The new Premier League season is fast approaching and for those who follow it, this will mean once again being exposed to a language that can at times feel daunting.
There are so many terms and expressions used in commentary, analysis and tactical talks by managers, players, pundits and journalists, some of which we nod dutifully along with even though we don’t really know what they mean.
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Here, The Athletic explains some of these words and phrases, and offers examples of how they can be correctly used.
This is our 2022-23 Premier League glossary.
Section 1: Tactics
The proliferation of tactics into the mainstream has meant a whole new set of terms for football fans to try to understand.
For many, the Premier League jumped the shark when the BBC’s Match Of The Day started including expected goals (xG) in its post-match statistics for the 2017-18 season. This led to a weird culture war that perhaps reached its peak on Sky’s Soccer Saturday when normally-affable host Jeff Stelling ranted that xG is “absolute nonsense” and “the most useless stat in the history of football”.
Jeff Stelling shared his thoughts over the 'Expected Goals' statistic at the weekend 😡😂 pic.twitter.com/SP2MgMuuoQ
— Soccer AM (@SoccerAM) November 21, 2017
Most of you reading this won’t need to have xG explained (though I did speak to a football writer not that long ago who genuinely seemed to think expected goals was essentially a pre-match result prediction, like the pools).
There are, though, a few tactical terms you might hear and have to slightly pretend you know what they mean.
Underlying numbers and overperformance/underperformance
If xG feels a little bit passe, these terms are the slightly newer, trendier kid on the block.
Put together, they essentially mean a player or team might be performing well but their underlying numbers — their xG, or expected assists, or expected goals against (xGA), or whatever’s most relevant — aren’t actually that good, indicating a level of overperformance which could soon see them found out. Likewise, if someone is underperforming, the reality may soon reflect the advanced metrics and lead to an improvement.
How to use it and sound convincing
“Leicester City are running hot right now but if you look at the underlying numbers, I do just wonder whether this form is sustainable.”
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Low block
You will hear this largely in terms of low-block defences — ones that typically sit deep and try to frustrate their opponents.
The meaning is very simple: the ‘block’ part refers to the ranks of players doing the defending and the ‘low’ bit tells us they are doing it deep in their own territory. A medium block would be higher up the pitch, a high block nearer still to the opponents’ goal. Though, of course, we tend to hear ‘high’ in relation to a high press.
How to use it and sound convincing
“They’re a good side, but as we know, they do struggle against low-block defences.”
Free eights
A positional descriptor that has leapt into the mainstream over the last couple of years, “free eights” refers to the two members of a three-player midfield who, thanks to a disciplined, deeper-sitting “six”, have the license to roam around the pitch and get forward.
Think Jesse Lingard and Dele Alli for England at the 2018 World Cup (when they were playing ahead of Jordan Henderson) or, as has often been the case for Manchester City, Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva, backed by a deep-lying Rodri. A good deep-lying midfielder, incidentally, should be press-resistant and able to evade the inevitable pressure he will be put under by opposition attackers.
How to use it and sound convincing
“Listen, he’s a talent. I can see him as a 10 or out wide, or even as one of the free eights if the manager wants to go with that system.”
See also: eight and a half — a position somewhere between a No 8 and a No 10 (but not a No 9, as might seem numerically logical). We also don’t have the time here to go into false nines, a term that has been around since Lionel Messi first popularised the role in 2009, but The Athletic has done a proper, in-depth analysis of that position if you want one.
Half-spaces/pockets
The former is a more technical definition that is a translation of the German word halbraum and refers to the space in between one vertical line denoting a pitch’s wide area, and another denoting its central area. (Note that in a low block we’re talking about a horizontal line, and that another commonly-used expression between the lines refers to the space separating an opposing team’s back line from its matching midfield one).
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“Pockets” is a looser way of describing what may be half-spaces or the spaces between the lines. Joe Cole is a big fan of the latter (both as a pundit, and when he was a player for West Ham, Chelsea and England), whereas half-space is a bit more Tifo.
How to use it and sound convincing
“He tends to operate in the left half-space, where he can cut onto his right foot and get shots off.”
“He’s so good at just dropping deep and finding those pockets of space.”
Section 2: Recruitment
Alongside the growth of tactical language, the last few years have seen transfers, and more specifically the process of them, being described in ever more granular detail.
The Athletic’s Adam Hurrey, who knows a thing or two about football linguistics, recently outlined the 22 stages of a transfer saga, but we’re talking more here about the rules and regulations of buying and selling players, and how recruitment teams operate.
It’s essentially admin work, but appears to be the source of endless fascination both for fans and those of us who cover the game.
Homegrown quota
One of the biggest preoccupations fans seem to have in 2022 is about whether their club will fall foul of the Premier League’s (or, if in European competition, UEFA’s) homegrown quota.
What this means in the Premier League is that no more than 17 players in a team’s selected squad for the season can be non-homegrown. Those 17 players can be of any nationality or age. For a player to be considered homegrown, they must have played for an FA-affiliated club, not necessarily yours, for at least three years before turning 21.
