Sport is about winners. Victors! Champions! Title-holders! GOATs!
The theory about how the Premier League became the biggest league in the world is that Manchester United’s overwhelming era of dominance created a vehicle for the most mildly interested to get behind. You don’t need to figure out who Fulham are at any point, if you just know that the main guys play at Old Trafford, if you back them you’ll often be happy, and you can namecheck Nicky Butt.
So it makes sense that every competitor and every sport should now distinguish itself in the grandest possible terms. A case in point: I was doing some prep for telly about a bike rider recently and went to check how he described his latest achievements over on Instagram. My eyes slid down the bio to ‘World Champion 2024’. What?? I’d missed that moment of ultimate achievement.
I took a second look. In fact it read ‘Vice World Champion’. He’d not claimed to be the best in the world, thank god. But in some ways the claim was more egregious. My eyes had skimmed over the first word without taking it in on account of the concept not existing. ‘Vice.’ There is no such thing as vice world champion.
Runner-up, sure, silver medallist, second place. What is the vice jersey? One bearing the number 69? Do you advise the world champion on how to conduct his or her champion’s duties? Sport has long been a place with an unselfconscious desire to brand itself in more and more outlandishly aggrandising ways. The most brazen version of this, to British ears, are the ‘world champions’ of the NBA, MLB and NFL. That’s right, the first letter in the initials stands for National and there is only one nation relevant here.
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The footage of the USA’s now four-time 200metres world champion Noah Lyles laughing at the world champions of the NBA resurfaced this week: ‘World champion of what? The United States?’ The North Americans in the comments were largely adamant that because the leagues feature players from all over the world, the title is completely apt.
I’m sure Liverpool Football Club will be delighted to be elevated to world champs of the Premier League. Though of course Chelsea fans who actually are convinced they’re champions of the world from the Club World Cup might bite.
The more ultimate the expression, the better. Never mind that there is only one winner, and that subs are not ‘finishers’, Mikel Arteta, even though they may be ‘super’ they are mainly players who are not quite as good as the players you’ve started. Otherwise you’ve done something wrong. Does it matter? Irritating sports language tics are as much a part of the thread tying fan communities together as the sports themselves.
Everyone knows it’s ‘football club’ rather than just club when the manager speaks. And the shark has been definitively jumped where ‘medal’ as a verb is concerned.
Though the likes of your Harry Kanes, your Rodris are completely unique and can be defined only as themselves, no one blinks when they are lumped together in this hackneyed collective noun format. The charming Football Cliches pod has been adjudicating the use of football tropes for more than five years now, for their sins, and they’ve material for a least a decade more.
To know instinctively how the conversation does and does not sound is how you indicate your commitment to the game.
Individual sports’ private lexicons are dense and impenetrable to those from the outside world and that’s how it’s supposed to be.
But that ends I think at the grandiose reframing of achievement: to say what you’d like to be doesn’t make it so. That’s the beauty of professional sport.