield,
(a shot) at/on goal, in goal, from time, on the half-hour.
The three studies outlined above all concern, from different perspectives,
characteristic features of football as a special language, features that contribute to
its specialness. At the same time, the boundary between football language and
general language is a pervious one, promoting transition between them (cf. section
2.1). Nowhere, perhaps, is this more apparent than with regard to metaphorical
26
To be sure, ODE gives the specific meaning involved – ‘score from (a penalty kick, pass, or
other opportunity) in a sport or game’ – but uses the notation [with obj.] to indicate, wrongly, that
it should be used transitively, as can also be gathered from the definition provided; that it may be
used with an object is another matter.
27
Incidentally, Swedish has adopted the same kind of usage, most likely as construction loans
from English; in the case of sign, however, informal Swedish often uses a direct loan (sajna) as a
direct equivalent to the English usage, as in Ingen klubb vill sajna en skadad målvakt (‘No club
wants to sign an injured keeper’).

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expressions, an aspect of football language meriting special attention.
First of all, there is the all-pervasive “master metaphor”: “Football is war”.
From this metaphorical foundation, a large number of more specific metaphors
derive, as noted by Chapanga (2004) and Bergh (2011), e.g. terms like attack and
defence, victory and defeat, as well as shoot and shot. Examples like Real Madrid
fired their heavy artillery are stock-in-trade in football commentary. In such
cases, then, general-language vocabulary provides the basis for much of the
lexical backbone of football language, in the form of metaphorical expressions
capturing the competitive framework of the game, expressions that are so
indispensable to football – everywhere and in all languages – that we have almost
stopped looking on them as metaphors. They are indeed, to paraphrase the title of
the ground-breaking work by Lakoff & Johnson (1980), metaphors football lives
by.
On the other hand, it is by no means uncommon for football expressions to be
adopted as expressive metaphors in general language (cf. section 2.1). A common
example is (missing) an open goal, as illustrated in “Miliband misses an open
goal”, a New Statesman blog headline (8 June 2011). Interestingly, this
metaphorical phrase is absent from both ODE and LDOCE, which shows that
even well-known football metaphors may escape notice in standard general-
language dictionaries. Similar self-explanatory, goal-related phrases include
scoring an own goal and moving the goalposts, no longer restricted to football
language but turning up in a variety of other contexts as well. Another much-used
phrase is back to square one, with a curious background in prewar live radio
coverage of football (cf. Davies 2007:122).
When it comes to single words used metaphorically in general language, there
are also a number of well-known examples. The verb sideline is one of them, as
can be seen in a sentence like The new MP was sidelined by her own party, a
usage included as a matter-of-course in general-purpose dictionaries. Much the
same goes for the informal use of kick-off in the sense of ‘the start of an event or
activity’ (ODE) or offside in a figurative sense, as in His radicalism caught him
offside with the law (from ODE). Likewise, expressions such as red card and
yellow card, also used in other sports, have infiltrated domains well beyond
football, e.g. politics, as noted by Wikipedia (penalty card) – but not so far by
dictionaries like ODE or LDOCE. Incidentally, the English examples just given of
metaphorical extension from football language to general language have exact
equivalents in Swedish; to what extent this is also true of other languages is an
interesting question.
As the examples given in the last few paragraphs will have suggested, football
metaphors in general language are unevenly covered in ordinary dictionaries;
some are included, many are not. This may be seen as a clear indication that
metaphorical expressions in relation to football language make up yet another
field deserving more extensive scrutiny. Such study should have a dual
perspective, including both the transition of general-language words and phrases
to football language and the “export” of football-language items to general

