#britpickiing

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English Sports Football

I was asked by an anon for more britpick posts on English sports. I have to start with football. To many, it is THE sport, the one and only, the most important. It is considered the national sport of England.

No, not the American game. What they call soccer is in fact called football by most of the rest of the world. Oddly, the word "soccer" originated in England; it's an abbreviation of "association football" or “assoccer” as it became known, later shortened to just soccer as a nickname, to distinguish it from the other football of the era- rugby.

The Football Association (or FA as it is more commonly known) created a standard set of rules in 1863, mostly to separate it from the version played that allowed ball handling and passing with hands- AKA "Rugby", named after the Public School that "invented" it.

In the United States, the sport that emerged in the late 19th century borrowed elements of both rugby and association football. Before long, it had proved more popular in the USA than either of the original football games. In full, the American version was known as gridiron football, but most people never bothered with the first word.

So, football is part of England's cultural heritage. Forty % of all English children play football during their school years (both boys and girls).

Over two million adults play football at least once a month in a proper team (not just kicking a ball around with a kid in a park or one's back garden). There are around 30,000 grass football pitches in England, with most of these (83 % in 2021) both publicly owned and managed facilities with 52 % of the total number within the schools sector and 31% Local Authority managed, many of these in parks. This one below is in Regent's Park (Rosie fans?)

There are 5 leagues- all the way from the village up to the Premiership. With over 40,000 association football clubs, England has more clubs than any other country.

Then there are the 92 professional clubs, which pay their players (astronomical sums in the top two leagues) and earn huge fees from television rights, merchandise, season tickets and venue income. There are 20 clubs in the Premiership and then in the Championship (League 1) there are 24, and in each of the three levels below that there are 24. Rules for promotion and relegation are strict and depend a lot on performance.

The world-famous teams - Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Arsenal, etc - are names and cultural icons for everyone in the country (and many millions of people across the world). Manchester United is the richest English club; in 2023 it was worth 731m euros (£619.1m). The top twenty English clubs made revenues in 2022 of 9.2bn euros (£7.82bn).

Fans? Millions. Over 37 million people attended games at UK Stadiums during the 2022/23 season. In total, 35.7m individuals have watched live matches and the BBC's Match of the Day highlights, equivalent to 59 per cent of the total UK TV audience.

So, football mad! Officially. It's a thing to be a follower of a particular club for most of your life, even if they aren't particularly successful. The previous Prime Minister was a lifelong fan of Southampton's Saints football club. The current PM is a fan of the Gunners- the nickname of the Arsenal Football club.

Rich, poor, southerners, northerners- all walks of life. It is one of the few non-class-oriented sports in England. The matches are attended by a lot of young men; efforts to make the matches more "family-friendly" haven't changed the make-up of the audiences that much.

Football fans in the 1980s had a reputation for violence; "football hooligans" became a common phrase back then. Racist chants are still an issue with some clubs. "Pitch invasions" happened in the 1980s when fans were outraged by a referee's decision.

Now stadiums of the big clubs have lots of crowd control elements: fences to keep the fans of the opposing sides away from each other and from the pitch; all seated stadiums, too. Police presence is obvious, too.

When the England team plays abroad, the fans still have a reputation for violence and drunken disorder. Some 40,000 English fans descended on Gelmskirchen Germany for the Euro 2024 England v Serbia match.

Both the Serbian and Russian fans travelling to matches in 2024 included far-right and neo-Nazi members, called "ultras", determined to make political points about the "liberation" of Ukraine from the West.

Football has both good and bad sides to it.

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I love your Britpicks!

Could you tell us a bit about the British school system? Both for Sherlock/John kidfics and for stories about Rosie?

I am alway a bit overwhelmed with the different types of school and of course especially the public vs private school system and dont want to make up complete nonsense.

I have done a whole series of Britpicks on the English education system, starting with Primary School, Secondary School, and University, both undergraduate and graduate.

Primary schools can be found by searching my blog for #British schools and #English School system for fanfic writers

Secondary schools can be found by searching in my blog for #english school system and #English Education System

University education can be found by searching in my blog for #British universities and #University in Britain. If you are keen on Oxford or Cambridge, you can search on #oxbridge, #oxford university and #cambridge university.

Unfortunately, consistency in hashtags is NOT something I have been very good at doing (SORRY!)

I apologise that my blog posts are not easily searchable for two different hashtags (blame Tumblr?). I have often used #britpick and #britpickiing interchangeably because when I first started doing these, I had no idea I would be doing so many!

