How we talk when we talk about football

Aeons ago when there was only Doordarshan, and when television had not yet monetised high-interest broadcasts to squeeze in as many advertisements as possible, during live telecasts of FIFA World Cup matches we’d stay glued to the screens at half-time and after the end of the match too. The cameras would endlessly roam the stadiums to cover the spectators in the stands, and it was a commentary-free introduction to the diversity and distinctiveness of fan cultures in world football. It is an aspect of football that sport telecasts these days don’t bring out as vividly as does the writing on the game. As John Lancaster explains in his brilliant chapter on Brazil in The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup , it is what makes football unique: “…in the overall run of writing about football, most of it is about the epiphenomenon of being a fan rather than the phenomenon of the game itself. It’s strange but true. Golf writing is about playing golf; cricket writing is about cricket, and baseball writing is about baseball; but most football writing is about being a fan.”

At the heart of football

This perhaps provides a clue to why football’s appeal continues to grow, while sports like cricket are perpetually convulsed with anxiety that if they don’t innovate, the fans will wander away. The fan is at the heart of football, and owns the narrative in a way that she does not in any other sport. This is why we had such a curious contrast on Friday, the second day of this World Cup. Spain and Portugal took on each other in a first-round match whose quality of play would do any final proud, but the biggest celebrations erupted in Iran, where fans partied on the streets of Tehran as if they had already won the World Cup. Earlier in the day, in St. Petersburg, the Iranian team registered its first win in a World Cup in 20 years, when Moroccan Aziz Bouhaddouz’s own goal in the dying minutes of the match broke the 0-0 scoreline. The win was doubly satisfying for the Iranians. This month Nike announced that it would not supply shoes to the Iranian team on account of American sanctions. After the football win, social media was awash with Iranians telling the shoe company, “We just did it without you.”

This parallel narrative is an instance of havaa-shi — or the “Persian name for the gossip, rumour and innuendo that swirl around the margins of the game in Iran”, as Tom Williams explains in his book Do You Speak Football? A Glossary of Football Words and Phrases from Around the World .

“No country’s football story is the same,” he writes. “Each nation’s experience of the game being refracted through the unique prism of its language. Hold each prism to your eye and football reveals itself in strange, amusing and unexpected ways.” It’s enormously enriching, then, to have this book by one’s side as the matches are beamed in from Russia.

Many of these phrases encapsulate entire football cultures. So from Japan there is the word ekyuketsuban , referring to the practice of retiring numbers, to honour a special player who wore it. And while there are instances of this elsewhere too, Williams explains that “Japanese clubs routinely withdraw the number 12 shirt from circulation in dedication to their fans”.

Ways to exclaim

Among the entries from Argentina is gol de vestuario , or changing-room goal, i.e. “a goal scored in the opening seconds of a match”. There is, among my favourites, also para que te traje (why did I bring you?)? “It has become so popular,” writes Williams, “that it has fallen into use colloquially as a term for an embarrassing blunder — a striker who spoons the ball over an open goal or a goalkeeper who fails to keep out a tame shot will be said to have committed a para que te traje .”

It was a Brazilian who first cried “Goooooool!” from a commentary box, Williams points out. But over in Egypt, whose team is everybody’s favourite in this year’s World Cup, cries of “ ya salaaam ” (oh, wonderful) will echo when, for instance, “Messi tiptoes through a spellbound opposition defence to score”. Back in Argentina, “Synonymous with Maradona and Messi, gambeta is the name given to the jinking, weaving dribble that has been an Argentinian speciality almost since the moment the game arrived there. It’s believed to come from gaucho literature and to refer to the distinctive running of an ostrich.”

Then there are such oddities: “Without wishing to cast any aspersions about the national character of the Portuguese,” writes Williams, “it’s interesting to note that whereas in Brazil the word called out when a teammate has an opponent sneaking up on them is ladrao (meaning ‘thief’), in Portugal the equivalent expression is policia [police].”

In sum, whatever else you do this summer, when it comes to football, don’t be monolingual.