{"id":882,"date":"2026-07-11T11:36:45","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T11:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=882"},"modified":"2026-07-11T11:36:45","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T11:36:45","slug":"british-grammar-invades-the-american-world-cup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=882","title":{"rendered":"British Grammar Invades the American World Cup"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The World Cup can be enlivening for American English. Every four years, we import some Britishisms. The phrase in abundance during this year\u2019s tournament, especially after a certain controversial red card, has been \u201ca coming together,\u201d which describes an incidental collision, as in, \u201cThat\u2019s not a foul, just a coming together.\u201d It\u2019s a practical term. I plan to use it while parallel parking in a tight spot. The British have given us other gifts: \u201chat trick,\u201d \u201cnutmeg.\u201d There\u2019s \u201cargy-bargy\u201d (a verbal scuffle), \u201cafters\u201d (argy-bargy turned physical), and \u201chandbags\u201d (afters but minor). \u201cSoccer,\u201d despite its contrarian edge, comes by way of England, from university slang for \u201cassociation football\u201d: \u201cassociation\u201d became \u201cassoc\u201d became \u201cassoccer\u201d and then \u201csoccer.\u201d You\u2019ve likely encountered the snob who describes a great goal as a \u201cclass finish,\u201d but at least the snobbery expands our expressive horizons. In this cultural exchange, America is a winner.<\/p>\n

Read more Can Office-to-Residential Conversions Survive the Pfizer-Building Crisis?<\/a><\/p>\n

Or are they? With the lexical flourishing has come grammatical rot. I\u2019m referring to the British \u201care\u201d\u2014the tendency to pluralize, as in, \u201cEngland are<\/em> going to blow it.\u201d Before France played Senegal last month, I heard an American remark, \u201cWith libert\u00e9, \u00e9galit\u00e9, fraternit\u00e9, and Mbapp\u00e9, France are<\/em> once again the heavy favorites.\u201d Often, the \u201care\u201ds emit from a certain type of liberal, cosmopolitan American soccer fan. (The \u201cFrance are\u201d utterer in question: Zohran Mamdani.) But these days the \u201care\u201d is everywhere. It\u2019s on our broadcast, even from the rare American announcer. (In sports commentating, we run a big trade deficit.) It\u2019s at our sports bars and in the Times<\/em>\u2014often with little consistency. We\u2019ve become plurally confused. When the U.S. lost to Turkey a couple of weeks ago, E.S.P.N.\u2019s website announced:<\/p>\n

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\u201cT\u00fcrkiye beats<\/em> much-changed USMNT.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Also:<\/p>\n

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\u201cTurkiye find<\/em> a late winner against the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Is the Britishification of our soccer grammar a token of graciousness and respect, or is it the wheedling sycophancy of perpetual losers? \u201cHere\u2019s what\u2019s going on grammatically,\u201d Lynne Murphy, a linguist and the author of \u201cThe Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English,\u201d told me. \u201cYou can either follow the form of the word, which looks singular\u2014\u2018England\u2019\u2014or you can follow the meaning, and since it\u2019s a team with lots of people in it, you have the choice of treating it as singular or plural.\u201d Words that are formally singular but refer to a group are called collective nouns. Americans tend to treat them as singular. This is called formal agreement. In soccer and in other contexts (government, bands), the British often use the plural. This is called notional agreement. Linguists insist that neither is better or worse; it wouldn\u2019t be wrong for an American to say that our basketball team is good while our soccer team are bad. But that doesn\u2019t mean I have to like it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Linguistically, as on the pitch, the Americans can often be found ball-chasing. Until the eighteenth century, English everywhere employed notional agreement\u2014\u201care\u201d not \u201cis.\u201d Since then, both sides have been moving toward formal agreement, with the Americans leading the way. Then, a couple of decades ago, the Brits suddenly reversed. \u201cThe British use of \u2018are\u2019 has been going up, possibly in reaction to the perception that \u2018is\u2019 is the more American way to do it,\u201d Murphy said. A similar backlash has happened with the spelling of the suffix -ize (they now prefer -ise). The language shifts have always been about class and status. To Americans, the Queen\u2019s English sounds sophisticated. To Brits, American English sounds crude. They say \u201cmashed potato\u201d; we say \u201cmashed potatoes.\u201d \u201cMaths,\u201d \u201cmath.\u201d If enough Americans were to adopt the \u201care,\u201d the English would probably go back to \u201cis.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re a gregarious species,\u201d Grant Barrett, a linguist and lexicographer and co-host of the radio show and podcast \u201cA Way with Words,\u201d told me. \u201cThere\u2019s something called accommodation theory that says, We change our speech depending on the groups we\u2019re in to try to fit in.\u201d But it\u2019s a little pathetic when the accommodation goes only one way. The American World Cup has produced some American backlash\u2014an \u201care\u201d argy-bargy. Among the \u201cis\u201d crowd, there\u2019s a sense that we need to build our own soccer culture. The \u201care,\u201d in its snobbery, excludes. Also, should we really be emulating a soccer country that is culturally dominant but hasn\u2019t won a major international tournament in sixty years? We\u2019d be better off learning Spanish or French. (Those happen to be formal-agreement languages.) On the podcast \u201cThe S* Word,\u201d Will Gavin, a Brit, and Master Tesfatsion, an American, have argued about the \u201care.\u201d Gavin, who also does play-by-play calls for American football games broadcast on U.K. radio, told me, \u201cWhen I\u2019m covering the N.F.L., I\u2019m really aware of using the grammar or the language of the sport itself. Otherwise, it\u2019s like commentating on tennis and saying \u2018fifteen\u2013nil\u2019 instead of \u2018fifteen\u2013love.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Gavin calls it \u201cde<\/em>-fense\u201d in the N.F.L., and \u201cde-fense<\/em>\u201d in soccer. But he only accommodates so much. \u201cI will still say \u2018are,\u2019\u00a0\u201d he said. \u201cTo me, that\u2019s not a language-of-sport thing, that\u2019s a fundamental language truism that I think Americans should adopt when talking about anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare<\/a><\/p>\n

