Football terms explained: a fan's glossary
Football has plenty of words that sound strange if you are new to it. Here are the ones you will meet most often on score pages and in match reports, with short explanations.
Results and scores
A win gives a team three points in most league competitions, a draw gives one point and a loss gives none. A clean sheet means a team did not concede a goal in a match. A hat-trick means one player scored three goals in the same game. A brace means two goals by one player.
Time in a match
A match has two halves of 45 minutes each. Referees add stoppage time (also called injury time) to the end of each half to make up for time lost to injuries, substitutions and other stops. In knockout games that are level after 90 minutes, extra time may be played: two more periods of 15 minutes. If it is still level, the match goes to a penalty shoot-out.
Penalty shoot-outs
In a shoot-out each team takes five penalty kicks in turn, and the team that scores more wins. If the score is still level after five each, the shoot-out continues one kick at a time until one team scores and the other misses. A shoot-out is not counted as goals in a player's season total, and the match score is usually written with the shoot-out result in brackets.
Tournament words
A group stage is a set of small leagues at the start of a tournament, where every team plays the others in its group. The best teams move on to the knockout rounds, where the loser is out. The round of 16, quarter-finals, semi-finals and final are the usual stages. An aggregate score is the combined score of two matches (home and away) between the same teams. Teams used to get an advantage for scoring more away goals, but UEFA removed that rule from its competitions in 2021.
Players and positions
A goalkeeper defends the goal. Defenders include centre-backs and full-backs. Midfielders connect defence and attack, and forwards or strikers try to score. A substitute is a player who comes on during the match, and each team is usually allowed up to five substitutions in a game in many competitions.
Referee decisions
A yellow card is a warning, and two yellows in one match mean a red card and sending off. A direct red card is shown for serious fouls. VAR, the video assistant referee, is a team of officials watching video who can ask the referee to check key decisions such as goals, penalties and red cards. Offside is when an attacker is closer to the goal line than both the ball and the second-last defender at the moment a teammate plays the ball to them, with some exceptions.
On ScoreHub
You will see FT for full time, HT for half-time, ET for extra time and PEN for a penalty shoot-out on match pages. A red dot with a minute means a match is live. If a match is listed as postponed, it has been moved to a later date and the new time is usually announced by the competition.