Sport, Teams and Competitions
Learn 20 A2 English words for sport and competitions - tournament, league, opponent, referee, draw, qualify - with a story and a quiz.
A1 gave you the sports themselves. A2 gives you the competition around them: leagues, tournaments, referees, penalties and the result that exists in football and confuses everybody who learns English – the draw. There is also one noun that changes its stress depending on whether it is a noun or a verb. Learn the 20 words, then read about the worst football team I have ever loved.
20 words to learn
The 20 words
/ˌkɒmpəˈtɪʃn/
An organised event where people try to win.
It is the oldest competition in the country.
/ˈtʊənəmənt/
A competition with many rounds until one winner is left.
Sixteen teams start the tournament and one finishes it.
/liːɡ/
A group of teams who all play each other over a season. Say LEEG.
We finished eleventh in the league.
/ˈtʃæmpiənʃɪp/
The competition to decide the best team or player.
They have never won the championship.
/ˈtʃæmpiən/
The team or person who wins.
The champions lost their first game of the year to us.
/əˈpəʊnənt/
The person or team you play against.
Our opponents were two divisions above us.
/ˌrefəˈriː/
The official who controls the game and applies the rules.
The referee was the only calm person on the pitch.
/fæn/
A person who supports a team. Also supporter.
There were about forty fans, and eleven of them were relatives.
/biːt/
To defeat somebody. Past tense is also beat.
We beat them for the first time in nine years.
/drɔː/
A result where both teams have the same score. Americans say tie.
A draw away from home is a good result.
/ˈrekɔːd/
The best performance ever achieved. Stress on the first part.
She broke the club record at seventeen.
/wɔːm ˈʌp/
To exercise gently before playing to prepare your body.
Always warm up – injuries happen in the first ten minutes.
/ˈsʌbstɪtjuːt/
A player who comes on to replace another one.
He came on as a substitute and scored in four minutes.
/ˌhɑːf ˈtaɪm/
The break in the middle of a match.
At half-time we were losing three-nil.
/ˌekstrə ˈtaɪm/
More minutes played when the scores are equal at the end.
They scored in extra time, obviously.
/ˈpenlti/
A free shot given when the other team breaks a rule.
He missed the penalty and nobody mentioned it again.
/ˈfaɪnl/
The last match of a competition, which decides the winner.
We have reached the final exactly once.
/ˈkwɒlɪfaɪ/
To do well enough to enter the next stage.
If we win on Saturday we qualify.
/ˈmedl/
The metal disc you win: gold, silver or bronze.
She has a bronze medal in a drawer somewhere.
/ˈsteɪdiəm/
The large building where big matches are played.
Our ground is not a stadium. It is a field with a fence.
Now read the story
Story · all 20 words
The Worst Team I Have Ever Loved
My father took me to my first match when I was six, and by a series of accidents I have supported the same team ever since. In thirty years they have won nothing at all.
They play in the fourth division of a league that most people in this country could not name. Our ground is not a stadium; it is a field with a fence, one small stand, and a scoreboard that a man operates by hand and gets wrong about twice a season.
The fans number around four hundred on a good day. Everybody knows everybody. When a player is substituted, the crowd applauds him by name, and when the substitute comes on, three people shout advice at him that he can definitely hear.
Most seasons are the same. We do not win the championship and we do not seriously try. A draw away from home is treated as a triumph and discussed for a fortnight. Twice we have nearly gone down a division, and both times somebody scored in the last match of the year and grown men cried in a car park.
But there was one spring. We somehow got into a national cup competition – a knockout tournament that a club like ours is not supposed to qualify for at all – won two rounds against teams we had no right to beat, and were then drawn at home against the actual champions of the country.
Four thousand people came. They had to open a field for parking. Our opponents arrived in a coach that cost more than our entire club, and warmed up in kit that matched, which we found genuinely funny. Our players warmed up in whatever they owned.
At half-time it was nil-nil and nobody in that ground was breathing properly. Their manager was shouting. Ours was standing with his arms folded, saying nothing, which is what he does.
In the sixty-eighth minute the referee gave us a penalty. Our captain, a plumber from two streets away from my mother, put it in the top corner and then ran to the fence and stood with his arms out and his eyes shut while four thousand people made a noise I have never heard before or since.
They equalised in the eighty-ninth minute. Of course they did. It went to extra time, and they scored twice more, and we lost four-one and it did not matter even slightly.
We have never reached a final, nobody at that club has ever won a medal, and the only record we hold is for the longest time in the same division. My father is seventy-three and still goes. I take my daughter now. She asked me last year why we support a team that never wins, and I said something about loyalty, and she said, correctly, that it did not really answer the question.
She is nine, and she has not missed a home game in two years.
Beat or win? You met this in the A1 sport lesson and it is worth repeating, because it is the mistake native speakers notice fastest:
✓ We beat Egypt. (a team or person) ✓ We won the match. (a thing)
✗ We won Egypt. ✗ We beat the match.
Past tenses: beat → beat (no change), win → won, lose → lost.
A draw is a real result. In football a match can end with nobody winning, and English has a specific word for it: a draw. The verb is the same – we drew two-all. Americans say a tie and we tied. Do not say we made equal or it was the same.
Record changes its stress. This is a pattern across dozens of English words:
a world REC-ord (noun) but to re-CORD a song (verb)
The same happens with PRES-ent / pre-SENT and IN-crease / in-CREASE: noun on the first part, verb on the second.
Qualify takes for: They qualified for the tournament. And a person with the right training is qualified – the same word doing a different job.
Pronunciation: league is one syllable, LEEG. referee has the stress at the end: ref-uh-REE.
The structure: league, tournament, competition, championship, final, qualify.
The people: opponent, referee, fan, champion, substitute.
The match: half-time, extra time, penalty, warm up, beat, draw.
The prizes: medal, record, stadium.
Describe a match you watched in five sentences: who played, what the score was, one moment that mattered, what the crowd was like, and who you wanted to win.
Now practise with the questions below.
Check your understanding
Answer the questions below. You will see instantly if you are right.
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