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language. Further, different contexts and text types should be taken into account
here, spoken as well as written (cf. Nordin 2008, Vierkant 2008). Our descriptive
framework will be based primarily on the distinction between conceptual and
orientational metaphors, as proposed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980). Among the
latter type may be mentioned the adverbs occurring in, for example, verb phrases
like head home (’score by heading the ball’), shoot wide (i.e. beside the goal) and
sit deep (cf. above); cf. also phrases like high up the pitch and up the wing – but
down the flank.
The studies outlined so far all concern various aspects of football language from
a synchronic perspective, especially oriented towards features that set it off as a
special language. However, English football language, being the first of its kind,
may also be seen from a diachronic perspective, where the historical development
of, in particular, its lexicon should be of considerable interest.
The gradual emergence of “football talk” as a special language is sketched in the
following way by Seddon (2004:25):
Football’s core language was influenced by two key bodies of men: the Football
Association and the press. The lexicon they created was rapidly taken on board by a public
who just as quickly spread it at home and abroad. Most of it is still with us now, so it
follows that today’s football talk is a legacy of linguistic fashions from the game’s
formative years.
Thus, English – or any other – football language cannot boast a very long
history, the modern game being invented, i.e. regulated, in the 1860s (cf. section
1.1). This circumstance alone should facilitate the study of the development of its
present-day vocabulary, mainly an incremental process, although leaving in its
wake a fair number of more or less obsolete expressions. For instance, the term
centre-half (as well as left-half and right-half) started to disappear in the latter half
of the 20th century as a result of the introduction of new defence formations, like
a flat back four, as in the 4–4–2 formation (cf. Davies 2007:118-119, Wilson
2008:82).
The condensed history of football language may thus be thought of as an
advantage, in that there should be comparatively few completely dark linguistic
corners. Further, given the brief time span of the modern game, the influence of
historical and social change on its vocabulary over the past hundred years or so
should be relatively unproblematic to trace. In many ways, today’s football
language can be viewed as a mirror not only of technical, tactical and
organizational changes in or around the game, but also – in some layers of its
vocabulary – of changes in society at large, whether of a political, economic or
sociocultural nature. For instance, the language policies of dictatorial regimes –
and not only those – in 20th-century Europe often implied purist attitudes towards
foreign loanwords, not least football terms, giving rise to the replacement of early
English direct loans by loan translations or more independent indigenous creations
(see Görlach 2001, Bergh & Ohlander 2012).
However, our own diachronic study will focus mainly on football-internal

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changes as reflected in the continuous development of the game’s core vocabulary
over the past 150 years. In many cases, it may be expected, there should be a
fairly straightforward causal and temporal relationship between the introduction
of a new term and the “event” – e.g., a rule change or a tactical innovation – that
prompted it. Obviously, there was no need for terms like crossbar, penalty line
and centre circle before the crossbar, penalty line and centre circle were
introduced in the 1880s; similarly, the term goal net would have to wait until 1892
to make its first appearance (Goldblatt 2007:34). Other words or phrases may be
more difficult to pinpoint as to their first occurrence, especially such terms as
have resulted from more gradual changes of, say, a technical or tactical nature.
When, for example, did terms like one-two, through ball, offside trap, libero and
total football first turn up? Or, to widen the perspective, Bosman ruling or WAG?
For such dating of first occurrences, the OED is of course an indispensable tool
(cf. note 24).
First occurrences, however, are not the only, perhaps not even the most
intriguing, historical aspect of football language. It should also be of interest to
determine, as far as this can be done, when a certain term could be said to have
become part of general language – and how long it took after its first occurrence.
Needless to say, determining this can never be an exact science. One way of
approaching the problem that we propose to employ involves the use of the twelve
editions so far published (1911–2011) of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD),
its twelfth edition (2011) retitled the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COED).
The underlying assumption here – by no means unproblematic – is that inclusion
in this dictionary is criterial for being part of “current” general language.
28
For
example, the words dribble and goalkeeper are included in the first edition of
COD (1911), and may thus be considered part of general language at the time of –
or, rather, well before – its publication, whereas crossbar, goal net and offside are
not. Using consecutive editions of the same dictionary should be an advantage in
this kind of enterprise, even though inclusion policy may not have been consistent
throughout its history; different editors may have adopted different approaches in
such matters. As a complement to the COD, learners’ dictionaries could also be
used for the same purposes, but only for the latter half of the 20th century.
29
It
should be borne in mind, however, that such dictionaries, being intended for
foreign learners, are considerably more restrictive as to what they include.
Due to the pioneering role of English football language in setting the lexical
28
Cf. the full title of the first edition of COD (1911) where the phrase “current English” is
included, just as in the following editions up to the twefth; the notion of currency is also
emphasized and discussed in the Preface. The retitled twelfth edition carries on its predecessors’
insistence on “current English”: “[It] aims to cover all those words, phrases and meanings that
form the central vocabulary of English in the modern world”, including, like the first edition, many
technical terms “now established as part of the mainstream language” (Preface to the twelfth
edition, p. viii); cf. Knowles (2011:x–xi).
29
The first edition of The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English was published in
1948, continuously updated and reigning supreme until the advent of LDOCE in 1978; see Cowie
(1999); cf. also Ohlander (1996, 2003).

