Dame Bola: A Journey Through the Language of Argentinian Football

By Christopher Hylland

Every language has its sports-related phrases: in English one communicates through metaphors originating in boxing, horse-racing, cricket and even fencing. Why do Argentinians almost exclusively express themselves through football?
Dame Bola takes us on a journey through the many intriguing words, phrases and concepts used by Argentinians not only in their football but also in everyday society. The book explores identity and the inextricable link between football and life. Enjoy a deep dive into the cultural, historical and linguistic context of football terminology and the concepts unique to the Argentinian beautiful – and sometimes not so beautiful – game.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jan 6, 2025
• ISBN: 9781801509916

Book preview

Introduction

ONE WOULD imagine that the national sport of Argentina is fútbol. Think again. The South American country’s official national sport is called pato. Pato, meaning ‘duck’, is a sport not too dissimilar to polo which involves the carrying and throwing – on horseback – of a duck carcass (which has since been replaced by a leather ball with handles) into a basketball-esque netted ring. With little interest in the vocabulary of pato, this book is not about pato.

Argentina is now synonymous with fútbol. The country was once dominated by a rural elite with very small urban centres – a fact little conducive to the development of the beautiful game. The estancias – the ranches – were extremely powerful, occupying the fertile land of Las Pampas while frequently employing the first Argentine folk hero, the gaucho, to assist with tasks involving the rearing of cattle and managing the vast areas of the landowners. Pato, polo and other equestrian sports¹, as well as card and dice games, were the more popular leisure-time activities of the era.

Mass immigration to Argentina (and the Americas in general) began in the second half of the 19th century. Coincidentally, the first football match was played around the same time, namely in 1867. The subsequent explosion of football – rather than the horseback sports played in the countryside – was predicated on the accessibility of the sport as well as the encouragement by employers and churches alike to partake in leisure-time activities. While the game of football was initially ruled over by the English language, it would soon take on the local tongue with the rules translated into Spanish, the Argentine Football Association becoming Asosación Argentina de Football and clubs encouraged to hispanicise their once English names; Athletic Club, in many instances, became Club Atlético.

One’s national language is a source of pride. And by now Argentinian-Spanish had distinguished itself from the Spanish of the Spanish Crown. At the very beginning of Spain’s conquest of the Americas, which began with the accidental ‘discovery’ of the Americas in 1492, the language imposed on the locals was that of the Kingdom of Castile – Castilian.

(Spain became a unified nation a couple of centuries after the Kingdom of Castile had first contracted the Italian sailor Cristoforo Colombo – Cristóbal Colón in Spanish and Christopher Columbus in English – to explore the west and therefore ‘Spanish’ as a language did not represent Spain until the unified nation existed. For this reason many call Spanish ‘castellano’.)

As the subjected peoples of ever-expanding South, Central and North American colonies were exposed to Castilian/Spanish – and had it imposed upon them – few differences would have been found. In Spain there were many different languages (such as Catalan and Basque, to name but two) and dialects but the tongue of the ruling power would have been uniform: that of Castilla. But just as English and American English have diverged over the centuries, so has the Spanish spoken in Spain and its former colonies; for example, the very different Spanish dialects spoken in Argentina, Colombia and Cuba. Now less than ten per cent of Spanish speakers worldwide live in Spain and the Spanish spoken in Latin American countries differs greatly. In particular, Mexican or Peruvian Spanish are influenced by and include words from indigenous tongues like Nahuatl or Quechua, respectively. With less indigenous influence, and experiencing a different level of immigration, Argentinian-Spanish was heavily influenced by the influx of approximately two million Italians looking for a better life in the New World, as well as peoples from Spain, Germany, the Middle East, eastern Europe, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, to greater or lesser extents.

As well as native and/or external influence on vocabulary, variations in language also include pronunciation (the Spanish lisp is not used in Latin America), the use of yeísmo in Argentina (the pronunciation of the letters Y and the double L as a harsher SH sound/softer JJ sound, e.g. pollo – chicken – is pronounced po-sho or po-jjo) and their slang – lunfardo – the word itself coming from the language Lombardo spoken in the northern Italian province of Lombardia. Despite variations, the basis of the language is more or less the same across the 20 Spanish-speaking countries globally: una cerveza is una cerveza. But una birra (Argentina), una chela (Perú), una pola or una fría (both Colombia) are also cerveza.

