This Week: Home kits, Away kits and Third kits

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.

There’s less than a week to wait before the first matches of the new season. But we are still waiting for the football to begin so this week, I want to talk about the new kits that the teams will be playing in this season. But before I get to the kits, I want to take a look back at last week’s football phrase and fiendish football phrase.

Last week’s football phrase was **** ********. This phrase describes how well players are able to kick the ball to their teammates. It’s one of the statistics that managers look at. If the ball always gets to their teammates then they will have a very high **** ********. However, if they kick the ball poorly and it is intercepted by players on the other side, then this will reduce their **** ********.

Last week’s fiendish football phrase was ********. This means the performance of a player or a team over a whole season. So if a player is injured, they might miss out on lots of the matches of a season’s ********.

Congratulations to Alex from Ukraine, AndreTorre from Brazil, Gapa from Korea, Lukáš from Czechia, Hasan from Turkey, MoBeckham from Turkey, Ryohei from Japan and Denis2000 from Belarus.

You all managed to work out that the football phrase was pass accuracy and the fiendish football phrase was campaign. Keep listening till the end of the podcast for two new football phrases.

There’s an article on the Premier League website site about the kits that the clubs will be wearing in the 2024/25 season that has slideshows of pictures of the new kits for all the clubs in the Premier League.

Last week, I spoke about Ipswich Town’s kit and some of the language was quite complicated. Now, I’m not sure if this is because the language is advanced or if I am just bad at talking about clothes, but either way, I thought that it would be a good topic for a podcast. So today, I want to talk a little bit about kits and then I’m going to challenge you with a quiz where I describe a team’s kit and I want you to tell me which team I’m talking about.

A kit in football is the outfit, that is the clothes that a team plays in. So it includes a football shirt, shorts and socks. You might come across the term jersey for a football shirt. Normally, in British English, a jersey is a type of jumper or pullover. Some people call sports tops for football and rugby jerseys, but it’s not that common. I’ve read that it’s more common to call them jerseys in the US, but the Premier League club shops that I’ve seen sell football shirts.

Premier League teams usually have three different kits, a home kit, an away kit and a third kit. On some of the club websites, there are also training kits and pre-match kits, but in this podcast, I’m going to focus on the kits that the teams play in. In the rules of the game, it says that the two teams must wear colours that distinguish them from each other and the match officials, that is, you need to be able to tell which team a player is on by the colour of their kits. The verb to distinguish means to see the difference between two things. This has come up before and I’ve spoken about the phrasal verb to distinguish yourself which means to do something to show that you are different from the people around you, usually by being better than everyone at something. During a football match, all the players and the referees need to be able to tell the difference so that a player doesn’t try to pass the ball to someone on the other team or to the assistant referee. Most of the time, clubs will play in their home colours. However, if their colours clash with the team they are playing, the visiting team will wear their away kit. If colours clash, then there is a problem when they are together. In normal English, we talk about colours clashing because they look bad together. So if you are wearing a red shirt then a green scarf might look a bit funny and you could say that you don’t want to wear the scarf because it clashes with your shirt. In football, we say that the kits clash when they are too similar so it might cause problems for the players and referees. Aston Villa and West Ham United both play in dark red shirts with pale blue sleeves. If they were to play against each other in their home kits, it would be very difficult to distinguish the different teams. So, the teams all have away kits. When West Ham play against Aston Villa at Villa Park, Aston Villa’s home ground, they play in their away kit, which this year, is black.

Chelsea, Ipswich, and Leicester all play in blue so when these teams meet, the visitors will have to play in their away kit. Wolverhampton Wanderers play in orange and as they are the only team that play in orange, you might think that they don’t really need an away kit, but they do have an away kit.

Sometimes, when teams meet, they play in their away colours even when the shirts are very different. I read a story that said that for referees, shorts and socks are very important, especially for judging if a player is offside. In some cases, a team’s home kit shirt might clash with their opponents shirt and their away kit shorts and socks might clash with their opponents shorts and socks. When that’s the case, the visitors will choose to wear their third kit. So that’s why Premier League teams have three different kits.

