This Week: Fulham Football Club

Hello my name’s Jack and welcome to the weekly round-up called This Week on Premier Skills English.

In this week, we’ve got lots of interesting words and phrases to help you talk about football in English.

If you are listening to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify you can also visit the Premier Skills English website at britishcouncil.org/premierskillsenglish where you’ll be able to download the podcast.

On the Premier Skills English website, you can read the transcript and join the Premier Skills English community by completing a language task in the comments section. This will really help you remember the new words and phrases from the stories from the Premier League.

Now as the new season hasn’t started yet, I am going to talk about the teams that are being promoted to the Premier League. These are AFC Bournemouth, Fulham Football Club and Nottingham Forest Football Club.

I spoke about AFC Bournemouth last week so today, I’m talking about Fulham.

In this focus on Fulham Football Club, I am going to use a range of B2 vocabulary that I will talk about more after the story. The words from the story that I’m going to talk about are: Located, professional, amateur, current, capacity, rivalries, submit, cheer up

Listen out for these words in the focus on Fulham Football Club.

But before that, I want to look at last week’s football phrase. If you didn’t hear it last week, here’s one more chance to guess now.

Football Phrase

Last week’s football phrase was ___ ______. This means the highest tier in something. It’s mostly used to refer to sporting categories, to the best or most competitive of the groups in a particular sport. The Premier League is the highest tier in the English Football League so it could be called the ___ ______.

So ... who got the right answer? Well, congratulations to Hayato from Japan, Vietnguyenngo from Vietnam, Isshin from Japan, Hsn from Turkey and Taha Gashout. And Daniel_06 from Mexico (not from Colombia as I have been saying - I’m sorry Daniel) got it half right with his first guess but I think he will have figured the second word out by the time he hears this.

All of you managed or will have managed to work out that the phrase I’m looking for was top flight.

OK, let’s get on with this week’s focus on Fulham Football Club!

A quick reminder of the language to listen out for ... The words are: located, professional, amateur, current, capacity, rivalries, submit and cheer up.

Fulham Football Club back in the Premier League

Fulham Football Club is located on the bank of the River Thames in Fulham in London. The club was founded in 1879 as a church team. At the time, football was not professional so most teams were founded by other organisations for their workers or in this case, the young men who attended St Andrew’s Church Sunday School. The club enjoyed some success as an amateur side and started playing at their current ground Craven Cottage in 1896. They turned professional in 1898, becoming the third London club to play in the professional league.

Fulham started playing in all white shirts and black socks in 1903 and two of their nicknames, The Whites and The Lily Whites come from the colour of their kit. Fulham’s most commonly used nickname is The Cottagers which comes from the name of their ground Craven Cottage which stands on the site of a hunting lodge, the original Craven Cottage, built in 1780. The stadium is one of the smallest in the league with a capacity of 19,359.

Fulham fans consider Chelsea to be their biggest rivals as Stamford Bridge is actually in Fulham, less than two miles from Craven Cottage. However, there are strong rivalries between all the London clubs and when Fulham play Queens Park Rangers, Crystal Palace or Brentford the matches have a derby feel.

The club mascot is Billy the Badger. Billy became the club mascot following an online competition in which fans were asked to submit their designs. Since joining the club, Billy the Badger has been a bad badger and on one occasion was actually sent off by the referee for breakdancing in the corner of the pitch after the match had kicked off. He also got into trouble for trying to cheer up the Chelsea manager during a home game.

Language focus

The words from the focus on Fulham Football Club that I’m going to talk about are: located, professional, amateur, current, capacity, rivalries, submit and cheer up.

The adjective located comes from the verb to locate which means to find or to discover the location of something. The location is the place or position of a thing. It is where something is. Often in English, we can use present and past participles as verbs. So if you look located up in the dictionary, it only has the verb, but then it has lots of examples of be located meaning something is in a particular place. I said the football club is located on the bank of the River Thames. Chelsea football club is actually located in Fulham.

The adjective professional is interesting because it has a range of uses. If you do something professionally, then it is your job. You are paid to do it. This can be contrasted with the next word I want to focus on: amateur. I think the word amateur originally meant ‘lover of’ so if you are an amateur footballer, you play the sport because you love it, whereas a professional does it for the money. I think that most professional footballers are also lovers of football, but that’s the main difference between an amateur and a professional. However, we also use the adjective professional when we refer to work or equipment or behaviour that you would associate with a professional worker. So you might ask a builder for their professional opinion on some work on your house. Or if you like to work on your house yourself, if you do a good job, someone might say that it looks very professional. You can use amateur in a similar way. As well as saying that you do something because you like it, possibly as a hobby, you can also describe work as amateur if it’s not very good. I think that people use the informal adjective amateurish to say that something is not very well done, that it doesn’t look like it was done by a professional.

The next word is current. This has two main meanings. As a noun, it means the flow of water or air or electricity in a circuit. But that’s not the meaning from the focus on Fulham. I used the word current as an adjective and then it means at present or that something is true right now. So I said that Fullham started playing in their current ground in 1896. I used the word current to emphasise that they were still playing there now. So we can also say that Manchester City are the current Premier League Champions.