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framework of the game, there is an inevitable and close connection between its
development and the history of other football languages around the world. This
means that the cross-linguistic influence of English football language on other
languages is in evidence virtually everywhere. This “extrovert” aspect provides
another field of study worthy of special attention (cf. Bernard 2008, Dosev 2008,
El Sayed 2008, Gamal 2008, Pintarić 2008, Sępek 2008).
The cross-linguistic influence of English football language is, of course,
especially obvious with regard to vocabulary, in the form of direct loans as well as
loan translations (calques) and semantic loans (sense loans). Numerous Swedish
examples of all three types of loans have already been given (cf. section 3.3);
similar examples from other languages are equally abundant. However, due to
political, cultural and sociolinguistic circumstances in different countries,
including purist trends in different periods, languages differ considerably with
regard to their attitude towards, in particular, direct English loans, with
repercussions for the other two loan types.
Bergh & Ohlander (2012) account for the impact of English, in terms of direct
loans, on the football vocabulary of 16 European languages (Swedish not being
part of them). The study was based on a set of 25 well-known English football
terms – corner, dribble, goal, hooligan, offside, score, supporter, etc. – taken
from A Dictionary of European Anglicisms (Görlach 2001), also providing
relevant data for the “fate” of each word in all of the 16 languages. It was found,
among other things, that while direct borrowing is certainly common, there is
nonetheless a great deal of variation among the languages studied, Norwegian and
Dutch displaying the largest number of direct English loans (23 and 20,
respectively), Finnish and Icelandic the lowest (6 and 10, respectively). Another
finding was that, among the 25 words included in the study, team, hooligan and
offside came out on top as the most “popular” English direct loans (15–16
languages each), head, sweeper and draw making up the bottom three (1–2
languages each). A follow-up study of loan translations (Bergh & Ohlander,
forthcoming), based on the same material, shows Icelandic at the top (15 cases)
and Albanian at the bottom of the league, exhibiting no clear case.
The two studies just mentioned point to the interplay – or, often, tug-of-war –
between direct loans and different types of native-language renditions (basically,
loan translations, semantic loans and other indigenous creations; cf Görlach 2001,
2002). In some cases, as is well known, two competing terms may remain in
(more or less) peaceful coexistence in the same language, like Norwegian corner
versus hjørnespark, or score versus lage mål (Graedler & Johansson 1997:
corner, score; for Swedish, cf. section 3.3, note 23). In other cases and other
languages, an original direct loan may have been replaced by a native word; for
example, offside was ousted by hors jeu in French and by fuera de juego in
Spanish (Görlach 2001: offside).
30
In fact, the word football itself was replaced by
30
Cf. also German abseits, “von Konrad Koch schon 1874 vorgenommene Lehnübersetzung zu
engl. offside” (Burkhardt 2006: abseits).

