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Football Word Search

A word search dedicated to football, perfect for young fans of the beautiful game. Hidden in the grid are eight words to find: goalkeeper, defender, striker, penalty, corner, stadium, ball and jersey. Learning these words is a joyful way to connect language with a passion many children already share. Print it for free or download it as a PDF: ideal for a PE lesson or a football-themed classroom activity.

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Created for free at creapuzzle.com

Football, one by one

A football match has a vocabulary of its own, and the eight words hidden in this grid take in the whole pitch, from the goal at one end to the stands around it. Below is a short note on each word, handy for chatting about the game once the grid is solved.

Goalkeeper — The only player allowed to use their hands, but only inside their own area; wears a different colour jersey to stand out.

Defender — Protects the goal and wins the ball back from opponents.

Striker — Tasked with scoring goals, often the fastest and most celebrated player on the pitch.

Penalty — A shot from eleven metres, one against one between the shooter and the goalkeeper — a moment of huge tension.

Corner — Awarded when the ball goes out over the goal line off a defender; a great chance to score with a header.

Stadium — The large venue where matches are played, with the green pitch at the centre and stands full of fans.

Ball — The modern football is precisely stitched to fly in a predictable way.

Jersey — Carries the number and name of the player; every team has its own colours, cherished by fans.

Football by the numbers, and a few word origins

The pitch is full of exact measurements. A team fields eleven players, a match lasts ninety minutes in two halves of forty-five, and the goal is 7.32 metres wide and 2.44 metres high, which is 8 yards by 8 feet in the old units that the Laws of the Game still remember. A ball must measure between 68 and 70 centimetres around, and the black-and-white pattern everyone recognises is made of twelve pentagons and twenty hexagons, a shape that mathematicians call a truncated icosahedron. It became famous with the Telstar ball at the 1970 World Cup.

The words themselves have stories. “Stadium” comes from the Greek stadion, a unit of length of roughly 185 metres and the name of the track at Olympia where the sprint of one stade was run. “Penalty” goes back to the Latin poena, punishment, and the penalty kick was introduced in 1891 after an Irish goalkeeper, William McCrum, had suggested it. The corner kick is older, dating from 1872, while shirt numbers first appeared in English league matches in 1928. As for “jersey”, it is named after the Channel Island where fishermen wore close-knit woollen sweaters, and “soccer” began as student slang for “association football”.

Four activities for young fans

Football is a favourite with most children, so this word search can open the way to a few simple activities:

  • How big is the goal? Mark out 7.32 metres by 2.44 on a wall or in the playground, with chalk or tape. Children see for themselves how large the target is for the striker and how much ground the goalkeeper has to cover.
  • Positions on paper. Draw a pitch on a large sheet and ask the children to place the goalkeeper, a defender and a striker, then to mark where a corner and a penalty are taken. It is a first lesson in reading a plan.
  • The commentator. One child describes an imaginary match aloud, using at least five words from the grid, while the others draw what they hear. Compare the drawings afterwards.
  • Design a jersey. Each child designs a jersey with colours, a number and a short slogan, and the finished shirts are pinned up like a small gallery.

How this grid is built

Eight words hide in 12×12 squares: two horizontal, two vertical and four diagonal. GOALKEEPER, with ten letters, is the longest word and slopes down to the right from the second row to the eleventh, while BALL, with four letters, is the shortest and stands alone in the last column. DEFENDER and PENALTY take up the bottom two rows, one above the other, and STADIUM runs down the first column. The remaining three, STRIKER, CORNER and JERSEY, slope the opposite way and criss-cross GOALKEEPER without sharing a single letter with it. Nothing at all is hidden in the first row.

More football words

To play with other names, open the generator with the Sport theme, which already holds soccer, tennis, swimming, basket and waterpolo, and replace the suggestions with the names of the children's favourite teams. A long word such as goalkeeper, ten letters, fits comfortably in the 13×13 grid.

Also in Italian

The Italian names are portiere (goalkeeper), difensore (defender), attaccante (striker), rigore (penalty), corner (corner), stadio (stadium), pallone (ball) and maglia (jersey). Italian has two words for the ball: pallone is the big football, while palla is the general word for smaller balls. In the Italian version, Crucipuzzle del Calcio, all eight words run vertically, so you search it by scanning the columns.

More word searches to try

After football there are other sports to try, and some geography:

More sports vocabulary, and ideas for using sport as a theme for learning, are in the article Sports word search puzzles.