The next word capacity is commonly used when talking about football stadiums. It means the number of people who can watch a match at a particular ground. So the capacity of Craven Cottage is 19,359. The capacity of Arsenal’s stadium, the Emirates Stadium is much greater, it’s 60,250. The club with the stadium with the smallest capacity in the Premier League is AFC Bournemouth’s Vitality Stadium.

The word rivalry is a noun and it describes a situation where people or teams are rivals. This means that they are in competition with each other. So all the clubs in the Premier League are rivals so you could talk about the rivalry between Fulham and any of the other clubs. However, we only really talk about rivalries when two clubs have a history that makes the competition more intense. So the rivalry between Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur is quite strong. The strongest rivalries are between teams that play in derby matches.

To submit means to give something to someone else so that they can judge it. So at school you can submit your homework or assignments. This has become more common now that work can be given or submitted online. When you send a teacher some work online, you are submitting it online. When you are applying for something online, perhaps for a loan or a visa application, you can complete the forms and upload your documents and the final stage of the application is the submit button. The submit button is the one that actually sends your answers and attachments to the bank or the visa office.

The last phrasal verb today is close to the football phrase a few podcasts ago. The phrase is cheer up. This means to make someone happier. You can use the phrase cheer up to say that someone became happier. For example, when his team scored an equaliser, he cheered up. Or you can cheer someone up by doing something to make them happy. For example: I bought her tickets for the match to cheer her up. Or you might say: come out with me for a walk. It will cheer you up.

OK. That’s all the language I want you to think about today. The words were located, professional, amateur, current, capacity, rivalries, submit and cheer up. Listen to the focus on Fulham Football Club one more time to hear the words in context and after that, there will be a language challenge and this week’s football phrase.

Fulham Football Club back in the Premier League

Fulham Football Club is located on the bank of the River Thames in Fulham in London. The club was founded in 1879 as a church team. At the time, football was not professional so most teams were founded by other organisations for their workers or in this case, the young men who attended St Andrew’s Church Sunday School. The club enjoyed some success as an amateur side and started playing at their current ground Craven Cottage in 1896. They turned professional in 1898, becoming the third London club to play in the professional league.

Fulham started playing in all white shirts and black socks in 1903 and two of their nicknames, The Whites and The Lily Whites come from the colour of their kit. Fulham’s most commonly used nickname is The Cottagers which comes from the name of their ground Craven Cottage which stands on the site of a hunting lodge, the original Craven Cottage, built in 1780. The stadium is one of the smallest in the league with a capacity of 19,359.

Fulham fans consider Chelsea to be their biggest rivals as Stamford Bridge is actually in Fulham, less than two miles from Craven Cottage. However, there are strong rivalries between all the London clubs and when Fulham play Queens Park Rangers, Crystal Palace or Brentford the matches have a derby feel.

The club mascot is Billy the Badger. Billy became the club mascot following an online competition in which fans were asked to submit their designs. Since joining the club, Billy the Badger has been a bad badger and on one occasion was actually sent off by the referee for breakdancing in the corner of the pitch after the match had kicked off. He also got into trouble for trying to cheer up the Chelsea manager during a home game.

Language Challenge

Right, now it’s time for you to think about the language again.

Here are 8 sentences with gaps in them and you have to complete the gaps with the words and phrases from this podcast.

Number 1: I’m quite happy in my _______ job. I don’t want to change.

Number 2: Serena Williams was such a _________ young player she turned professional when she was 14-years-old.

Number 3: There has always been an intense _______ between the Manchester clubs.

Number 4: The office has moved and is now _______ right next to the library.

Number 5: Amazingly, it was an _______ photographer who won the wildlife photography competition.

Number 6: After a hard day at work, seeing my kids always _____ me __.

Number 7: Please make sure you ______ your application before the deadline.

Number 8: The building work at the stadium will increase the ________ to over 50,000.

Leave your answers in the comments section on the Premier Skills English website and I will go through them next week.

Football phrase

Now it’s time for this week’s football phrase.

This week, I’m looking for a phrase that means the games that teams play at this time of the year. The phrase also means that the matches are not part of any campaign, they are not cup or league matches. The phrase I’m looking for is pre-season friendlies.

If you know the phrase I’m looking for, please leave it in the comments section on the page for this podcast on the Premier Skills English website.

Very quickly, here are the answers to last week’s language challenge.

Number 1: Didsbury is a very fashionable suburb of Manchester.
Number 2: There are otters living on a stretch of the river that runs through Ludlow.
Number 3: The teacher made the pupils line up in alphabetical order with little Andrew at the front and Zahra at the back.
Number 4: I just got a new job. The hours are flexible and I get good holidays and the salary is respectable.
Number 5: The club board spent most of the meeting in a debate about the new stadium.
Number 6: Yorkshire is the biggest county in England.
Number 7: The best part of superhero stories is their origin stories where we find out how they got their super powers.
Number 8: These messages on facebook don’t represent how most customers feel about the shop.
I hope you got them all right!

That’s all I have time for today. Before I finish, I just wanted to say that I hope you found this podcast useful, and I hope all of you stay fit and healthy and safe.

Bye for now and enjoy your football.