This question and another one on English sports made me realise that I might want to use PDFs to put these into Ao3 where multiple hashtag searching is easier. The only challenge there is dealing with so many images (I'm not great at embedding things in Ao3)!

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Some more British Idioms- 

           “Happy as Larry” and “Pleased as Punch”

“Happy as Larry” is used a lot - just heard a cute advert on the radio that used it, making me curious about the origin. This one is interesting because it comes FROM the colonies, rather than the other way. 

The phrase is most likely to be of Australian or New Zealand origin. The earliest printed reference currently known is from the New Zealand writer G. L. Meredith, dating from around 1875: "We would be as happy as Larry if it were not for the rats".

But who was Larry? There the story gets more contentious. One possibility is the Australian boxer Larry Foley (1847 - 1917) who never lost a fight. He retired at 32 and collected a purse of £1,000 for his final fight. So, it’s logical to assume that he’d be happy with his lot in the 1870s, which is just when the phrase is first cited.

An alternative explanation is that it relates to the Cornish and later Australian/New Zealand slang term 'larrikin', meaning a rough type or hooligan, that is, one predisposed to larking about. 

“Pleased as Punch” refers to my old friend, Mister Punch, of Punch and Judy fame. 

Punch's name itself derives from Polichinello (spelled various ways, including Punchinello), a puppet used in the 16th century Italian Commedia dell'arte. It began in Britain at the time of the restoration of the monarchy in the 17th century. The Diary of Samuel Pepys has an entry from 1666 that shows this early origin and also the popularity of the show even then: I with my wife... by coach to Moorefields, and there saw ‘Polichinello’, which pleases me mightily.

Punch and Judy shows were a regular feature of summer-time entertainments on British beaches through most of the 20th century, and I can remember having a show at one of our village fetes about ten years ago.  

Alas, in these days of political correctness, Mister Punch is recognised as a real villain. That's hardly surprising as Punch is a wife-beating serial killer! In performance, Punch is always unrepentant, self-satisfied and delighted with his evil deeds, squawking "That's the way to do it!" whenever he dispatches another victim. 

Despite this, there is still surprising affection for the old rogue in the UK, and the phrase lives on. Moriarty is definitely a Mister Punch.

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Could you give some tips on how to write a British character who grew up poor in London but then had to assimilate into the upper class? Like how would their natural accent being cockney affect their speech since they prefer to talk in an RP accent? Slang wise. Or anything else that might be a problem for them that I can’t think of because I’m an American haha

Interesting question! Let's start with the fact that people don't really speak "Cockney" anymore - and whatever you might think about hearing it in the original Mary Poppins movie, it was a total caricature. The "East End" accent these days is more likely to sound South Asian, given the preponderance of population immigrants or second-generation from Pakistan who now live in the Tower Hamlets and Bow areas.

So let's assume that your character has a South London accent or speaks with an "Estuarine" accent. Spoken by a growing number of people in the south of the country, Estuary is an English accent that is hard to describe. Somewhere between old cockney (South East London) and the Received Pronunciation of some newsreaders which avoids any kind of regional accent, Estuary is far from posh and almost classless. or at least not easy to tell whether the person is working class, lower middle class or middle class. The one thing that it will tell you is that the person is not "posh." Most public (as in 'private') school-educated Brits have this way of talking that has learned to avoid regional accents.

It's easiest to think of Estuary as a sort of "Cockneyfied RP" but without the use of rhyming slang that Americans tend to think of as Cockney. Go listen to Ricky Gervais speaking as himself rather than a character and you will get the idea. Martin Freeman also has this sort of classless but not posh Southeast accent. too.

The key to avoiding sounding "common" (which is what the upper class, public school educated person would call it) is to have parents, peers and professional life where everyone else around you is speaking RP without an Estuary accent. Vocabulary is a big difference, as would be the use of things like "innit?" or "you know" every other word. And NO rising inflexion at the end of the sentence that makes a statement sound like a question (one of the more objectionable imports from American English).

So what are the main differences? Estuarine will use a glottal stop rather than pronounce the t in football (foh'ball). It can also mean losing the t in water, so it sounds like wa'er. Estuarine can add an r in places that RP wouldn't so China and India become China/r/and India; law and order become law/r/and order. An RP speaker never drops their h, whereas Estuarine speakers usually do, especially when in the middle of a sentence. "Where's 'e gone?" instead of "Where's he gone?

If you wanted to learn how to get rid of your accent, drama school would be one way. Watching a lot of BBC costume dramas (but NOT Peaky Blinders!!!) would help. as would having a best friend who spoke posh RP.

I hope this helps!