Over the years, football kits have changed with the fashions and technologies of the time. When the Football Association was founded, players wore heavy long sleeved clothes. However, they quickly started wearing shorts and short sleeved shirts. By the 1960s, players were wearing long sleeved shirts and baggy shorts. In the 1970s and 1980s, the shorts got shorter and the shirts were more brightly coloured. Leeds United were the first club to start selling replica kits, but all the other clubs worked out that this was a good business so they started paying more attention to their kits.

A replica is a copy of an original. Sometimes, people make replicas of important or historic objects. So I was in Singapore a few weeks ago and I saw a replica of a famous statue by the French artist Rodin. The original is in the Musee D’Orsay in Paris, but there are a few replicas around the world. As well as art and historical artefacts, you can buy replica guns and weapons. As far as I know, replica weapons are not real weapons, that is, replica guns don’t actually fire bullets.

In the 1990s, football shirts and football shorts were baggy and comfortable. Baggy is a funny sounding word. It means loose fitting. So if a jumper is slightly too big for you and has lots of room, it is baggy. The opposite is tight. These days, shirts are often slim fit which means there is not a lot of room in them around the stomach. I prefer my shirts with a loose fit and all my clothes to be a bit baggy.

I remember reading that one of the England kits in the 90s was designed to go well with jeans. To go well with means to complement or look good when worn with something else. You might hear someone say your scarf goes well with your jacket. If something goes really badly with something, you could say that it clashes. So the England football kit designers in the 90s, when they designed a shirt that would go well with jeans, were thinking more about the sales of replica shirts than the style of the players.

In the 2000s, the style of the kits changed again and the kits got really tight, like a super slim fit. I read that the style was called a second skin. I think that these shirts were designed more for player comfort than replica sales as most fans need a bit more room in their shirts. These days, fashions seem to be more relaxed and there are lots of different styles; some are tighter than others.

Another part of the design that has changed over the years is the collar. This is the fabric or cloth around the neck hole. I tried looking up the language for all the different styles of collar and discovered lots of vocabulary that I had never heard of. I’m not going to begin to try to describe all the language that fashion designers use, but I think it’s worth describing a few styles. In the 1950s, teams often played with a deep v-neck collar. This is a collar that comes down like the letter v. Leicester’s shirt has a v-neck. It’s only a subtle v-neck, but there’s definitely a v. Personally, I prefer subtle styles. I’m not a fan of things that are really loud or obvious. I like well designed clothes, but I prefer styles that don’t attract too much attention. The adjective subtle has a silent b in it. It’s written S U B T L E but pronounced subtle.

In the 1960s, teams often played with a round neck or crew neck. This to me just looks like the collar that you have on a normal t-shirt. I had to look up the difference and the collar on crew neck shirts generally sits higher up the neck, I guess the neck hole is a bit smaller. I don’t think there’s a big difference between these styles.
Brighton and Bournmouth’s home kit both have simple round necks or crew necks.

In the 1990s, for a while the fashion was to have little polo shirt style collars on football shirts. These collars were more like the collars on formal shirts, the sort of shirt you might wear to work or to school if you have to wear a tie. Eric Cantona was playing for Manchester United at this time and he used to turn his collar up in a stylish way. This season, Fulham have a collar and a button at the neck. Often, when shirts have collars, they have a few buttons at the neck, but not always.

There’s one more style of shirt with no collar or a very small collar but that still has a few buttons at the neck. Brentford’s away shirt has this style of collar. My wife told me that this is called a grandad collar. I don’t think that’s how it’s described on the Brentford website, but I have found examples of similar collars with that name.

I’ve already said that in the past, clubs would follow football fashions more closely; all the clubs had similar collars. This season, there are examples of every collar type and some new kind of hybrid collars. Manchester City’s home shirt has a very nice little dark blue collar with an interesting pattern. The collar is a bit like a round neck, but it is cut down at the front a bit like a v-neck with a secondary plain dark blue round-neck. I think you would be able to recognise my description if you saw a picture.