Being across this rule is a great way to show you know more than the average supporter.
How to use it and sound convincing
Q: “What a summer it’s been so far for your club, you must be pretty excited?”.
A: “I am. I’m just a little concerned about what it means for our homegrown quota.”
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Age profile
Premier League recruitment staff have never had it so good. Once, backroom operators nobody knew too much about, they are now the geniuses behind a team’s rise and fall. The layperson puts Liverpool’s success in recent years down to their manager Jurgen Klopp; for the more savvy observer, it’s just as much about their smart recruitment team.
As journalists, we have a responsibility to outline for you precisely what the thinking is of your team’s transfer brains trust (a term also applicable to a huddle of players discussing what they’re going to do at a free kick), and part of this means using the same kind of language they do.
“Profile” is one of the most commonly used words in this regard, meaning essentially the kind of player(s) whoever is being talked about is. An offshoot of this is “age profile”, which as far as I can understand just means age.
How to use it and sound convincing
“They did like the player, but in the end, he just didn’t quite fit the age profile the club’s recruitment staff are looking for.”
June 30
Has a deadline to submit accounts ever been so sexy? This is not a term as such, but the date Premier League clubs, and those in other countries and divisions for that matter, have to register their accounts for the year just gone and make sure they are compliant with football’s financial rules and regulations.
What it means is June 30 has become a mini transfer deadline day a couple of months before the real one, with some clubs needing to make sales before July 1 to balance their books.
On the flip side, a buying club may want to wait until July 1 to complete a deal, so the outlay does not affect the previous year’s accounts.
How to use it and sound convincing
“Just keep an eye out for June 30. I’ve got a feeling there’ll be quite a lot of business done then.”
Dry loan
One of the side-effects of all those Twitter aggregator accounts that pick up transfer rumours from around the world is that the reports are often run through Google Translate with, let’s say, mixed results.
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As well as the often bizarre, nonsensical syntax, it has also meant that literally-translated idioms from other countries have entered the English football transfer lexicon.
“Prestito secco”, for instance, is an Italian term meaning an old-fashioned, bread-and-butter loan deal, with no option or obligation for the club doing the borrowing to buy the player involved at the end of their stay. It translates literally into English as “dry loan” — a term you will see now on Football Twitter. (Another favourite is “giorni caldi”, associated with the Italian journalist Alfredo Pedulla, which translates as “hot days” and means talks over a move are intensifying or heating up).
As a side note, these slight mistranslations can be seen elsewhere in the footballing lexicon.
“In a good moment”, roughly meaning “in good form”, was once the preserve of foreign managers, but has since been taken on by several English ones including Graham Potter of Brighton — for whom the expression feels very right.
How to use it and sound convincing
“I think it’s a good move for the club. Bear in mind it’s a dry loan, so they keep control to a certain extent.”
And while we’re on the subject of loans, a reminder that the correct way to tweet about every single such move from a Premier League club to an EFL one is:
Section 3: Off-field issues
A sign-of-the-times fact of modern football is that it is not enough to have a good understanding of tactics and recruitment. To really be accepted, you also need to have a basic grasp of geopolitics, especially the practice of…
Sportswashing
Exact definitions of this term vary but essentially it means laundering the reputation of an entity, normally a country, by having it associated with a much-loved institution. For our purposes, a Premier League club — for instance, Manchester City or Newcastle United.
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There are some experts in the field, though, who feel it has become a bit of a catch-all for anything one finds unpalatable, and it is not the most useful way to describe this sort of club ownership.
The term also threatens to spawn a new linguistic sub-genre.
For instance, regarding the recent women’s European Championship, Sarah Gregorius, director of global policy and strategic relations for women’s football at players’ union FIFPro, said in the Financial Times at the weekend: “Don’t get me wrong, I’m loving this tournament. But we have to be critical. I can’t get caught up in progresswashing.”
Maybe safest to stick to sportswashing for now.
How to use it and sound convincing
“I can’t get behind this Newcastle team. Not when their success is such a blatant result of sportswashing.”
Educate myself
Once the case for sportswashing has been established, it will be put to a manager of whichever club stands accused.
This can prompt defensive retaliation, genuine reflection, or perhaps the equivalent of a child being told off but assuring their teacher they won’t do it again — the promise to “educate myself”.
How to use it and sound convincing
“Look, I take this sort of thing very seriously. I’m a football manager first and foremost, but I’m going to educate myself about this.”
The above examples only scratch the surface, and we haven’t even got into the minuscule distinctions, like using “football club” instead of “club” when really trying to convey the gravity of a situation — “That performance, the effort levels of the players… it’s just not good enough for this football club.” Or the nuclear option: “Manchester United Football Club.”
And apologies in advance if there are lots of tactical or transfer terms you see this season that you don’t fully understand.
Best to just nod along and, if challenged, sigh thoughtfully and earnestly promise to educate yourself on the topic.
(Photos: Getty Images; graphic: Sam Richardson)
