There are only a few weeks left until the end of the season and things are getting exciting, nervous and frenetic in leagues across Europe.
Who will win the title? Who will be demoted? Who will go to the Champions League places? Who will suffer the humiliation of finishing under Chelsea?
All of this will combine to create a whirlwind, chaotic and often confusing time. So, to help you make sense of it all, here are some phrases you’ll hear over the next few weeks…
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The meeting
Let’s start with the basics. For some reason, the final stages of each season are often characterized as a rush of some kind, as if we collectively can’t cope with the concept of several football matches finally coming to a conclusion, so we have to visualize it as people who sweat running towards the finish line. Anyway: run-in = the last few games, usually for those with something on the line.
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The thread (up to)
Continuing the theme of the race, when the conclusion of the season is uncertain and it seems that things will get closer to the end, they will “get down to the finish line”, evoking the frankly crazy practice of the past when the end of a horse race would be signaled with a wire upon arrival that the horses would have to break. It seems incredibly dangerous.
End of business
See above, to a point, but the “end of business” tends to be a bit longer than the break-in. As a rule, everything after Easter in the structure of the European season represents the end of business: the time when deals are concluded, hopes are realized and dreams are shattered.
Freak time
During the run-in, when things go to the limit, at the business end, people get nervous. And that’s where this aphorism from Sir Alex Ferguson comes in… well, sort of.
There is some dispute as to whether the former Manchester United manager actually coined this phrase: the story is that he said something that sounded like this in a press conference, but it was unclear due to a combination of his thick Scottish accent and of a chorded recording. It was either “squeaky bum time” or “squeeze ya bum time”: the assembled journalists discussed which was more likely, voted, and the former was chosen.
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It’s also unclear exactly what Ferguson meant, if he actually said “squeaky…”: competing theories about what squeaky bum time literally refers to include the nervous fart, the squeak caused by shifting tensely in a seat plastic, the sweating that causes these squeaks. , or even simple… er… bottom-related discomfort caused by tension-filled scenarios. Whatever the intention, it simply refers to the nerves stirred up by the end of the season. And it is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Sir Alex Ferguson – squeaky bum merchant (Andrew Yates/AFP via Getty Images)
Six points
A match between two teams competing at the top or bottom of the table, which becomes so important that winning it seems worth six points, rather than just three.
On the beach
The exact opposite of teams involved in six-point shooting are those who have nothing to play for and as such, their minds are already well beyond the end of the season, thinking about the holidays. So, when they play with little effort and enthusiasm, they are “on the beach”. Probably in Dubai.
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In the shop window
The players who are on the beach may also be in the shop window, which brings to mind a cute seaside souvenir shop selling trinkets made of seashells, those bottles with multicolored sand inside and disgruntled Premier League footballers. This term is used to describe players who have little to play for and therefore get their motivation from trying to impress other teams who may want to sign them in the summer.
In the current state of affairs
It’s best saved for the final day of the season, when all matches are played at the same time and the quicksand of the standings develops in real time. So, let’s say Arsenal take the lead in the first five minutes, they could be described as “the best in the league… as things stand!” And then things will change, many, many times, to the point where it’s essentially a waste of time trying to follow everything. But it allows the commentators to shout quite enthusiastically during the game.
The trapdoor of relegation
The portal through which relegated teams fall into the Championship/whatever division is next lower. Not a real trap door.
Battle in the basement
The basement is last in every ranking, just as it is the bottom of a house, although it creates confusion, from an architectural point of view, given that the trapdoor opens at a lower level than the bottom.
The lottery (play-offs)
Many things in football are described as a “lottery” – that is, something in which there is competition but which is not actually based on skill or competence and is governed solely by chance – but perhaps that is even more disconcerting than believing that penalty kicks belong in this category there are play-offs to determine who is promoted and, in some countries, who is relegated.
The idea here is how you could finish several points ahead of another team, then lose to them in a one-off match and then your season goes down the toilet, but the lack of randomness involved is a concept that English football fans , in particular, simply can’t understand something.
The richest game in football
Therefore, the importance placed on the Championship play-off final, in deciding who will move up to the Premier League, must be measured. This being English football, the only parameter we can define is monetary: the winner of that match will guarantee themselves something like £190 million in TV money, and although it would be a lot more fun if this money were delivered from the air to The Conclusion of the match, like the ticker tape, is however always announced as “the richest match in football”.
Luton won the biggest game in football last season (Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
Overwhelming
The team that ends the season on the way to glory with an inevitable and unstoppable sense of dominance is therefore always Manchester City (currently unbeaten in 32 games).
Invincible
Only applicable to Bayer Leverkusen.
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Champions elected
Probably not one for this Premier League season, unless Arsenal or City collapse quite dramatically in the next two games. The team that, despite not being officially champions, will be so in the near future.
Bottle work
Chokers, essentially. Teams/players in a winning position who then threw the position away, in theory, due to lack of courage or moral strength. There are various ideas about the etymology of the phrase, but the most likely is probably rooted in Cockney rhyming slang – bottle and glass = ass – suggesting that whoever “bottles” it has lost control of his bowels in fear.
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Bolter
The opposite of a bottle job, in a way. A player who emerges from the pack, like a horse, to become a contender for the national team in the final weeks of a season before a major tournament. This year take your pick between Kobbie Mainoo, Adam Wharton, Dominic Solanke or Jarrad Branthwaite.
Kobbie Mainoo could join the European Championship team (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Coefficients
Most people don’t know how things work. Cars, air traffic control, Wi-Fi – we just assume they will work and rely on a small group of experts who know how they work to tell us what went wrong when they don’t work.
“Coefficients” also belong to this group. Simply put, they represent the ranking of some European leagues compared to rival leagues, based on the performance of their teams in European competitions. And they are important because they will decide which two nations will get an extra place in the Champions League next season. It will be Italy and almost certainly Germany, but you will hear this word many more times in the coming weeks.
(Top photo: Getty Images)