This Week: Sheffield United 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 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.

Today, I want to talk about another club that has been promoted to the Premier League this season. The club I’m going to talk about is Sheffield United Football Club.

Football phrase

But before I start talking about Sheffield United and the vocabulary, I want to give you the answer to last week’s football phrase. If you didn’t hear it last week, here’s one more chance to guess now.

Last week, the football phrase was ****-****. These are additional matches that are played at the end of a tournament to decide the outcome. In English football, three teams are promoted from the Championship to the Premier League. The top two teams are promoted and then the 3rd to 6th place teams compete in a series of ****-**** to decide which team joins the top two in the Premier League.

Congratulations to Takateeto from Japan, Miky90ct from Italy, welcome to Premier Skills English Miky! Well done to Vietnyuyenngo from Vietnam, Alex from Ukraine, GlitchifyVN from Vietnam, Chen Meng Tso from Taiwan, Hasan from Turkey, Leandro_Higuita02 from Colombia, Welcome to you too Leandro. Congratulations to EduardoCaicedo from Ecuador, Denis2000 from Belarus, Isshin from Japan, Goku from Japan, Satt from Japan and Ken from Japan, Renan from Brazil and Shiho from Egypt. Welcome to Premier Skills English Shiho - I know that this is your second comment, but you missed my podcast recording last time so well done this week.

And also congratulations and welcome to the podcast XuanHung from Vietnam. You almost didn’t make the podcast XuanHung, but ... er ... Your comment came through just before I published this week so you just made it.

You all worked out that the phrase I was looking for was play-offs. Keep listening till the end of the podcast for a new football phrase.

Now it’s time for this week’s story. As there’s only one story this week and it’s quite long, I do advise you to visit the Premier Skills English website and click on the transcript so you can read and listen at the same time. I’m going to talk about Sheffield United in 6 parts and I’ll stop and talk about the vocabulary after each part.

This club is a bit special for me because I was born in Sheffield. Sheffield is in South Yorkshire which is in the North of England. People from Sheffield consider themselves northerners. If you look at a map of the UK, Sheffield doesn’t look that far north, but in England, there’s a bit of a north-south divide. London is such a big city and as it’s the place where the government sits it can feel like other cities are neglected or ignored. When I was born, I was a northern lad and more importantly a Yorkshire man and these were important qualities, though I was never really sure why.

I still feel a pull towards the city of my birth all these years later so I am happy to see a Sheffield team back in the Premier League.

Sheffield United played in the Premier League in 2020 and 2021 so we have spoken about the club in podcasts in the past, including in a series of very silly podcasts about Captain Blade, Sheffield United’s club mascot. However, these podcasts episodes came out a few years ago and Isshin from Japan said that he was really looking forward to a podcast on Sheffield United. So in this podcast, I’m going to talk about Sheffield, the city and Sheffield United. I’m going to talk about the team’s history and share some interesting facts about the club. I will stop and talk about the interesting vocabulary as I go.

The City of Sheffield

Sheffield is in the country of South Yorkshire and has a population of 556,000. People have been living in the area since the end of the stone age according to Wikipedia, meaning there have been people living in Sheffield for around 15,000 years. The name of the city comes from an Anglo-Saxon settlement and means the divided place. People often say that the city is named after the River Sheaf which is one of the rivers that run through the city, but the name of the river and the name of the city are linked. The name of the river comes from an old English word sheth of shed which meant to divide or separate. We still use the verb shed which means to get rid of something and the noun bloodshed to talk about the killing and wounding of people, usually in a war. So there had to be a place to divide for the river to get that name and then the place became known as the divided place or Sheffield.

I said that the name of the city comes from an Anglo-Saxon settlement. A settlement is a place where people decide to live. The verb to settle means to become relaxed or to slow down to a stop. It also means to arrive somewhere and start to live. You can imagine someone moving around a lot and then when they slow down and want to stop moving, they settle. So a settlement just means a place where people have settled. We use it to talk about ancient towns or villages. Archaeologists might report that they have discovered the remains of an ancient settlement.

I said that the river divided the settlement. To divide means to split into two or more groups. We use the words in maths to talk about an operation. Ten divided by two is five; six divided by three is two. You can also divide a space. So there is a fence between my house and my neighbours that divides the land. As well as physical divisions, people can be said to be divided by the politicians they support or by their religion.

I said that Sheffield is named after one of the rivers that flow through the city. To be named after means to be given a name because of the name of someone or something that existed before. Most commonly, people are named after their family members. I have known lots of people who were named after their grandparents. Sometimes people are named after famous people. I knew a man who was named after a famous writer and my sister has named one of her dogs after a jazz guitarist.

If you get rid of something, you dispose of it or throw it away. You can use the verb to rid to say that you free someone of something they don’t want, but it’s not as common as the phrase to get rid of. In my old house, we had a problem with mice and it took me ages to get rid of them. I hate throwing stuff away so I have quite a lot of old clothes that my wife wants me to get rid of.