Football shirts have always been colourful and some teams are still playing today in the same colours they used when their teams were founded. For colours, football shirts are either one solid colour, that is the whole shirt is that colour. Sometimes, football shirts are one colour but with different coloured sleeves, like West Ham whose shirt is dark red with pale blue sleeves or Arsenal whose shirt is red with white sleeves. Sometimes the main shirt is one colour and the collar, the extra cloth around the neck hole is a different colour and the cuffs, the extra cloth around the hand or arm holes is a different colour. If a team plays in stripes, we normally mean that the shirt has vertical stripes that go up and down. When the stripes are very narrow like Ipswich Town’s then we call them pinstripes. Some smart suites have the same types of narrow stripes and they are called pinstripe suits. On football shirts, if the stripes go from side to side then we say that the team plays in hoops. Blackburn Rovers play in a shirt that is half white and half blue. If a team plays in a kit that has squares of different colours, then that team plays in a checked shirt. In the 1990s, some teams started playing in kits with more elaborate printed patterns. Elaborate means detailed and complex with lots of parts. In 1996, Manchester United wore a red shirt with a printed checked pattern on the shoulders and sleeves. Quite a lot of the teams have at least one kit with a printed patterned shirt this season. The patterns are generally quite subtle and from a distance, all you’d see is the team colours.

I will share a link on the page for this podcast on Premier Skills English to the article on the Premier League website with the new shirt designs.

Today, I have tried to describe vocabulary related to football kits and some other useful vocabulary along the way. I’m now going to challenge you by describing five different football kits and I want you to see if you can identify which team and which kit I’m describing.

Kit number 1: This kit has a pale blue shirt with a navy blue or dark blue collar and cuffs that have a pattern that’s made of the numbers 0161 which is the local area telephone code. The kit has white shorts and navy blue or dark blue socks with a pale blue hoop.

Do you know which kit I’ve just described? I think that one is an easy one.

Kit number 2: This kit has a black shirt and black shorts and black socks. The shirt has green and red stripes around the collar and over the shoulders and thin strips of printed fabric that looks like a kind of batik, a pattern that’s made using wax. The colours are from the Pan-African flag and are described as a celebration of cultural diversity. I think the shirts will be very popular.

Do you know which kit I’ve described? So far, I think I’ve only seen the under-18s wearing it so this one might be quite hard.

Kit number 3: This is another tricky one. This shirt is mostly white but with a small black polo style collar with a teal stripe. The collar has one button. There are black stripes on the shoulders and teal sleeves. There are also thin strips of teal on that run down the lower sides of the shirt.

Teal is a kind of greeny blue. There are some quite interesting colours among the new kits, but a podcast is not a great place to try to introduce colour vocabulary so I have added a matching activity on the premier Skills English website on the page for this podcast that has some advanced colours.

Do you know which kit I’ve described?

Kit number 4: You’ll have to listen closely this time. This kit is claret and blue. Claret is a rich dark red. The colour comes from red wine - from a type of red wine called claret. The shirt is mostly claret, but with light blue sleeves. It has a striped crew neck collar and striped cuffs with claret and blue hoops. The shorts are white and the socks are mostly light blue but claret at the top.

Which team’s kit am I describing?

Kit number 5: The last kit that I want you to work out is bright yellow with navy blue pinstripes. The colour looks like a very loud buttercup yellow but the name on the website is university gold. The shirt has a simple round neck collar with little navy blue triangles that look a bit like the shirt has a collar. The cuffs are navy blue. There is also a strip of white at the sides. The shorts and socks are the same bright yellow colour.

If you know which teams and which of the main kits I’m describing, leave your answers in comments on the page for this podcast on Premier Skills English.

Football phrase

The football phrase this week is the ********* ******. This is the name of the match that is held before the start of the season between the League champions and the winners of the FA Cup. This is a special match that is usually played at wembley stadium and the proceeds, that is the money that is collected from ticket sales is given to local charities. The prize is a silver replica of an object that a mediaeval knight might have carried to defend themselves.

This week’s fiendish football phrase is really tough. The phrase is a ******-******. I have chosen this phrase because the football phrase was described as a ******-****** in an article on the Premier League website. Generally, this phrase is used to describe an event that happens before something larger or more important that acts like an introduction to the more important event or series of events.

So ... this week’s ********* ****** is a ******-****** for the Premier League.

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 everyone stays fit and healthy and safe.

Bye for now and enjoy your football.