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calcio in Italian, whereas in Spanish the native word balompié, basically a calque,
was less of a success story as a substitute for fútbol (Görlach 2001: football).
Generally speaking, it is not easy to predict the long-term fate of an English direct
loan entering another language, beyond the tendency that its chances of survival
as direct loans are clearly diminished by national language policies that promote,
or demand, restrictiveness.
Thus, a diachronic perspective on football language appears to offer yet another
worthwhile field of study. This applies to football language as such, its continuous
creation of new vocabulary in response to developments on and off the pitch, and,
not least, to its interplay with general language along the time axis. Moreover, it
could be argued that, given the short history of the modern game, a diachronic
perspective on its language may provide a convenient peephole into more general
processes involved in vocabulary change.
4. Summing up
It has been the aim of the preceding sections to demonstrate that just as football is
in many ways a remarkable public phenomenon in its own right, now in its third
century, so indeed is the language of the game. As argued here, football language
may be characterized as a special language with a public face. The specialness of
football language is apparent in literally thousands of facts and features, lexical
and grammatical, that set it apart from general language. Consequently, a sentence
like The striker was awarded a last-minute penalty but failed to convert (cf.
section 3.4) is virtually incomprehensible from a strictly general-language point of
view, i.e. to speakers of English with no, or insufficient, knowledge of football
and its language. Not only does it contain special terms like striker, penalty and
convert; it also deviates from normal collocational and grammatical patterns, with
regard to the verb award in relation to penalty as well as the use of the verb
convert without an object or other complement. The same general point is
illustrated by sentences like A heavy first touch let the goalkeeper gather and Van
Persie curled narrowly wide.
At the same time, however, due to football’s public nature, the interface
between special language and general language is quite possibly more extensive
as regards football language than other special languages. For this reason, as
insisted throughout this paper, football language as a field of linguistic inquiry
should warrant considerably more scholarly attention than it has so far received.
The research project outlined in the preceding sections represents an attempt to
make at least partial amends for this collective “sin of omission”. Its lexicological
core is aimed at elucidating the specificity of English football vocabulary, its
words and phrases, especially from a contrastive English–Swedish perspective.
Work on the concrete, lexicographic outcome of the lexicological investigation,
a bilingual English–Swedish dictionary, is under way. All in all, the dictionary
will include some 8000 headwords, English as well as Swedish, thus accounting
for the specifics – words, phrases, common collocations – of both English and
Swedish football vocabulary, together with ample exemplification. The following

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extract, involving a sample of English entries under the letter E, will give some
idea of the contents of the English-Swedish part of the dictionary:
early doors informellt i början, tidigt i
matchen Both sides tried to keep it tight
early doors
effort subst.
1 målchans They didn’t manage a single
effort on goal in the first half
2 mål Notts County pulled one back
after another effort by McSwegan
eighteen-yard box el. 18-yard box
subst. informellt straffområde, box; jfr
penalty area
end-to-end stuff informellt; ung. böljande,
pulserande spel The second half was
end-to-end stuff with both sides creating
many spectacular chances
engine subst. informellt (mittfälts)motor
The team is lacking an engine in
midfield to create opportunities for the
strikers
engine room informellt centralt mittfält,
centrala mittfältare Steven was a key
part of the Ajax engine room
The “periphery” of the project is intended to provide a fuller picture of some
specific aspects of English football language. It is, for the most part, closely tied
up with the lexicological core area, especially as regards the specificity of football
language in relation to general language, with in-depth studies of certain lexical
and grammatical features. The research horizon is further extended to include
diachronic and cross-linguistic dimensions. In view of the key role of English in
the brief history of modern football as well as its present-day status as a global
lingua franca, investigating such dimensions should prove interesting also from a
wider linguistic perspective.
It should be added that the project presented here is by no means exhaustive
with regard to scope and range. For instance, a perspective not specifically
focused on is the sociolinguistic one. It is, naturally, implicit in much of the
lexicological work, like assigning markers of different degrees of formality to
lexical items; cf. e.g. the rather formal altercation and its more informal near-
synonym, afters. However, as pointed out earlier, a more explicitly sociolinguistic
approach to football language would seem to be long overdue. Its large variety of
contexts and settings, as well as the vast number of people involved in football,
should prove fertile ground for sociolinguistically oriented studies of the complex
and dynamic relationship between football and society; the language on the
terraces is likely to differ from that in the stands.
In conclusion, most work on football language, English and other, remains to be
done – a somewhat surprising state of affairs considering the present-day role of
football as the global game as well as the world’s most widespread cultural
phenomenon. In the meantime, football keeps developing at a rapid pace, along
with its language, as new notions, e.g. of a technical, tactical or organizational
nature, are continuously introduced, while old ones are gradually phased out. As
an object of linguistic study, “the people’s game” is very much alive – and forever
kicking.

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© Moderna språk 2012:1
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