Argento is the word used in Argentina which encompasses the idiosyncrasies of the Argentinian-Spanish dialect. Throughout this book, Argentinian-Spanish, argento, rioplatense-Spanish (which includes Uruguayan-Spanish, a dialect very similar to that across the River Plate) and castellano – Castilian, an alternative to saying español and the more popular of the two in Argentina – will be used interchangeably depending on the context.

It took me a long time to learn Argentinian-Spanish. But Buenos Aires stole my heart, and then handed me a new one. I had been living in La Ciudad de la Furia – the ‘City of Fury’ – for over two years, yet I was still struggling to express myself in this new language. I had studied a fair bit of Spanish-Spanish before moving to Argentina at the end of 2013, taking the language as a module as a part of my Bachelor’s degree in the UK and later listening to and studying podcasts while living in Oslo, Norway. But, having landed at Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires, I stumbled trying to negotiate my first hurdle in Spanish, something which left me rather deflated. The driver of the remis – taxi – started the conversation as we were leaving the airport, ‘¿De dónde sos?’

I had learned the phrase ¿De dónde eres?A2 but was thrown by this subtle anomaly. It turns out there were many such deviations from the Spanish – español – I had been learning. The drive into Capital Federal was an awkward one but after 45 minutes we had arrived in Colegiales, the barrio where I would be renting a room.

Learning castellano proved to be a rebirth. The process of learning a new language – essentially from scratch – is akin to starting life again. At first, one’s pure innocence (innocence for a baby, ignorance for a grown adult) means that very little, if any, language is comprehended. As the months go by, more words, phrases and concepts are taken in by immersion alone and the learner progresses to being a toddler or a pre-schooler who can talk a little bit, understand a little bit, but is as yet unable to partake in any meaningful conversation.

It was New Year’s Eve 2015, spent in Valparaíso in Chile, where I progressed to – and then lumbered in – this stage. Sitting around the dinner table with my Chilean hosts and their friends, I was a mere observer to their conversations. (And, for the record, Chilean-Spanish is considered to be even harder to understand than Argentinian-Spanish.) God forbid they ask me anything! Which, of course, being good hosts, they did. The whole room would fall silent every time I was engaged in the gathering. ‘Shh, he’s going to say something. How cute.’ Any illusions of cuteness were dispelled upon the appearance of a confused grimace and sweaty 30-something panicking. The pressure would multiply and my introvert’s insecurities would almost cripple my larynx. It was (socially) painful, awkward, frustrating; but it was an essential transition from new-born to child to adolescent to adult, or A1 to C2 (as per the CEFR scale used to determine one’s proficiency in a language). It would take a full two years before I could really engage in conversation, and then my progress improved rather more quickly. And so did my experience of Argentina.

I wasn’t alone in feeling this new me. Argentina – like the so-called New World in general – has long been a place where people can start afresh. Argentinian historian José Luis Romero commented that Argentina ‘is a place where men can invent a new identity for themselves’. It was not necessarily my intention when moving 7,500 miles from the northern hemisphere to the Southern Cone to start a new life with a new personality, it simply happened that way.

I may not have been able to converse especially fluently or even effectively with a local in those first couple of years, but I did find that talking about football in castellano was easier. I remember sitting outside a burger joint called Burger Joint in Calle Jorge Luis Borges after a couple of birras chatting to an Argentine about the game we both loved. It seemed easy. I would ponder as to why afterwards; when you understand the context of a conversation inside-out with many pieces of vocabulary the same, and the fact that teams’ and players’ names are easy to recognise, football may well have been the perfect shortcut to learning the language. If only one could get by talking exclusively about football. Oh, I tried.

