In this football language post we look at a newspaper headline, ‘The New Number Nein‘ from the Star on Sunday newspaper about Harry Kane’s transfer from Tottenham to Bayern Munich. You can see more newspaper headlines here and don’t forget we have hundreds more explanations of football language in our football glossary. If you have questions or comments about this or any other phrase then email us at: admin@languagecaster.com.
Newspaper Headlines: Coronation Day: The New Number Nein
Harry Kane has finally joined Bundesliga side Bayern Munich after a long drawn-out negotiation that lasted all summer and this is why it has been called a ‘saga‘ – transfer stories that last a long time are known as sagas which is a term used to describe a long, epic story from Scandanavian.
This is big news as not only is Kane the all-time leading golscorer for Tottenham, he is of course the England captain. The Sunday Star showed a picture of Kane pointing to the number 9 shirt for Bayern and used the main headline ‘The New Number Nein’ which in addition to using a typical headline technique of alliteration (There are three ‘N’ sounds) uses a little German to highlight the fact that Kane is going to Germany. However, the word ‘nein’ in German means ‘no’ so the headline does not really work so well – it seems that the newspaper headline simply wanted to include a German word without any real meaning being added! Or maybe they wanted to include the German word for nine which is ‘neun’? The word ‘saga’ is used here too in order to demonstrate that the transfer has finally happened (‘Summer Saga is Over‘), while the sub-heading gives more information about the transfer (A£100m Kane is a big bay buy’). The number is a reference to the transfer fee but there is an attempt to include a pun by using the first part of his new club ‘Bay – Bayern’) but again it doesn’t really work so well. Headline writing is a difficult skill!
