This Week: Transfer Deadline Day

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.

This week, I don’t really have much in the way of news from the Premier League because of the international break. I do have one story for you and then I’m going to go through the questions and give you the answers to the Premier Skills English Premier League quiz that I published at the weekend.

At the end of the show, there will be a new football phrase for you to guess, but before we start the show, let’s look back at last week’s football phrase.

Last week's football phrase

If you didn’t hear it last week, here’s one more chance to guess now.

Last week, the phrase was just a word and the word was ******. This word is used to describe a match in a cup competition that is played because the original match ended in a draw. In the past, FA Cup matches were only 90 minutes. If the match ended in a draw, the teams would have to play a ******, usually at the other team’s stadium. This word is also used on TV to describe a recorded footage that is shown again, usually because of something exciting that happened.

Congratulations to Mobeckham from Turkey, Hayato from Japan, 258963 from Vietnam, CTLN from Romania, HSN from Turkey, and Simone Cavassi from Italy. You all correctly guessed that the word I was looking for was replay. I would also like to say good guess to Taha Gashout from Libya and better luck this week. You can hear this week’s football phrase at the end of this podcast. But now it’s time for this week’s football story.

Transfer Deadline Day

Yesterday was the transfer deadline day in the Premier League. Newcastle United are the biggest spenders in this transfer window buying Bruno Guimaraes from Lyon, Chris Wood from Burnley, Dan Burn from Brighton and Kieran Trippier from Atletico Madrid for a combined transfer bill of just under £83m. Julián Álvarez has signed for Manchester City from River Plate, but he’s finishing out the season in Argentina on loan so we’ll have to wait till the new season to see him in action.

As there is only one story today, I want to talk briefly about the words: transfer and deadline. I know that these are words that we have covered before, but they are important items of football vocabulary that can be used in many situations.

The word transfer can be a verb and a noun. To transfer means to move from one place to another. I think it’s most commonly used to talk about money. If you move money from one bank account to another, you transfer money. We also use the verb when we talk about air travel. If you are travelling somewhere by plane and you need to change planes because you can’t fly directly with one flight, then you have to transfer at whichever airport you are changing planes in. When I fly to Indonesia to visit my family, I usually transfer at Dubai for the flight to Jakarta.

Interestingly, I don’t think we use the verb to talk about footballers that much. I think you could, but it’s more common just to say that a player is moving to a new club. However we do use the noun to talk about transfers more generally. We talk about transfer gossip when there are rumours about who might be moving where and the transfer windows which are the periods in the summer break and mid season in January when transfers can be made. And we talk about transfer deadline day.

The word deadline has a horrible history. During the civil war in the USA, prison guards painted lines on the ground around their prisoners. If a prisoner crossed one of these lines, the prisoner would be shot. These were the original deadlines. Cross the line and you are dead. It wasn’t until later that the current meaning, related to a time limit for an event became common. Today, it means the time or date by which an action needs to be completed. So, I have deadlines at work. For example, when there’s an important meeting, I have to produce a report which needs to be shared before the meeting. My manager will tell me when the report needs to be completed and shared and that time is the deadline. When I was at university, I had lots of deadlines. For every course, I had to complete assignments and write essays and there were deadlines for these tasks. If you didn’t complete the tasks by the deadlines, you would fail the assignment.

The January transfer window opened on the 1st of January 2022 and closed at 11 pm on the 31st of January. That means all transfer deals needed to signed and all of the paperwork needed be submitted to the Premier League and Football Association by 11pm yesterday.

Premier League Quiz - Answers

Now it’s time for me to go over the answers to the Premier Skills English Premier League quiz. Before I do, I want to congratulate Taha Gashout from Libya for correctly answering all 10 questions and also HSN from Turkey who got the answer to the bonus question right.

I’ll go through all ten questions and their answers so here we go.

Question 1: This first question was about the current season. In this season, which Premier League player is on track to win the golden boot with 16 goals so far? The golden boot is the award given to the top goalscorer in the league. Who is on track to win the Golden Boot?

Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah is currently the leading goal scorer in the Premier League.

Question 2: Which Premier League team spent 140 days at the bottom of the table the season before winning the league? This was the record for a Premier League team, to spend that long at the bottom of the table and then not be relegated. And then to go on and win the league the following season. Do you know which team pulled off this miraculous escape and went on to become champions?