My journey continued. From playing football mostly with other foreign expats and fluent-in-English locals, I joined an 11-a-side team of South and Central Americans who had moved to Buenos Aires for various reasons. I was ready to throw myself into an environment where I would be uncomfortable conversing in Spanish with various different accents (including Chilean-Spanish!) and if it didn’t work I could always ‘let my feet do the talking for me on the pitch’, as the cliche goes. As a mediocre footballer, I would have to continue studying the language in my non-footballing leisure time.

One of my favourite books to read was Eduardo Galeano’s Fútbol: Al Sol y Sombra. Galeano’s short, non-fiction but poetically written stories were about football, so the context was easy to grasp immediately. I could try to read the one- or two-page stories before looking up new, unfamiliar words. Finally, when I felt confident that I had understood them, I would record myself reading my favourite stories and send a five-minute audio message in the WhatsApp group of my new team. It wasn’t long before I was expelled from that group chat.

Before becoming an English teacher (my profession when living in Argentina and across South America), I knew very little about English grammar, let alone about other languages. I grew up speaking English and Norwegian but never had to study either – my English secondary school demanded very little of us when it came to the studying of grammar, and I learned Norwegian having lived my first six years in Oslo, with my father speaking it to us at home when in England. When I began teaching English I was forced to teach myself the intricacies of the language first, before I could face a class of adolescents. Conditional sentences, the passive voice, relative clauses and participle clauses were all on the menu for someone who could barely explain what a noun was. It would take me a long time to studiously plan lessons for Argentinian teenagers who were being forced to attend English classes in their free time and, while my working week was often long, I found English grammar and language in general to be fascinating. And the more I learned Spanish, the more I learned about my own languages.

Hence this book. The better my Spanish got and, subsequently, the more I engaged with Argentinian society and her fútbol, the more I came across words, phrases and concepts which I enjoyed analysing and which I considered interesting enough to compile in a book, along with the accompanying stories and background context. I consider this an appropriate follow-up to Tears at La Bombonera as the content matter of Argentinian football and the storytelling style will be similar.

Every language utilises words and phrases from sports. In English, a handful of football-related terminology transfers over to everyday situations (‘an own goal’, meaning a mistake; ‘kick off’, meaning the start of an event; ‘back to square one’, meaning a regression, etc.) as well as a slew of phraseology from other sports – boxing (‘take it on the chin’; ‘he is punching above his weight’; ‘she’s on the ropes’), horse racing (‘horses for courses’; ‘he’s not at the races’; ‘we’re on the last stretch’); golf (‘par for the course’), and darts via other shooting disciplines (‘bullseye!’). But in Argentina, I noticed there were so many more such phrases from football. From the chapter on football as a metaphor comes the book’s title.

On this journey through the language of Argentinian football we will visit the history of Argentinian football and the initial vocabulary used, before looking at some key concepts in their game. Then we will continue on to the phrases which have made their way from the football pitch across all strata of Argentinian society in the form of metaphors, and the new footballing tongue – more contemporary, yet equally intriguing phrases. There will be time for some iconic phrases, some ‘Maradonisms’ as well as some of the best nicknames applied to footballers.

¡Buen viaje!

Chapter 1

ORSAI: Amateur football, amateur vocabulary

IN 1867, the first game of football to be played in Argentina took place at the Buenos Aires Cricket Club at Los Bosques de Palermo in northern Buenos Aires. Earlier that year, Dublin-born Edwards Mulhall, the founder and editor of the English-language newspaper The Standard, had received a copy of the rules of association football, which he passed on to Thomas Hogg. On 9 May Buenos Aires Football Club was founded – as an offshoot of the cricket club – by Thomas and James Hogg and Walter William Heald. Three years earlier, in 1864, another game of football had been played at the same spot, but that was most probably a mix between football and rugby; The Standard and River Plate News reported that 12 sportsmen had taken part in a football match lasting 40 minutes.

Buenos Aires Football Club’s first game was due to be played on 25 May – Argentina’s national day – at Boca Junction Railway Station but bad weather meant it had to be postponed. Within a month, on 20 June 1867, a match did take place: ‘After a delay discussing the etiquette of wearing shorts in front of the ladies present, players were eventually split into two teams’: an eight-against-eight match with two 50-minute halves saw the red flat-caps (Colorados) face white flat-caps (Blancos) in what was an internal game by Buenos Aires Football Club. Thomas Hogg’s White Berets – Los Blancos – won 4-0¹.

