This Week: History of the World Cup

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.

Today, I want to talk about the World Cup.

The World Cup final is the biggest event on the planet. The last World Cup drew about the same number of viewers as the Olympic games, but the last World Cup final drew more viewers than any other event in history. So ... you probably already know all about it.

In this podcast, I am going to talk a bit about the history of the World Cup and how teams get to play in the tournament and then I’m going to focus on 10 bits of vocabulary.

The words I’m going to focus on in this podcast are: Prestigious, tournament, professional, host, round-robin, knockout, qualify, ranking, cupset and Fifa. Listen out for this vocabulary while I talk about the history of the World Cup and about how teams get to take part. At the end, I’m going to go through the vocabulary and then you can listen again.

After that, there will be a language challenge to see if you can remember the vocabulary and at the end there will be a mystery football phrase for you to guess. I’ll also go through the answer to last week’s football phrase at the end of this podcast and the answers to last week’s language challenge.

So the history of the World Cup ...

Before the World Cup, the most prestigious football competition was the football tournament in the Olympics. However, by 1930, many countries had professional football leagues and the Olympic organisers, the IOC, did not want professional athletes in the Olympics so football was dropped from the Olympic games and Fifa made the decision to organise their own tournament.

The first World Cup was held in 1930. Uruguay was named as the host country. Uruguay had played the first international match outside the British Isles against Argentina in 1902. Furthermore, Uruguay had won gold in the football tournament in the Olympics in 1924 and 1928. Uruguay went on to win the first World cup, defeating Argentina 4-2 in the final.

Since that first tournament, the World Cup has been held every 4 years, except for in 1942 because of the Second World War. The number of competing teams has grown over the years from thirteen teams in the first World Cup to 32 teams in 2022 and 48 teams will compete in the 2026 World Cup.

Although the format of the competition has changed slightly over the years, there has almost always been a round-robin group stage, followed by a knockout stage. In the first World Cup, the knockout stages consisted of the semi-finals and the final. This time, the first round of the knockout stage is called the round of 16. The winners will advance to the quarter-finals and then the semi-finals and then the final.

How do teams get to play in the World Cup?

Fifa allocates World Cup places to regional football associations like UEFA in Europe and Conmebol in South America. In the years before a World Cup, rounds of matches are played within each group to qualify for the tournament. In Europe, there are 55 national teams but only 13 World Cup places so 10 qualification groups were created and the teams played against each other with the winner of each group gaining a place and the last three places won through play offs.

31 World Cup places are won through qualification and the last place goes to the host nation. These 32 teams are then put into a draw to establish places for the groups that play the round-robin stage of the competition. Although there is a random element to this selection process, the draw is made from 4 pots which are grouped by Fifa’s world ranking so the top teams are not all in the same group.

The first round of matches are underway and the excitement and drama is mounting. There have already been some cupsets or surprise results and football fans all around the world are watching their teams compete in the biggest football competition in the world, the World Cup.

Now I’m going to talk about the vocabulary.

The adjective prestigious is an advanced word. It comes from the noun prestige which means respect and admiration, usually because someone has got an important job or done something impressive. If something is prestigious, then other people respect it and think it’s important. I think it’s most commonly collocated with award so you can find lots of examples of stories online about people winning prestigious awards. I said that before the World Cup, the football tournament in the Olympics was the most prestigious football competition. It was the most respected competition, the one that footballers wanted to win the most.

The noun tournament is an intermediate noun that means a competition that usually involves a series of stages or different events where a game is played or a task of some sort is completed and successful competitors continue to play and unsuccessful competitors leave the tournament until one winner is left.

The adjective professional is interesting because it has quite a lot of meanings. Most commonly, it describes things that are related to work so a professional camera is a camera that a photographer uses if being a photographer is their job. Earlier, I used the phrase professional athlete. This use is the same. A professional athlete is an athlete who does their sport as a job and not a hobby. If you do something as a hobby, you are an amateur. If you do it as a job, you are a professional.

The word host is normally a noun and means someone who has guests. If someone stays at your house then you are a host. In football, when a team plays at home, they are the hosts for the team that is visiting them. When there is an international meeting like the World Cup or the Olympics or the COP conference, the country where the meeting takes place is the host country.

The noun round-robin is a strange word. The term is most commonly used to talk about a petition, which is a letter to the government or a company to complain about something or to demand something. It was first used in English in the British Royal Navy. So that the leaders of any protest could not be identified, the petition was signed with all the signatures like the spokes of a wheel, so that there was no first signature. As interesting as that history might be, it’s not really related to the World Cup. In a competition, a round-robin stage is a stage when all the members of a group play against all the other members of the group. The Premier League is a double round-robin competition as each team plays all the other teams twice. IN the World Cup, the teams are divided into groups of four so there are only six matches for each group in the round-robin stage.

The next stage of the competition is the knockout stage. I guess this comes from boxing originally where a knockout is where one of the boxers is knocked out, they are hit so hard they temporarily lose consciousness or can’t continue to fight. This is a win by knockout. In a knockout competition, the loser of each of the matches is out of the competition. In the World Cup, there are 16 teams who were not eliminated in the group stage. When they play each other, if they lose, they are out. After the round of 16, there are 8 quarter-finalists and then 4 semi-finalists, then 2 finalists and then the winner. The losing competitors at each stage are knocked out of the competition.

