Imagine you enter the office in the morning and your colleague suddenly wakes up and shouts: “Imagine, the capital city team has really made a splash in the premier league with their new protégés.” Okay, you would say, it can’t be about football, because capital city means Berlin and premier league means Champions Leaguean inequality overall. It will take a few more centuries before a football club from the capital can boast in the premier league.
Of course, no one would talk like that, but in written sports language, many things are possible that are not possible in real life. Often it is due to the desperate search for synonyms: not always Berlin, but sometimes the capital or, in the past, even the Athens on the Spree.
But that was more in the days when the wet ball was still being kicked and a new protégé of the Hertha coach had set up camp on the Spree. Despite the new signing (what is an old signing?), Hertha was often still in the valley of tears. Despite a good starting position beforehand.
But that’s all harmless enough, if you have to abbreviate it can get even more adventurous when you break it down. German Football Association Women is the same as DFB Women, Women’s Bundesliga is not the same as Bundesliga for women, but rather the Women’s Football Bundesliga.
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But let’s relax for a moment, some word creations are easy to hold on to. When the women of 1. FC Union play in the Champions League, then to be fair we should talk about the capital city women in the premier class. And so that the impression is not created that this is a pharisaical moaning about dear colleagues from the ivory tower: the author’s first article for the Tagesspiegel ended with the fact that “a victory hung by a thread”.
