This Week: Premier League Prediction Five

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 premierskillsenglish.britishcouncil.org 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.

This is the fifth and final episode in a series of prediction podcasts. I have made predictions about the teams who are going to struggle to survive and about which team will surprise people the most, about who will be the best player and about which teams will finish in the top four and today I am going to make a prediction about which team is going to win the Premier League.

But before I make my prediction, I want to give you the answer to yesterday’s football phrase. If you didn’t hear it yesterday, here’s one more chance to guess now.

Yesterday’s football phrase was a player. I asked you: Which Ecuadorian defensive midfielder has just signed for Chelsea?

Congratulations to KareemZain from Egypt, AhmadAmr from Egypt, Ali Abedini from Iran, Andretorre102 from Brazil, Renan from Brazil, Daigo from Japan, Welcome to Premier Skills English Daigo, Well done Denis 2000 from Belarus and Mumtaz from the UAE, Welcome Mumtaz - great to have you on the site and congratulations to Ken from Japan.

You all worked out that the player I was looking for was Moisés Caicedo.

Keep listening till the end of the podcast for a new football phrase.

Now, it’s time for me to make my fifth and final prediction.

Question 5. Who will win the league?

Will City make history and win four in a row? I’m not sure. The effort to fight back against Arsenal last season and then to do the treble must have been enormous. To do the same again will take an incredible effort. Guardiola was so determined to win the Champions League, he was prepared to do whatever it took. But now that City are treble winners, their motivation to defend the title is not going to match the hunger of the teams who are out to topple them.

So does that mean I think that Arsenal will win the league? No. Manchester City are that good that even with a dip in motivation, I think they are still sure to win. But I don’t think they are going to dominate the league this season. The battle for the top has never been so competitive. When you look at the players that Arsenal, Liverpool, Man U, Chelsea and Manchester City have to play, it’s impossible to predict the winner with any certainty. But even after Gundogan and Mahrez’s departure, Manchester City have such strength and experience that they are still the most likely to win.

Language Focus

The language that I am going to focus on from this prediction is:

• To be out to do something
• To be sure to
• Most likely to win

To be out to do something means to want or be planning to do something. It’s normally used to describe someone’s intentions when they are selfish or unkind. So you might hear someone say that a colleague at work is out to get them, meaning they want to hurt them or damage their reputation or career in some way. When someone is really angry, sometimes we say they are out for blood. In my prediction, I spoke about the teams that want to beat Manchester City, that want to stop them from winning their fourth consecutive title. They are out to topple the champions. To topple means to cause something to lose its balance and fall down. The champions are at the top so if they are defeated, then you can say that they have been toppled.

To be sure to do something means the same as to be certain to do something. If you say something is sure to happen, you are confident that it will happen. When you are making a prediction, this phrase to be sure to happen, means you are confident that something will happen, but it’s not always as strong as almost certain. I think that the use of sure as an adjective is less formal than certain and for that reason, a prediction made that something is sure to happen is not quite as certain. The language means that you have no doubt that your prediction will happen, but the register, the level of formality means that it’s often used for a strong prediction rather than a really really strong prediction.

The last bit of language for predictions that I want to talk about is the phrase most likely. If you say that something is most likely to happen, you are saying that of all the possibilities, your prediction is the best or the one that should happen. I guess if you wanted a percentage of certainty expressed by a most likely prediction, I would suggest that you should use it when you are 60% certain of a particular outcome. It’s not a strong prediction. It’s the best prediction you can manage, but you’re not really confident.

Over the course of these prediction podcasts, I have used a lot of different phrases that you can use to make a prediction. Before I wrap this up, I want to quickly review these items and to do that, I have tried to put these ways of making predictions in order of confidence. This is how I would use these phrases. In this review, I am going to make predictions about winning. I’m asking myself the question: Will you win? And then I’m going to make predictions about my chances of winning, starting with the lowest level of confidence and getting more and more confident.

Will you win?

• I might win.
• I probably will win.
• It’s most likely that I will win.
• I have a good chance of winning.
• I’m sure to win.
• I’m almost certain to win.
• I’m set to win.
• I’m a dead-cert to win.
• I’m going to win.
• I’m definitely going to win.

Language Challenge

Your challenge today is to make your own prediction about which team is going to win the Premier League. For each episode of these prediction podcasts, I want to read about your predictions and then, at the end of the season, I’ll look back and we can see whose predictions were the most accurate.

Football Phrase

Now it’s time for today's football phrase.

Today’s football phrase is a game that you can play on the Premier League website where you pick a team and act as a sort of manager, transferring players in and out of your team. Each week, the players earn points by playing, scoring goals, making assists and performing other football feats. You compete with other managers to see whose team scores the most points and there’s a Premier Skills English league you can join if you want to compete with me and a group of podcast listeners and Premier Skills English users.

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

And 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.