The answer is of course Leicester City. What a story that was! I’m not sure anybody really saw that coming.

Question 3: This question is about penalty takers in the Premier League, that is players who have taken 10 or more spot kicks. Which penalty taker is the only one to have a 100% success rate? I’ll give you a clue. This sharp shooter played 8 seasons in the Premier League and netted all 11 of his spot kicks.

The answer is Yaya Toure, who netted all 11 of his spot kicks for Manchester City.

Question 4: Which Cameroonian defender has been relegated four times with three different teams? This is not a great honour. Which poor player has had the misfortune to have been on three different teams that went down four times.

This unfortunate player is Sebastien Bassong who was relegated with Newcastle in 2009, Wolves in 2012 and Norwich in 2014 and 2016?

Question 5: Which team has the worst Premier League record? In one season, quite a few years ago now, there was a team in the Premier League that managed to earn only 11 points in the whole season. That was for 8 draws and one win over Newcastle United. So which team only won one Premier League match?

In the 2007-08 season, Derby County had the worst record of any club in the history of the Premier League. They only won once against Newcastle United and finished the season with a record low score of 11 points.

Question 6: For this question, I was looking for the opposite record. Which team scored the most points in their winning campaign? There’s only one team that has managed to score 100 points in a season. So which team was that? Which team scored 100 points in a season?

In the 2017/18 season Manchester City earned an amazing 100 points from 32 wins and also set new records for the largest winning margin, the greatest goal difference, the most away goals and points and the youngest ever Premier League winner as Phil Foden was only 17.

Question 7: There are two teams that share the record for the most league wins in a season. So a season is 38 matches and two teams have won 32 matches out of 38. Which two teams share the record for the most league wins in a season?

OK so I’ve just said that Manchester City managed 32 wins in a season. The only other team to have managed that number of wins is Liverpool.

Question 8: In the 93/94 season, the unfortunate Swindon town set the record for the most goals conceded when by the end of the season, they had let in 100 goals. For question 8, I’m looking for the opposite. Which team has had the best defence in the history of the Premier League? Which team has the record for conceding the fewest goals in a season?

The answer is Chelsea. Chelsea have the record for conceding the fewest goals in a season when they only let in 15 goals in 2004-05.

Question 9: One of the biggest humiliations a professional footballer can face is not losing a match, it’s not even relegation. The greatest humiliation comes when facing an opponent who puts the ball between your legs. This humiliation is of course a nutmeg. This season, the king of nutmegs is currently Watford’s Emmanuel Dennis with 12 nutmegs. Who completed the 20/21 season with the highest number of nutmegs?

Marcus Rashford was the nutmeg king last year with 20.

Question 10: The final question was about the largest crowd at a Premier League match. Which team holds the record for the largest attendance in the history of the Premier League?

The answer is Tottenham. Spurs played their matches at Wembley while their stadium was being built. The record Premier League crowd was 81,978 when they beat the visiting Manchester United.

And the bonus question was: Which Arsenal legend is the club’s 4th all time top goal scorer with 149 total goals? And why am I asking this question?

And the answer is John Radford who I have the honour of being related to. I used to work in a bar and I wasn’t very popular, it was a funny place, I wasn’t very popular until I was asked if I was related to John Radford. When I told the regulars in the bar that I was, their attitudes all changed and they begged me to bring him to the bar. I never let on that I have never actually met him. My grandfather once gave me a picture of him and told me about him. I think he was my grandfather’s nephew, my dad’s cousin, perhaps. Something like that. My grandfather was very proud and it’s nice to see the name Radford on the players mural on the Emirates stadium.

Now it’s time for this week’s football phrase. This phrase will be the same in this podcast and the podcast on Friday so I will announce the answer and the usernames of people who have got it right next Monday.

This week's football phrase

This week, I have chosen a phrase from the Premier Vocabulary section from the medium vocabulary.

The word is ***** *** ****. This phrase is used to say that something costs too much. It’s a funny expression and it’s usually used in a negative way to say that something is not very expensive. So you might hear someone say: we really need a new defender, but we don’t want to ***** *** ****, meaning we don’t want to spend too much money. Or perhaps, we should go for a coffee, I can treat you, it won’t ***** *** ****.

I think that this is much more difficult than last week, though it is from the medium vocabulary in Premier Vocabulary. I hope lots of you will leave a comment on Premier Skills English with your answer.

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

Bye for now and enjoy your football.