Dictionary365: N is for Napoli, Nevilles, Newcastle, Neymar, Nightmare, NLD and Nottingham Forest

We reach N in our rundown of the language of football, and that means all the Nevilles as well as your Newcastles, your Nightmares, your Nottingham Forests.

Napoli – Italian club with huge appeal due to smart light blue kit – ideally Mars-sponsored – and most importantly the everlasting and indelible link with Diego Maradona and, er, Tanguy Ndombele. Won an improbable Serie A title in 2023 and will not be doing so in 2024.

Natural position – A wildly inaccurate term used to describe the position of the arms when a defender is running and jumping and leaping around the penalty area with them glued to his sides like he’s Lord of the f***ing Dance.

Neighbours – Vaguely twee term to describe a team’s local rivals. Somehow loses all that tweeness when prefaced with the word ‘noisy’ and delivered by Sir Alex Ferguson at his most bellicose.

Neutral – Fans of neither team in any particular match, liable to be referenced only when a game is particularly exciting or dreary viewing for said dispassionate observer. But really, are any of us ever truly Switzerland watching any game of football? There’s always a team or player involved who has wronged you in some petty but vitally important way in the past, and that’s before we even get to more important things like how the result could impact your team’s own prospects or the really, really important things like Fantasy Football points.

Neville, Gary – Combative trophy-hoarding right-back in the peak Fergie years turned combative pundit and co-commentator via improbable, short-lived and ill-starred managerial stint at Valencia. Better, in truth, at the punditry gig than the co-commentary one. The extra time to prepare and construct his detailed analyses suits his style, while his co-commentary can be prone to overly assertive and oft-contradictory snap assessments. Does, though, retain the important gift for all pundits and co-comms of realising this is a great job to have and enjoying it even when (especially when?) riled up by whatever nonsense is currently being attempted by some daft defence/referee/fourth official/VAR wonk.

Neville, Neville – Improbably monikered father of Gary and Phil.

Neville, Philip – Number 50.

Newcastle United – see United, Newcastle

New faces – What a new manager needs to bring in to freshen up the place. Ideally he’d have liked a few more, but really he’s perfectly happy with the squad already in place. Until that six-game winless run that’s coming up in about three months’ time anyway.

New signing, like a – Desperate late summer attempt at re-evaluating a moribund transfer window by taking a fresh look at that midfielder you signed three years ago who has played 14 times for you and a combined 47 times across four mediocre loan deals in three countries.

Neymar – Brazil’s all-time leading goalscorer, an Olympic champion, winner of two La Liga titles, a Champions League and five Ligue Un titles who has scored over 100 club goals for three different clubs (Santos, Barcelona, PSG) but who will forever be a diving fancy-dan wastrel who has pissed away the little talent he had.

Niggle – Any minor non-specific injury likely to sideline a player for one to two weeks. Unless that player is an Arsenal player, in which case it will keep them out for six weeks initially before they return to the bench, at which point it is decided surgery might be the best course of action after all and nothing more is heard of them for the next 12 months when they turn up on loan at Southampton in news greeted by a thousand Ian Wright jpegs.

Nightmare start – Conceding an early goal. A slightly less imagination-deficient variant of worst possible start.

NLD – What the youngsters call the North London Derby these days. The Premier League’s best derby, specifically because it is the biggest one that pits together two clubs equally capable of the entirely absurd instead of having just one side capable of both scaling unfathomable heights and barrel-scraping lows within the same game and very often the same five minutes.

Nominal – The fee required to buy unwanted players or even entire clubs back in the day. Never hear of nominal fees these days, do you? Eh? Who remembers nominal fees? You sir, you look like you remember nominal fees. Sadly, appears to have gone the way of proper tackling, white dog shit and goalkeepers hoofing the ball aimlessly downfield on the half-volley.

Norwich City – Premier League-Championship yo-yo club currently in the unpleasant process of painfully discovering a yo-yo always stops at the bottom.

Nottingham Forest – Our unscientific survey reveals Forest to be the most liked (or least hated) Premier League club by neutrals. Nearly always included in those lists where people pick their ideal Premier League despite only playing a handful of its seasons. Plenty of reasons to include them, though. Great badge, inoffensive location, red kit which is objectively the best colour for football kits but most teams that have them are twats, great history but importantly a properly ancient one (nobody really enjoys others’ success) and, of course, Cloughie. Fans generally a GBOL as well, until you call them Notts Forest.

Nobody likes to see that – Catch-all commentator description for any unseemly event that absolutely everybody likes to see.

Nou Camp – see Camp Nou

Nuisance – An awkward, often small in stature, opponent likely proficient in the dark arts.

Numerical advantage – Enjoyed by any team playing against 10/9/8/etc. men after you’ve said “10/9/8/etc. men” too many times. Also particularly useful in women’s football, for obvious reasons.