Cambridge Research Helps Capello Out..Ish

Cambridge boffins have backed up beleaguered England football manager Fabio Capello claim that he needs only 100 words to coach a football team.

England football manager Fabio Capello recently snapped that he needed only “maximum 100 words” to speak to the squad. With Capello, 64, on a salary of £6 million, each word is worth £60,000.

While the media were skeptical at the time, Cambridge profs immediately got to work searching for the 100 words most important to football managers.

They used a supercomputer to trawl through Cambridge Dictionaries Online – a database with over one billion words on it from magazines, newspapers and other publications. This then allowed them to create a list of the 100 words most used in association with football.

The wholly unremarkable findings see ‘ball’ take top place, while other words include ‘clever’, ‘dive’, and -perhaps more ominously for Capello – ‘sack.’

The results were criticised by an anonymous Sidney student though, who told The Tab: “I don’t know how ‘final’ and ‘win’ have made it in there – I’ve never heard them used in an England game.”

Capello will surely feel more assured now with research to back up his claims

There were similar puzzled reactions at the relatively low placement of the words ‘defeat’, ‘disappointment’ and ‘humiliation’, in 97th, 98th and 99th respectively.

The researchers seem happy with the experiment though. Dominic Glennon, of the English Language Teaching Department at Cambridge University Press, had this to say in conclusion: ”I suspect Fabio needs more than 100 words to manage the England team effectively but we believe his statement is not far from the truth.”

Whether this is a reflection on the flexibility of the English language or the intelligence of the players remains unclear.

Read the full list HERE.