WTF is nil?

WTF is nil?

Nil means zero. It is the score when no goals have been scored. A "one-nil" result means one team scored once and the other scored nothing.

Why do they say "nil" instead of "zero"?

Because soccer is British. That is the entire reason. The word comes from the Latin "nihil," meaning nothing, and the British adopted it for sports scores sometime in the 1800s when they were busy inventing games and then being bad at them. It crossed the Atlantic with the sport. It stayed.

You already understand this concept. You have watched a team go scoreless. You have said "the Bears got shut out." Same thing. Different word. The British version just sounds more defeated, which is appropriate, because a lot of nil scores feel that way.

Does "nil-nil" mean what I think it means?

Yes. Nobody scored. At all. The final result was zero to zero and both teams walked off the pitch having accomplished mathematically nothing in the goals column.

In American sports, a 0-0 final is a malfunction. It means something went wrong. A scoreless NFL game would prompt a federal investigation. But in soccer, a nil-nil draw is a real result that goes in the standings, gets three words of analysis, and is immediately forgotten by everyone except the two managers who will each claim they deserved more.

You are going to call this boring. Some of them are. Some nil-nil draws are ninety minutes of a chess match between two deeply organized teams where the tension is so thick you forget you have not seen the ball hit the net. Most of them are not that.

How do you actually use "nil" in a sentence?

The score reads left to right, winner first in recap shorthand. If your team won by one goal to zero, they won "one-nil." If they lost that way, they lost "nil-one," though you will more often hear "one-nil to [whoever beat you]," delivered by commentators with quiet satisfaction.

Here is the only table you will need.

The word "nil" only applies to the zero scores. Nobody says "they scored nil goals in the second half" in normal conversation. It lives in score-reading. That is its domain. It does not leave.

Still confused?

You are not confused. You understood this three paragraphs ago and kept reading anyway. That is fine. This is what wtfis.soccer is here for, not because ESPN failed to define "nil" once, but because nobody ever bothered to explain why the sport talks the way it does and why you should care.

Nil is zero. Zero is nothing. Nothing happened, or something happened once, or something happened twice. The number before "nil" is the team that scored. The "nil" is the team that did not. Read the score out loud once and it clicks.

You will hear this word approximately forty times during the World Cup. You are now prepared for all forty.

If you want to understand what happens when a nil-nil draw at the end of ninety minutes sends both teams into extra time, read our piece on how draws actually work in tournament soccer.

— The Scoreboard