Steel City

For hundreds of years, Sheffield was famous for producing steel. When I grew up, the words ‘Sheffield Steel’ were printed on pretty much every knife, fork or spoon that I used. In the 1740s, a new method for producing steel was developed in Sheffield. The steel was called crucible steel. A crucible is a container that can survive at very high temperatures and is used to melt metal. Metal is melted in a crucible. A similar method of steel production had been used in Central and South Asia for hundreds of years before it was discovered in Sheffield, but the discovery in Sheffield meant that high-quality steel could be produced in England which provided the materials needed by new factories that were part of the industrial revolution. Today, the steel mills have closed and there are only a few specialist knife makers that still produce Sheffield steel.

Now that the factories have closed down, Sheffield has transformed into one the greenest cities in the UK with the highest number of trees per inhabitant in Europe. There are two big universities in Sheffield and the city is proud of its music and culture. The city has the largest theatre complex in the UK outside of London which includes the Crucible theatre, named after Sheffield's crucible steel which is where the World Snooker Championship is held.

Steel is metal. It’s made by melting iron and dissolving some carbon. And then ... I’m not really sure. However, I do know that steel is a lot harder than iron and by dissolving different amounts of carbon and other substances, different types of steel can be produced.

The Industrial Revolution refers to the time when lots of factories were built and more work was done by machines. These machines were often built out of steel.

I said that Sheffield has transformed into one of the greenest cities in the UK. The verb to transform means to change completely from one form or shape to another form or shape. Sheffield was a smokey industrial city. When the steel mills closed, the city changed and people started to enjoy trees, plants and green spaces and today, the city has changed so much, it would be hard to recognise the old industrial steel city. This massive change is a transformation.

I said that Sheffield has the largest theatre complex outside of London. Normally, complex is an adjective that means something is made up of lots of different parts. We use the word as a noun to talk about a place that has lots of different related businesses or buildings. You often hear about sports complexes where there are facilities to do different sports or apartment complexes where there are lots of apartments.

Sheffield United FC

Sheffield is an important city for English football with the world’s oldest football club and two big clubs, Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday. Both clubs were formed from even older cricket clubs. Sheffield United was formed by members of the Sheffield United Cricket Club which was the first sports club to use the word United in its name. The football club was officially founded at a meeting in a hotel in 1889. They moved into Bramall Lane that year and have been there ever since.

I said that the football clubs were formed from even older cricket clubs. When we use even in comparative sentences like this, we want to emphasise the quality we are comparing. So I was talking about how old Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday are. They are both old clubs. But the cricket clubs are even older. If I had just said that the cricket clubs were older, I think the meaning would have been the same. By saying that the cricket clubs were even older, I was emphasising that the football clubs are both old.

The adverb officially means that something is done in a formal way that is approved by the people in charge. So if you have a nickname, then you have a new name that is not official. If you change your name officially, then you have to register your new name with the government and update your official records. Before Sheffield United was founded, some people must have got together and discussed it. When the founding members of the team met in 1889, I imagine some sort of declaration was made and maybe a document was signed declaring the foundation of the club.

Bramall Lane

Bramall Lane is south of the city centre and is the oldest professional football ground that’s still being used for professional football association matches. It opened in 1855 as a cricket ground and hosted its first football match in 1862. Sheffield Wednesday, who, at the time, were just called the Wednesday, made the club their home in 1867 and stayed until 1889 when Sheffield United moved in. In 1878, the first floodlit match, at night, was played between the reds and the blues. The stadium has hosted cricket, football and rugby matches, as well as rock concerts and a religious meeting. The record attendance for a match was 68,287 during an FA Cup match between Sheffield United and Leeds United in 1936. Bramall Lane was converted to an all seater stadium following the disaster at Hillsborough in 1989 and today has a capacity of 31,884.

The noun attendance means the number of people who go to an event. The attendance at a football match is the total number of fans who are at the match. The highest ever attendance at a football match was nearly 200,000 at the Maracana stadium in Brazil.

In the UK, the attendance at football matches dropped after new laws made it illegal for stadiums to sell standing tickets. This law came in after a disaster at Hillsborough in 1989. Hillsborough is Sheffield Wednesday’s football ground and in 1989, there was a horrible disaster. The match was over crowded and people panicked and there was a crush and 94 people died on the day and more have died since. After that, there was a report and the government passed a law that made football clubs in the top two tiers of English football convert the stands in their stadiums to seated terraces to make sure that everybody had enough space.

The word disaster means a terrible event. Sadly, the news is full of stories of disasters. As well as horrible accidents in which lots of people lose their lives, there are natural disasters like earthquakes and typhoons. The word disaster can be used for very serious events like the Hillsborough disaster though it is often used for less serious events that go very badly. When was looking for examples for the language challenge, I read about a DIY disaster. A man had tried to fix a leak in his roof himself and had ended up causing lots more damage and had to pay thousands of pounds to fix it.

