The new Premiership season kicked off this weekend and, with all the usual hype, will come novelties. There are the gamely optimistic new arrivals and returnees, no doubt a breakout star or two, some eyebrow-raising new hairstyles (Mo Salah) and some ingeniously tweaked – and therefore ‘must-have’ – revenue-gouging strips. As ever, there will be new rules, including yet further tinkering with VAR.
But what interests me, as an English teacher and student of socio-linguistics, will be any novelties in the figurative language which the players, fans and journalists use to describe the game. Over nearly 50 years of watching football, it has been fascinating to hear the football lexicon evolve in ways that can be quite culturally revealing.
Pseudish terminology is in the ascent, that type of language that seeks to convey sophistication
Cliché is an essential part of football language (‘the beautiful game’). Indeed, football seems to revel in stale phraseology.
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