At the time of the first football match in Argentina, fewer than 200,000 people lived in Buenos Aires. But over the next 45 years, the population would reach 1,576,000, with a further doubling between 1914 and 1930. The timing was perfect. Just as a new sport kicked off on the shores of Argentina, this mass immigration – which initially saw a huge skew in the balance between the number of men and women – saw workers and refugees arrive from Europe and the Middle East. Another popular leisure-time activity in those inceptive days of Argentinian society was tango, a dance with African origins which initially saw men dancing with men, for the lack of women in society.

Football appealed greatly as a free-time activity for its accessibility to all strata of society and was encouraged by employers and the church alike. However, the initial language of football was English, despite the local tongue being Spanish and around 75 per cent of immigrants coming from Spain and Italy. The English words and phrases used in the embryonic football of the turn of the 20th century were reproduced by those who didn’t speak English and written down phonetically. Some of these words are still used today.

AURREDI?

‘All ready?’

Here we go. I hope you, the reader, are ready to kick off this book and its first chapter. Before the commencement of those initial football matches on the shores of the Río de La Plata, the referee would ask – in English – ‘All ready?’ or ‘Are you ready?’, a question which would be hispanicised to ¿Aurredi? (also written aureli). The two captains would reply with ‘Diez’ (meaning ‘Ten’) because it sounded like ‘Yes’, the response they had heard – and subsequently copied – from the English players.

FÓBAL

‘Football’

The most essential piece of vocabulary! The word for both the ball and the sport, fóbal – the bastardisation of ‘football’ – would later become fútbolA3.

In 1906, it was decided that Spanish would be the official language of the fóbal. In 1912, the Argentine Football Association (AFA) became Asociación Argentina de Football (AAF) but the English word ‘football’ (sometimes written ‘foot ball’) was not replaced by the hispanicised fútbol until 1934.

REFERÍ

‘Referee’

Nowadays árbitro (‘arbiter’) and juez (‘judge’) are more commonly used although referí is by no means antiquated, serving as a useful synonym to avoid repetition of árbitro.

Spanish words beginning with an r require that rolling r sound which many English speakers find so difficult; rrrreferí. And the accent (called a tilde) on the i determines that the stressA4 be on the final syllable.

LAIMAN

And who would assist the referí: only the laiman – the linesman – could do such a job. The words laiman and ‘linesman’ have made way for ‘assistant referee’ or juez asistente.

ORSAI/ORSEI and ONSAI

‘Offside’; ‘Onside’

These words require little explanation in terms of translation other than to say that the f sound and the -ide sound are not common in Spanish. Hence, when interpreting these unusual sounds together, the reproduction of the new word is just that; a new word altogether.

While offside is still used today, fuera de juego (‘outside of play’) or posición adelantada (‘advanced position’) are more common.

INSAI

‘Inside’

As in inside-forward.

CENTROFÓBAL

‘Centre-forward’

Just as in English, the stress is on the first syllable of ‘forward’: cen-tro-FO-bal with the sound bal so vague it could pass for the syllable ‘ward’ just as much as it could pass for a guttural sigh. As you can see, the word fóbal passes for both ‘football’ and ‘forward’.

CENTROFORWARD

‘Centre-forward’

Fairly straighto-forward! Now called centrodelantero or simply el nueve – ‘the nine’. Also called el piloto – ‘the pilot’.

CENTROJÁS

‘Centre-half’

With the accent on the penultimate letter, the word is pronounced cen-tro-JÁS with the j acting as the English h sound and the soft s acting as an f sound. This word takes some linguistic gymnastics – and a fair bit of imagination – to understand the leap from centre-half to centrojás. Those poor British pioneers of Argentinian football must have thought they had landed in a foreign country!

