Hello and welcome to the final episode of the Premier Skills English podcast. Today, I am going to look back at the last 10 years, at the over 800 episodes and reflect a little on what has been a fun and surprising journey. And as this is a podcast for football loving English learners, I will also include a quiz. I’m going to quiz you on my favourite football English and hopefully will be leaving you, after all these years, with some better language tools to watch, enjoy, appreciate, share and most importantly, talk about the beautiful game.

Over the past ten years, life off the pitch has been just as full of changes as life on it. I’ve moved around quite a bit: first from Manchester to Ludlow, and then again up to Scotland, where I’m now living in a small town along the coast from Edinburgh. Each place has brought something new, but East Lothian in Scotland, with its sea views and fresh air, has become home.

Family life has been busy too. My second son was born, which has been a joy, and my first son has been growing up fast. It feels like only yesterday he was a baby, and now he’s gone from play group, to nursery, to primary school, and he’s just started secondary school. Watching him move through all those stages has been amazing – and a reminder of just how quickly time flies.

Work has also changed. I had some fantastic times working with Rich, and then later with Rowan, but both of them have moved on. And at the British Council, I’ve made so many friends who have moved on or retired, from Michael who started Premier Skills English to Marta who has just started a new job in Oxford. I think I’ve been lucky to have worked with such great people. There have been ups and downs, good times and some more challenging moments, but through it all, there’s been one constant: I’ve always come back to football and to the Premier Skills English podcast.

And just like in my own life, football hasn’t stood still either. The game has seen some massive changes in the last decade.
One of the biggest talking points has been technology. A decade ago, referees had only their eyes and assistants to rely on. Now we have goal-line technology and, of course, VAR – the Video Assistant Referee. Love it or hate it, VAR has transformed the game. Sometimes it corrects huge mistakes, and sometimes it sparks even bigger debates, but it has definitely added drama to every match.

The way teams play has also shifted. The old “kick and rush” style is long gone. These days, pressing high up the pitch, quick passing, and clever tactical systems are everywhere. Managers like Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp have set the tone, and clubs across the league have followed. Data and statistics are now used to analyse players and plan matches in a way we never saw before.

In the UK, one of the most exciting changes over the last decade has been the rise of women’s football. The Women’s Super League became fully professional in 2018, and in 2022 the Lionesses made history by winning the European Championship at Wembley. That breakthrough moment inspired millions of fans and encouraged more young people to play the game. The momentum continued when the Lionesses went on to win the World Cup, cementing their place in football history. Crowds are growing, and the women’s game is now firmly part of the football conversation.

Supporters themselves have also made their voices heard. When a group of clubs tried to form a European Super League in 2021, fans protested loudly, and the idea collapsed almost immediately. In stadiums, change has also arrived: safe standing has returned in certain grounds, giving supporters a chance to bring back some of the atmosphere of the past.
On the global stage, football has never stood still. The World Cup in Qatar in 2022 was the first ever held in winter, and the next edition in 2026 will expand to 48 teams – the biggest in history. We’ve also seen famous players move into new leagues, with Lionel Messi joining Inter Miami in the United States and a wave of stars heading to Saudi Arabia. These moves show that football’s future will be even more international.

So, from VAR to the Lionesses, from tactical revolutions to fan power, the last decade proves one thing: the beautiful game just keeps finding new ways to surprise us.

And for me, just as football has kept evolving, so has life. Through the moves, the family milestones, the changes at work, and all the ups and downs, the game has been a constant companion – and so has this podcast. No matter what’s been happening, I’ve always found my way back to the Premier Skills English podcast, and I’m really glad you’ve been here with me to share it. 

I first started this podcast because I was in the British Council office in Manchester talking to a colleague who told me that the British Council had an account on Apple’s iTunes U which was an old podcast platform and that this account was really popular, but they didn’t have enough content. He suggested that if we made some podcasts, we’d get thousands of listeners right away. So I got together with Rich, who was living in Spain and we wrote a script and recorded it in two parts and I then stitched them together. The sound quality was horrible. We both tried recording, sitting on a bed with a blanket over our heads to stop the sound of the echo. And then when I tried to join the parts together, it sounded so unnatural. Over time, we bought new microphones and worked out a way to record while talking online so we could sound more natural, but there was quite a long learning curve. Because the sound quality wasn’t great, I tried using some background noise to make it seem like we were in the same place. At the start, I recorded the sounds of a shopping centre in Manchester and used that. But later, I found a company online that was giving away completely royalty free sound effects and background noises. Now, it turns out that my colleague who said we’d get loads of listeners right away was mistaken. I think we had about 100 downloads of the first podcast. The numbers grew, but really slowly. But all the while the numbers were going up, we were happy.

In the sound effect pack, there was one sound effect that I really wanted to use. I had crowd noises which we used as the background for a football match and we made quite a lot of podcasts based in Rich’s cafe. And there were quite a lot of driving podcasts with some fun sound effects including engine noises and rain and windscreen wipers. But there was one sound effect in particular that I had been trying to find an excuse to get into a podcast for ages. And then, Sheffield United were promoted to the Premier League and I got the chance to use it all because of their iconic mascot, Captain Blade. The sound effect was of a sailing ship at sea. You can hear the boards creaking and the waves and seagulls overhead. I was delighted when the Captain Blade podcast came up as finally, we could set a story on the open seas.

