Your World Cup phrasebook of weird and wonderful football sayings

"In squeaky bum time, the false 9 pulled off a nutmeg and scored a worldie in the top bin."

Make any sense? It does to football fans. 

They're heading from around the globe to North America for the World Cup – and bringing with them their own vocabulary to describe the beautiful game.

Here's a look at some of the curious phrases you might be hearing from inside and outside stadiums – not to mention a watching worldwide audience expected to hit 6 billion, or three-quarters of the planet.

Squeaky bum time

Let's paint a picture: It's the World Cup final, and Argentina and Brazil are locked at 1-1 with five minutes remaining. We are officially in "squeaky bum time." 

Coined by legendary Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson, the phrase describes the late stages of a match — or even a season or tournament — when players and fans get tense and nervous. 

It's even been recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary, which defined the saying as "a reference to the sound of someone shifting restlessly on plastic seating during tense closing stages of a contest."

False 9

You can't trust a false 9 if you're a defender. But a manager will have faith they can be a match-winner. 

A false 9 starts a match as the nominal striker – i.e. as a classic No. 9, in the traditional positional numbering system that still influences tactical discussions – but constantly moves into deeper positions on the field. This gives defenders problems – should they follow or stay in place? 

Although glimpsed as far back as the 1950s, the modern-day role was mastered by Lionel Messi at Pep Guardiola's Barcelona and played by Cesc Fabregas as Spain won the 2012 European Championship. Harry Kane might play in a similar position for England at the World Cup.

Parking the bus

This is nothing to do with a journey to the stadium. Instead, you're likely to hear this when a tiny outsider comes up against a top team at the World Cup. 

If an inferior team – or maybe one which has had a player sent off – shows no attacking intent and plays ultra-defensively to stop its opponent scoring, it is said to be "parking the bus" in front of its goal. 

The phrase came into football's wider vernacular after Jose Mourinho, the rentaquote Portuguese coach, complained while managing Chelsea in 2004 that Premier League rival Tottenham "left the bus in front of the goal."

Worldie

Typically reserved for long-range shots that fly into the top corner of the net, a "worldie" — a word coming from British slang — describes a goal that belongs in the "world class" category.

On the other hand, if the goalkeeper blocks a shot that few others would even get near, that can be known as "pulling off a worldie". Either way – it's a good thing. 

Nutmeg

It's one of the simplest tricks in soccer — and a humiliation for those on the receiving end. 

A "nutmeg" is the act of kicking the ball between your opponent's legs to either run round and gather it yourself or to pass to a teammate. It has derivatives around the world, from "petit pont" ("little bridge") in French to "caño" in Spanish and "tunnel" in Scandinavia.

Sitter

If you see a striker bent over with his head in his hands in the World Cup, he's probably missed a sitter. 

It's a very easy chance, usually from right in front of goal, that a player contrives to mess up. It might have come from cricket, which uses "sitter" to describe a catch that is seemingly impossible to drop — so easy, in fact, you could be sitting down to take it.

Panenka

Not many football terms are named after specific players, but this one is. 

Penalties are football's highest-stress moments: an unimpeded shot at goal in a low-scoring sport. So imagine the bravery on Antonin Panenka, playing for Czechoslovakia against West Germany in the 1976 European Championship final, which had gone to a penalty shootout. 

Whereas almost every previous penalty had been hit as hard as possible, Panenka fooled the legendary goalkeeper Sepp Maier by running up at full speed but then, as Maier dived, softly floating the ball over his prostrate body to score the winning goal. 

It's easily the coolest way to score a penalty… but if the goalkeeper stays stood up, by far the easiest one to save. 

Total football

It started off being a tactical ideology used by the Dutch national team in the 1970s, where outfield players would eschew fixed positions and comfortably interchange on the field to bamboozle their opponents. 

Nowadays, the phrase is invariably used loosely, even jokingly, by soccer fans to describe a lengthy spell of possession, often involving some intricate, fluid passing and ending up in a goal. "Liquid football" is an alternative.

Clean sheet

Goalkeepers want clean sheets more than laundry workers or hotel maids, but it's nothing to do with detergent.

Termed a shutout in the United States, it simply means when a team doesn't concede a goal. The use of "clean sheet" dates back to when reporters only used paper notebooks to record different incidents — like goals — in games. If no goals were scored by a team, a sheet of paper would be clean.

12th man

Each team at the World Cup will field the default 11 players – at least until somebody gets sent off. So who's the 12th man?

It's not a substitute – each team is allowed five of those plus one more in extra time, so we'd end up speaking of a "17th man". In fact, it's not a man at all, but a collection of people – the team's fans. The idea is that vocal and supportive fans act as an extra man, boosting the players. 

Top bin

As the most difficult space for a goalkeeper to reach, the top corners of a goalframe are the ideal targets for a shot. So obviously they have a special name among fans. 

Creeping just this century into the soccer lexicon – and thence the Oxford English Dictionary – is "top bin" (or, in plurals, "top bins"). It's possibly a nod to the use in practice sessions of targets in each of the top corners of a goal that resemble a bin – the British term for a trash can. 

Another version is "postage stamp," which you'd apply to the top corner of an envelope. But many languages have their own derivative: in Brazil, they say a top corner is onde a coruja dorme: "where the owl sleeps."