Football isn’t on the same level as a sport such as cricket when it comes to using words and terms that might not be all that well-known to those not from the United Kingdom, but there are times when it isn’t all that far off. Supporters of the beautiful game will occasionally make reference to a player in a way that fellow lovers of what the Americans would call ‘soccer’ understand, but someone who hasn’t been brought up as an aficionado of the sport may well find it confusing.
This is an attempt to explain some of those phrases, although it is obviously far from an exhaustive list.
Turncoat
If a player decides to leave one club for another, they will sometimes still be loved by their previous club’s supporters but can also end up being absolutely despised by them. Usually, the latter is reserved when someone chooses to leave one club for a rival, such as Sol Campbell’s decision to depart Tottenham Hotspur in order to play for Arsenal, or when Ashley Cole left the Gunners in order to sign for Chelsea. When that happens, one of the words that the player can be brandished with is that of being a ‘turncoat’, which is used to describe someone who has shifted allegiance.
It is possible that you don’t know the word ‘turncoat’, but that ‘turncloak’ is one that you are aware of. In essence, they mean the same thing, but they are not the same as a ‘traitor’. Whilst the depth of feeling from some supporters might be such that some people do feel that the player in question is a traitor, turncoat is more commonly used because of the idea of betraying a cause. It is especially relevant in football, on account of the fact that they are literally swapping the shirt of one team for another, meaning it fits in the historical context of being about army generals turning their coat colour to that of the enemy.
Journeyman
If you were to look up the meaning of ‘journeyman’ without the context or knowledge of where it fits into the world of football, you’d be forgiven for wondering what on earth it was meant to signal. The actual definition of it is of a worker who is skilled in a trade or craft and has completed their apprenticeship. When it comes to football, it is meant in a slightly more derogatory manner, given the fact that it is typically used to signal someone who has played for a wealth of different clubs without ever really hitting the big time. A journeyman is a player who was never good enough to be kept by one club.
@obdoesball Playing for over 50 clubs, this has to be a world record 🤣👏 @tomhwilliams23 #nonleague #journeyman #grassroots #englishfootball #football #efl ♬ original sound – ob
In the June of 2025, for example, Jefferson Louis finally retired from playing football at the age of 46. During his career, which began in 1996 and spanned 28 years, he was involved in 51 transfers. Considered to be the ‘ultimate journeyman’, he ended up playing for the likes of Lincoln City, Oxford United and Wrexham, amongst countless other sides. Journeymen are respected in the game because they have a wealth of experience, but ultimately acknowledged as not quite having the skill to be able to make it at the top level and instead deciding to bounce between sides.
On the Beach
As the end of the season approaches, you might well hear some people refer to players being ‘on the beach’. This doesn’t mean that they’re playing against Brighton & Hove Albion or Portsmouth, although they might be. Instead, it is a reference to the fact that the club that they are signed up to doesn’t have anything left to play for in the remaining games of the campaign, so the players are playing as though they’re already on holiday. Perhaps their team has already been relegated, or maybe the points are such that they know the position the club will finish in no matter what happens.
Regardless, the season’s end is just a couple of weeks away and the majority of the team are putting in the smallest amount of effort possible during their matches. Sometimes this can infuriate opposition managers not involved in the game, especially if the team that the ‘on the beach’ side is up against is involved in a relegation battle and the manager of another team fears they may win the match because the players can’t be bothered to perform. It is a saying that is not used in a polite way, instead suggestive of the notion that the players have simply given up and don’t care.