Part of the problem is pronouns. A team, singular, is an \u201cit.\u201d That sounds weird. (\u201cIt won!\u201d) Americans have a workaround. Our teams have names. Oddly, we use the plural even when the name is singular: Jazz, Heat, Kraken. A notable exception is Stanford\u2014the Cardinal\u2014which is stubbornly singular, forcing people to regularly say, \u201cThe Cardinal is losing again.\u201d (Stanford explains that \u201ccardinal\u201d refers not to the bird but to the color. I\u2019m not sure I buy it. The school\u2019s unofficial mascot doesn\u2019t help: it\u2019s a stoned-looking green tree.)<\/p>\n

European clubs go without mascots. There are some plural outliers (Go Berner Sport Club Young Boys!), and many have unofficial nicknames (Go Everton Toffees!), but they\u2019re not often used. Without nominal agreement, you\u2019d be stuck with \u201cit.\u201d Many M.L.S. teams follow European naming conventions: D.C. United, Philadelphia Union, New York City F.C. Our linguistic soccer confusion has given us the monstrosity of Real Salt Lake, a team name which somehow conjures both \u201cThe Real Housewives of Salt Lake City\u201d and a charter bestowed by a Spanish-speaking monarch. The team name is pronounced, in corrupted Spanglish, not \u201cray-al\u201d but \u201cree-al.\u201d<\/p>\n

So who are we to take linguistic stands? This is a country whose name could be singular or plural: United States. We used to be an \u201care.\u201d The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution use the plural. The Federalists used \u201cis,\u201d which helped make their case for unified federal power. After the Civil War, the North tended to use \u201cis,\u201d while the South more often stuck with \u201care.\u201d A linguistic shift can reflect societal changes, or even propel them. I\u2019m not saying that reclaiming \u201cis\u201d will help the American teams in future World Cups, but it can\u2019t hurt. If we can\u2019t even count them, how can we count on them?\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more The Story of France vs. Morocco<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zach Helfand writes about this summer\u2019s soccer tournament, which has demonstrated the dominance of Britishisms in soccer coverage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":881,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-cup-2026"],"yoast_head":"\nBritish Grammar Invades the American World Cup - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=882\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"British Grammar Invades the American World Cup - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Zach Helfand writes about this summer\u2019s soccer tournament, which has demonstrated the dominance of Britishisms in soccer coverage.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=882\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-11T11:36:45+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=882#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=882\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"British Grammar Invades the American World Cup\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-11T11:36:45+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=882\"},\"wordCount\":1230,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=882#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/b2a800e2c04256f49cee3a3c18d3245a.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"World Cup 2026\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=882#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=882\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=882\",\"name\":\"British Grammar Invades the American World Cup - 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