Word.ws English Dictionary

jumpers for goalposts

jumpers for goalposts phrase: informal association football as played by children, especially as a romantic or old-fashioned ideal contrasted against the commercialism and cynicism of modern professional football.

jumpers for goalposts: informal association football as played by children, especially as a romantic or old-fashioned...
Image: Adam Axon, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Phrase

jumpers for goalposts

  1. (UK) Informal association football as played by children, especially as a romantic or old-fashioned ideal contrasted against the commercialism and cynicism of modern professional football.
    • There is a strong, and understandable, tendency to romanticise a jumpers-for-goalposts golden age when football pitches looked like the battlefields of Flanders, assorted firms and crews spent their Saturday evenings trashing railway carriages and multi-millionaire players, bloodsucking investors...2011 July 7, Anthony Clavane, Promised Land: A Northern Love Story, Random House, →ISBN, page 130
    • In the next section we discuss the notion of 'jumpers for goalposts' in the United Kingdom, and how the modern notion of this, under different constraints, has emerged through activities such as cage football, mixed groups, playing against different ages, and so on.2021 June 27, James Rudd, Ian Renshaw, Geert Savelsbergh, Jia Yi Chow, Will Roberts, Daniel Newcombe, Keith Davids, Nonlinear Pedagogy and the Athletic Skills Model: The Importance of Play in...

Origin of jumpers for goalposts

From the idea that children, in the absence of a proper pitch, will mark one using items of clothing (such as jumpers).

Questions about jumpers for goalposts

What does jumpers for goalposts mean?
Jumpers for goalposts means informal association football as played by children, especially as a romantic or old-fashioned ideal contrasted against the commercialism and cynicism of modern professional football.
What part of speech is jumpers for goalposts?
Jumpers for goalposts is a phrase.

Words near jumpers for goalposts in the dictionary

  1. jumpering
  2. jumperism
  3. jumperless
  4. jumperlike
  5. jumpers
  6. jumpers for goalposts
  7. jumperwalk
  8. jumperwalks
  9. jumpest
  10. jumpeth
  11. jumpform

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: jumpers for goalposts (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “jumpers for goalposts.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/jumpers_for_goalposts. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.