I’m not sure why I didn’t write this so these appeared in a more natural order. The teams that play in the World Cup have to qualify to earn their place. The verb to qualify normally means to pass some sort of test to earn a certificate that means that you can do something that you couldn’t do before. So when you pass your driving test, you qualify to drive. You earn a qualification, your driving licence. Normally, when we talk about qualifications, we mean exam certificates and professional qualifications. The verb to qualify is used more widely and means that someone has the skills or qualifications to do something, usually a job. In football, to qualify for a competition you normally have to win some matches. These matches are called qualifiers as they qualify the winners to play in the World Cup.

The teams that qualify for the World Cup and the host country are drawn into groups for the round robin stage. But these groups are not random. You see, qualifying teams are split into four pots according to their position in Fifa’s ranking. So ranking is a noun and it means rank or level. The word rank is normally used in the military to talk about your position in the military hierarchy. Are you a private at the lowest level or a captain or a general at the top? Your rank is your level. However you can also rank other things. So if you were to take films made by Steven Speilberg and put them in order of best to worst, you would be ranking them. Fifa keeps a list of all the international teams in order of their success. I think they look at all international matches and apply some sort of formula to determine a score and that way they can work out which team is the best and so on. Brazil is at the top of Fifa’s international ranking. When the teams that have qualified for the World cup are drawn into groups, the four pots that are drawn from are made by taking the host nation and the top 7 teams according to Fifa’s ranking and putting them into one pot and then the next pot is the next 8 teams and so on.

The word cupset is a portmanteau. A portmanteau is a new word that is made by blending two words together. So an upset, that is, a shock defeat of a strong team in a cup competition can be described by blending the words cup and upset. I don’t think that it’s a very common word, but you might hear it if there are more surprise results in the World Cup.

Most of the time, when I hear the word Fifa, people are talking about the football video game. But I think that people also know that it’s the international football organisation. Fifa is an acronym. An acronym is a word that you can say that’s made from the first letters of a phrase. So Fifa stands for Federation Internationale de Football Association. In the UK, we call the Football Association the F.A. This is not an acronym because we say the individual letters. This kind of word is an initialism. We could make the F.A. an acronym. We could say the FA Cup. No. That sounds wrong.

OK! That’s 10 words for today’s podcast. The words are: Prestigious, tournament, professional, host, round-robin, knockout, qualify, ranking, cupset and Fifa.

Listen to the story again to hear the words in context.

Language Challenge

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

Here are 10 sentences with gaps in them and you have to complete the gaps with the words from this podcast.

Number 1: The __________ stage, normally just called the group stage, of the tournament will end on the 2nd of December.

Number 2: The _________ stage of the tournament starts with the first of the round of 16 matches on the 3rd of December.

Number 3: So far, clubs from Asia have performed better than was expected in the _________.

Number 4: King Salman of Saudi Arabia declared a national holiday after the ________ against Argentina.

Number 5: _____ has given the go-ahead for rainbow-coloured hats to be worn in the stadium in the Wales - England match today.

Number 6: The community coaching programme won the _________ social action award.

Number 7: Just after his 17th birthday, he signed his first _________ contract with Manchester United.

Number 8: Manchester is set to _____ its first ever Christmas Parade this year.

Number 9: Argentinians are worried that they won’t _________ for the round of 16 after their shock defeat by Saudi Arabia.

Number 10: In sport, _________ is often called seeding with the team or athlete in second place referred to as second seed.

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. I will give you the answer to last week’s incredibly difficult football phrase in a minute. First, this week’s phrase:

This week, I’m looking for the word ******. The current Fifa World Cup ****** was made in 1974 and was first lifted by West Germany. It is made of solid gold and weighs 6.2kg and has been valued at m.

If you know the answer, be sure to leave it in a comment on the page for this podcast on Premier Skills English.

Last week, the football phrase was very difficult. It was so difficult that only four people got the right answer. So congratulations to Hsn from Turkey, you were the first this week and thank you for trying to help Tiago, Congratulations also to Juntheman from Korea, Wilson2103 from Colombia and GD26 from Russia. I also want to say well done to Alif akmal from Malaysia as you got a different form of the same phrase.

Last week’s phrase was to watch from the sidelines.

Before I finish, here are the answers to last week’s language challenge.

Number 1: We were 2-0 down at half time. You should have seen the way the manager came charging into the dressing room.

Number 2: My brother tried climbing the tree in the garden, but a branch broke and he fell. He tried to pretend that he was fine, but I saw him limping out of the garden.

Number 3: In an accident at work, he sustained an injury to his right shoulder that needed full reconstruction.

Number 4: I missed my bus so was already running late and then, to add insult to injury, I spilled my coffee all over myself.

Number 5: Look at that sky. It’s threatening to rain

Number 6: He seemed so sad the last time I saw him, so I'm glad he's in good spirits tonight.

Number 7: They’re on their way to the meeting and should be there in five minutes.

Number 8: After scoring the winning goal, he did an acrobatic leap into the air to celebrate.

Number 9: I only want to help. It's so exasperating when he ignores all my advice.

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.