Football Language: (a) Fringe Player

In this post we explain the noun phrase ‘fringe player.’ If you have questions or comments, email us at: admin@languagecaster.com.

You can also find many more examples of soccer vocabulary by going to our football cliches page here and our huge football glossary here.

Football Language: (a) Fringe Player

In this post, I’m going to take a look at the phrase ‘fringe player.’ This is quite an easy expression to understand if we look at some examples of the noun fringe. A fringe is the part of your hair that goes over your forehead – it’s the edge of your hair, the last part, not the central part on the top of your head. A fringe is also a decoration at the edge of clothes – again, not the main part of the clothing. So, a fringe player is a player on a team that is not a regular starter in the first team. They may not even get on the bench often – they are at the fringe of the team, the edge.

You might also hear the phrase ‘a bit part player‘ meaning the same thing – a player that is not a regular in the first 11, someone who plays only a small part in the season. This week, in the Champions League, a fringe player at Chelsea, Ruben Loftus-Cheek scored a hat-trick against Bate, from Belarus. Maybe he won’t be a fringe player much longer!

Here’s another example from The Independent from September 2018: Gareth Southgate has warned England’s fringe players that if they are still not playing for their clubs by October’s international break, he may have to drop them.