Another highlight of the podcast for me was the competitions. We ran some really complicated competitions with mixed results. One year, over Christmas, we ran a festive football prediction competition that had a really complicated system of forms. I tried setting up a system that would send the results to a spreadsheet that made a graph that I embedded back on the site so that there was a live leaderboard to show whose predictions were the most accurate. It mostly worked, but meant that Rich and I spent all Christmas copying football results into the spreadsheet so it could allocate scores. I think it was fun ... really.

The biggest highlight for me, personally, was hearing from a regular listener from Libya, a man I only ever knew as El Ghoul who wrote to tell me about a time that he’d been in the market in his city and he’d been walking past a taxi rank and heard that one of the taxi drivers was listening to the Premier Skills English podcast in his taxi. It makes me very happy to think about people listening to these podcasts around the world and it was lovely to hear from El Ghoul.

And now ... it’s time for me to move on and do something new. I’m quite excited because I’ve always wanted to make more videos as I think they are a better format for learning and I’ll get back to making simple vocabulary podcasts. But now, it’s time for a final football quiz. More mystery football words and phrases to challenge you one last time. So to top it all off, can you work out what my 10 favourite football words and phrases are?

Number 1. (******)

This word is used to describe an act that skilled players can use to get past an opponent, usually a defender and that has the advantage of humiliating their opponent at the same time. It comes from a time when the original meaning of this word referred to a very valuable spice. It was so valuable that sneaky traders would try to trick customers by passing wooden replicas off as the real items. This sense of deception has spread into football and now this move, this trick is probably more commonly used by football fans than by cooks and chefs. #

Number 2. (******** ****)

While a pass is usually a helpful act, this one is the opposite. It’s a poorly judged ball played to a teammate who is about to be tackled by an opponent. The receiver has no time to prepare before impact, and the name of this treacherous pass refers to the most likely destination for the player on the receiving end of the inevitable crunching tackle.

Number 3. (******* *** ****)

This phrase perfectly captures the extreme tension and anxiety felt by fans and players during the final, decisive moments of a match or a league season. It was famously invented by a legendary Scottish manager of a top Manchester club, who used it to describe the sound of nervous fans shuffling in their plastic stadium seats.

Number 4. (*** ****)

In football, this describes the dreadful act of scoring against your own team. However, the phrase is now more commonly used outside of sport. It has become a powerful metaphor in politics and daily life to describe any action or statement that backfires and ends up harming the very cause it was meant to support.

Number 5. (*****)

This word is used for a match between two fierce local rivals. The term likely comes from a town in the English Midlands, famous for a Shrovetide football match that was so chaotic it was almost a riot. This word is especially tricky because of its pronunciation. It looks like it should sound quite different, but somehow has preserved the ancient way of saying e-r.

Number 6. (*******)

This is a word for a dreadful, obvious, and often comical mistake made by a player, especially a goalkeeper. It's the kind of error that makes the crowd groan, like fumbling a simple catch or letting a weak shot trickle into the net. The word itself sounds clumsy and loud, evoking the noise of dropping something heavy by accident.

Number 7. (******)

This is a very common, informal name for a football manager. The word’s origins, however, have nothing to do with sport. It's an old English term, a shortened version of "godfather," that was used to respectfully refer to an elderly man or, more importantly, the foreman in charge of a group of workers. The name carried over into the industrial world of early football, and it has stuck ever since.

Number 8. (***-*****)

Every football fan knows this means one player scoring three goals in a game. But the term didn't come from football. It was born in the sport of cricket in the 1850s. A bowler who managed the incredible feat of taking three wickets with three consecutive balls was rewarded by the fans, who would hold a collection to buy him one of these brand new items of headwear.

Number 9. (******** *******)

This describes a dominant player in the centre of the pitch who controls the flow of the game, issues orders, and leads their team. The term is a military metaphor, comparing the player to a high-ranking army officer who commands their troops, dictates the strategy, and masterminds the victory from the heart of the battlefield.

Number 10. (*******)

This term describes one of the most audacious things a player can do in the highest-pressure situation imaginable: a penalty kick. Instead of blasting the ball, the player performs a delicate chip straight down the middle, gambling that the goalkeeper will have already dived. The move gets its name from the Czechoslovakian midfielder who bravely and brilliantly executed it for the first time to win the 1976 European Championship final.
If you can work out the answers to these 10 football phrase puzzles, leave them in the comments on the Premier League British Council website.

I will keep reading your comments and will let you know if you’re right. Can I also ask you what your favourite football words or phrases are? If you can, try to challenge other listeners by leaving your own football phrase questions. I know that some of you have some great ideas for football phrases. In fact, Hasan, I’ve used lots of your suggestions over the years.

And that’s all I have time for.

It’s been a wonderful 10 years, making these podcasts and reading your comments and responses to the quizzes, discussions and competitions. So now all that is left is for me to say that I hope all of you stay fit and healthy and safe. Goodbye for now and enjoy the football.