Football eh, what a sport. Thousands of games played every week, millions of spectators - there's a lot to talk about! So it's no surprise that the world of football has built up such a vocabularly, a lexicon that even the fervent of football fan can easily find themselves out of date with, and as for newbies, well I can only imagine learning the language of our sport can feel just a wee bit intimidating. This is why The Fotball Dictionary exists, but to learn the true origin we need to talk about Basketball.
The 2020 NBA Bubble
I've always liked Basketball but I'd never really had the time to follow it, that all changed in 2020 when suddenly the entire world had more time. The NBA had decided to conclude it's 2019/2020 season by creating an 'NBA Bubble' at Disney World Florida, it allowed them to finish the season in a safe and meaningful way. This was the perfect opportunity for me to finally 'get into' Basketball, so I downloaded the NBA app and watched the highlights of every game and attempted to watch the odd live game whenever possible. I really had a great time with it, learning who the best teams were, the best players. The only thing I really struggled with was understanding all the terminology. A backcourt violation?? Goaltending?? The Pick and Roll?! I could (and did) look up all of these terms of course and it's a fun exercise when getting into a new sport, however what I really wanted was a single resource where I could look everything up.
Urban Dictionary
I've long been a fan of the website Urban Dictionary it was always a fun way of looking up slang I wasn't sure on (which is fairly often when you have a teenage son). I had even submitted a definition to it many years ago
So what I wanted for Basketball was essentially an Urban Dictionary style lookup website for Basketball terms, and if I would find that useful for Basketball then surely there are others out there that would find that useful for the sport I most know and love - Football.
The Football Dictionary
It was April 2021 when I went and regsitered the domain, annoyingly footballdictionary.com was already taken, and although there were other variations I could have gone for, I wanted a .com and so thefootballdictionary.com it was.
I had been building the website for a while but just couldn't get it done, I would add a feature here and there but could never find enough time to really get it done. I had assumed that paying actual money on a domain would motivate me to finish it, however that didn't really happen. I did continue to work on it in my spare time though whenever I got chance and eventually had got to a point where I would happily have released it, however the big struggle then was actually writing the definitions. If I failed to find time to work on the tech, it was even harder finding time to write the definitions.
World Cup year you say
2026 started and it's a World Cup year, and putting all the controvesies to one side, it's a World Cup year! Now would sure be a good time to release that website I had been working on for 5+ years(?!), but again, I had only written a handful of definitions and although it's meant to be a community driven website, I'm pretty sure if people come to learn about football parlance and find only 10 or so terms they will quickly move on.
I've got a whole blog post about AI I'm going to write where I'll explain the decision and the mechanics of using AI to help write the definitions but ultimately it allowed me to add a whole heap of content quickly. I could launch the website with 100s of definitions, rather than 10 or so. This was massive and the final piece of the jigsaw allowing me to launch. I know the use of AI will put some people off, and it wasn't something I came to lightly, again I will explain all in the other post, but it really got the project from a website sitting on my github to an active website full of interesting footy terms.
The Football Dictionary community
It feels a bit weird calling it 'The Football Dictionary community' when that community currently consists of just me, but the intention is that it does turn into a bit of a community. I want people to vote up the good definitions, vote down the bad, submit their own definitions, no matter how niche you may think it is, report definitions that offend, tell others about the site, increase your understanding of the beautiful game.
Ultimately, I want to help increase people's understanding of the sport and remove any barriers to entry people may feel when they hear any kind of unusual football words. I also want it be relevent, part of the conversation. If something has happened in a big game on a weekend which brings to the forefront a particular word or phrase, then I want to feature that prominently, bring everyone in on the conversation, bring clarity to the discussion.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the website, football is great.
The Gaffer - British slang for the manager or head coach.