Three jas – or jases; ‘halves’ – would make up the midfield (considered a defensive line, hence the use of the word ‘back’) of the now antiquated 2-3-5 formation of old with the jas derecho and jas izquierdo – right-half and left-half, respectively – on either side of the centrojás.

Another word for the three in the middle of the 2-3-5 was ‘half-back’. Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga’s short story Juan Polti, Half-back tells the true story of 25-year-old Abdón Porte who, in 1918 – seeing his very successful career with Montevideo side Club Nacional de Football waning – shot himself in the centre circle of their stadium Gran Parque Central. Quiroga’s short story was published two months after Porte’s suicide in the Buenos Aires-based magazine Atlántida.

BACK and FULBÁ

‘Back’ has survived the ages – and the subsequent changes in vocabulary – almost certainly due to the fact it’s a short word and the ease of its pronunciation. However, ‘full-back’ became fulbá, with the ck sound seen as superfluous.

WING/WINES

Argentina; the producer of great wings and great wines! This piece of vocabulary is less frequently used in modern fútbol having been replaced by puntero or carrilero. However, old-school romantics and journalists looking for synonyms – to avoid repetition in their reporting on the game – may well use the imported English word from a bygone era.

When referring to more than one wing, they’ll write wines. Who or what is more famous: Argentina’s grape-based wines produced around Mendoza or wines such as Ángel Di María, Claudio El Piojo López or Kily González (to name but three contemporary punteros)?

FIELD

Initially used in the Argentinian and Uruguayan games, ‘field’ has since been replaced by the word canchaA5 (or potrero). However, the word does survive in rioplatense football-Spanish, if only in the name of the authority which manages Estadio Centenario in Montevideo, Uruguay, CAFO: Comisión Administradora del Field Oficial.

ÓBOL/AUBOL

‘Out ball’: throw-in

The th sound in throw-in is especially difficult for non-English speakers. ‘Out ball’ would indicate that the ball has gone off the side of the pitch for a throw-in. This phrase has since been replaced by the Spanish phrases lateral or saque de mano.

FOUL

A word which has survived the test of time, if only its spelling and meaning. The pronunciation, however, has been severely bastardised: fool, faul, fau, ful – any of these sounds can be a claim for a free kick or penalti! Don’t get offended if someone shouts FOOL at youA6.

CÓRNER

The only thing to emphasise here is the use of the accent (the tilde) to emphasise the stress on the first syllable. Córner is a lot more convenient than the alternative words/phrases – tira de esquina or saque de esquina – its simplicity is the reason why it remains a part of today’s footballing vernacular.

CHUTAR/SHOTEAR

‘To shoot’

A relatively straightforward translation with the original word hispanicised. Spanish verbs (in their infinitiveA7) always end with the letters ar, er or ir. Alternative verbs for shooting the ball (‘having a shot’) might include: tirar, pegar, disparar.

SHOTEADOR

‘Shooter’: striker

Again, from the English word ‘shot’ which would have been used in those first years of football in Argentina. Shoteador survived long enough for Osvaldo Soriano to use it in his glorious short story El Penal Más Largo del Mundo (‘The Longest Penalty in the World’), one of many about the beautiful game in Soriano’s 1998 book, simply entitled Fútbol.

DRIBBLING/DRIBLEAR

The English word dribbling – an individual skill the original British (the distinction between English and British is tricky; Scottish football of the time was very different to the kick-and-run game played in England) footballers did not appreciate – would lead to the creation of the verb, driblear. However, both words went into disuse when gambeta became a quintessential Argentinian concept.

EL HINCHA/LA HINCHA

‘The inflator’: fan/supporter

The lunfardo verb for ‘inflate’ is hinchar and subsequently we get the words: un/una hincha (when referring to the individual); los/las hinchasA8 (about more than one fan), and, la hinchada (the fans as a collective).

