Jose Mourinho and Sir Alex Ferguson have had the unorthodox honour of having phrases they coined added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The move to add 15 addition terms to the dictionary was announced by the OED, who said: “There’s a World Cup kicking off in November, and while the OED already covered a large number of football terms, from catenaccio to nutmeg to water carrier , this select batch of 15 additions fills a few gaps in our formation.”
The two managers were the heartbeat of the Premier League between 2004 and 2008 before Mourinho left Chelsea for the first time, and the pair won all of the league titles in that time, sharing them two a piece. Ferguson retired in 2013 whilst Mourinho returned to Chelsea a year later and then went on to manage at Ferguson’s beloved Manchester United as well.
Together, Ferguson and Mourinho gave some of the most iconic memories from a period of golden football in England, and their contributions to the game have been added to the dictionary in memory of that.
Alongside Ferguson’s ‘squeaky bum time’, which was described as: “a particularly tense period of time, esp. one leading up to the climax of a competition or event”, is Mourinho’s famous ‘park the bus’ expression.
The description reads: “To play in a very defensive way, typically by having the majority of outfield players close to their own goal and showing little attacking intent.” The current Roma boss first used this term to describe how London rivals Tottenham set up to defend against Mourinho’s Chelsea in his first spell in England. It was later used against him by Brendan Rodgers. In 2013, Mourinho adapted the term, saying his Chelsea team ‘parked the Ferrari’ after a 1-0 win against Manchester City.
Other phrases to have been added include: Rabona, tiki-taka, gegenpressing, trequartista and Panenka.