The Blades

The club’s nickname is the Blades and the club badge is a black circle with two crossed swords beneath a white rose. This is surrounded by a red ring with the words Sheffield United F.C and the date 1889 in white. The two swords are because of the connection with steel and the club nickname and the white rose is the symbol of Yorkshire, the county that Sheffield is in. In the past, the club badge had the city crest on it which has pictures of the Norse god Thor and the roman god Vulcan who was the god of fire, volcanos and metalworking.

A nickname is an unofficial extra name. The word comes from Middle English and was formed from the words eke and name. Eke in this case meant extra or in addition. I love this and there are several examples of this in English; in the word nickname, the n was added because an eke-name sounds like a neke-name.

A sword is like a really big knife that was used by soldiers in battles. These days, the most famous swords are Japanese Samurai swords. The word has a silent w.

A volcano is a kind of angry mountain that might explode. There aren’t any active volcanoes in the UK. The nearest active volcanoes to the UK are Vesuvuis in Italy and a volcano in Iceland that I don’t know how to say. There is an amazing volcano in Indonesia called Mount Bromo. I got to visit there when I lived in Indonesia and climbed the volcano to watch the sunrise.

Promotion to the Premier League

Sheffield United have played 62 seasons in the top tier of English football, though this will be their third season at the top of English football in the last 10 years. They were last promoted to the Premier League in 2019 and finished in ninth place. They were relegated the following year to the Championship. They had a good season and finished in 5th place, earning a spot in the play-offs but lost on penalties to Nottingham Forest. In 2023, they finished in second place and secured direct promotion back to the Premier League.

The play-offs are the extra matches held at the end of a competition to decide the winner if there is not outright winner. This was the football phrase last week so I probably don’t need to describe it, but in case you didn’t hear last week’s podcast: In the Championship, the second tier of English football, the top two teams are automatically promoted, but then there are play-offs between the third to sixth placed teams to decide who goes up.

I said that Sheffield United finished in second place and secured direct promotion back to the Premier League. If you secure something, you get it. We use the verb secure when it is difficult to get something. If something is secure, then it is safe and not in danger. So if you ask for a promotion at work, until your manager approves it, you might feel that the promotion is not secure. When it has been approved, you have secured your promotion. It had been made secure.

Language Challenge

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

I have spoken about 17 items of vocabulary today and that’s way too many for me to challenge you with. So, I have chosen 6 items and to make it more difficult, I’m not going to tell you which 6 they are. I have found 6 examples of these items in news articles and I have removed the vocabulary from the podcast. I want you to fill in the gaps with the correct forms of the words.

Number 1. A disused railway station has been __________ into a 1960s vintage holiday home you can hire for £202 a night.

Number 2. The collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine is one of the biggest industrial _____________ in Europe for decades.

Number 3. British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran came close to setting an _____________ record at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey this week.

Number 4. Scientists have unearthed a brand new dinosaur, _______________ Janus, the two-faced Roman god of change, for its skill at surviving in a chaotic and rapidly evolving phase of North America's prehistory.

Number 5. A major civil engineering project to create a new junction off the A1 at Queen Margaret University has been completed and was _____________ opened today.

Number 6. Fruit flies can be really troublesome, especially during the summer months, but luckily an expert has shared a cheap but effective way of _______________ the pesky insects

Leave your answers to the language challenge in the comments section on the Premier Skills English website.

Football phrase

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

This week’s football phrase is an idiom that comes from football, but is not used to talk about football. The phrase is to **** *** *********. This means to change the criteria for success of a programme after the programme has already started. So if you ask your boss for a pay rise and they tell you that if you perform really well, say you complete 10 projects, they you will get a pay rise and then, when you have completed 8, your boss tells you that you need to complete 15 and then when you have completed 13, they tell you that you need to complete 20, you can complain that they keep ****** *** ********.

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

Before I finish, I am going to go through the answers to last week’s language challenge.

Number 1. Most of the current problems that customers are facing come from our new computer system.

Number 2. Karim Benzema marked his final Real Madrid appearance with a goal as they drew their last game of the season at home to Athletic Bilbao.

Number 3. Viewers of the latest Spiderman film have complained that they have been having trouble hearing the dialogue.

Number 4. To protest against the cost of living crisis, the lorry drivers blocked the motorway by using their lorries to form a barricade across the road.

Number 5. The council has given the go-ahead to plans to build an eight-storey office block on a residential street.

Number 6. New Orleans was founded by the French in 1718.

Number 7. Celtic fans fear Kyogo is set to leave after the Japanese striker sent an emotional social media message.

Number 8. Fans were delighted to hear that Alexis Mac Alister has made an early deal and signed for Liverpool despite strong interest from some of the Reds’ major rivals.

Number 9. Two teenagers were arrested this week in connection with a fire at a supermarket in Stanley.

Number 10. Chelsea won the Women's Super League for a fourth successive season as they cruised to a final-day victory against Reading

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.