The man who was generally considered the first hincha in South American football was the Uruguayan Prudencio Miguel Reyes. At the start of the 1900s, the leatherworker volunteered at Club Nacional de Football in Montevideo helping out with the team’s equipment. One of his main tasks was to inflate the footballs used by the club but his position on the sidelines meant that he was close to the action and he couldn’t help but to will on his team with his passionate shouts of ¡Arriba Nacional! Reyes became famous wherever Nacional played as – in the fledgling days of Uruguayan football – support like his was not common. Opposing players and spectators would ask about the crazy man on the sidelines, to which players would respond, ‘He is el hinchapelotas’; the ball inflator. Today, the whole Spanish-speaking world uses the word hincha.

El Gordo Reyes’s place in football history was acknowledged in 2020 with the erecting of a pitchside statue at Nacional’s Estadio Gran Parque Central in Montevideo.

UN FANA/FANÁTICO/A, SIMPATIZANTE (nouns)

‘Fan(atic)’, ‘sympathiser’: different degrees of supporting a team

Argentines are not uninterested in football. If you were to ask a person on the streets of Buenos Aires (or any other city) which team they supported, they might answer by saying that they are a fanatic or a sympathiser of a certain club.

A fanático/a is a die-hard supporter (like the hincha), whereas a simpatizante is someone who follows a team but doesn’t necessarily watch every minute or every game – a fair-weather supporter who goes to games as the team’s fortunes improve and who checks the league table from time to time. Argentina’s clubs are institutions and their members – socios – have access to a range of different facilities; from swimming pools to gyms to a slew of amateur sports and activities (e.g., chess, martial arts, senior football). Socios or sociasA9 may have no interest in going to the ground on a matchday nor actively look out for the team’s results, but when asked they will reply that they support the football division of that institution.

SOCIO

‘Member’

Argentinian clubs are member-owned associations with democratic processes which, for example, allow members to vote every four years for a president to represent their values – for the time being, at least, with threats to allow privatisation and foreign ownership more real after Javier Milei’s ascendency to president in 2023. Socios pay a monthly fee of around US$10 to be an ‘active member’ which gives access to various facilities, including the ability to buy tickets to see the team (for which they have to pay extra, naturally, albeit not the exorbitant prices the foreign visitor ends up paying on the black market or through a travel agency).

A socio vitalico is a socio for life, a member who has paid his or her monthly instalment without fail for a period of time (normally around 30 to 35 years for the ‘Big Five’ clubs).

South American football journalist Tim Vickery is a big admirer of the role of Argentinian clubs in any given barrio: ‘I do like that the concept of club is still really important in Argentina. It’s more feudal in Brazil – the social aspect of the club is the rich people using the facilities. There is a huge separation in Brazil between the club member using the facilities and the supporter; I don’t think that’s the case in Argentina. That’s partly because of the notion of the club being a legitimate representative of the neighbourhood – the club as the focal point of the barrio. Argentina is less of a feudal society [than other Latin American countries], so there is less social difference, meaning that the club really was a club in the sense of the people associating for a given purpose. Therefore, there is more identity that an Argentine can get from his/her club.’ Whatever might happen with Argentinian football club ownership going forward, let’s hope that the century-old spirit of the institution as a society of the neighbourhood is maintained and protected.

EL SÁBADO INGLES

‘The English Saturday’ was a half day of work on Saturdays which allowed for leisure pursuits in the afternoon, as initiated by British companies operating in Argentina. Many football clubs emerged from these companies encouraging sport in their free time. Clocking off at 1pm on a Saturday gave the whole afternoon for football – or indeed other sports and activities. In Argentina this was common from the early 1900s (although it was not passed into law until 1932).

Early amateur football in Argentina was dominated by British sides. The first league competition was played in 1891 with five teams playing an eight-game season. Old Caledonians and Saint Andrew’s Athletic Club – both of which were founded by the Scottish community in Argentina – finished joint top on 13 points. A play-off for the title saw Saint Andrew’s become the first Argentinian champions.

Two other British clubs would dominate embryonic Argentinian football from 1893 to 1911. Between 1893 and 1898, Lomas Athletic Club won five league titles (the Championship Cup). The only season in which they were denied the title was in 1896, when Lomas Academy finished ahead of their own first team. All of Lomas’s players – first and second teams – were students at Lomas de Zamora School, an important institution for the British expatriate community in the southern suburbs