Okuzeka
Football (Soccer) vocabulary · Competitions & Results

Clean sheet

Meaning in football (soccer), with examples

/ˌkliːn ˈʃiːt/nounCore term

In football (soccer), clean sheet means: A match in which a team, and especially its goalkeeper, does not concede a single goal.

In Turkish: gol yememe, kalesini gole kapatma

How it is used

Teams and goalkeepers keep a clean sheet, and the number of clean sheets is counted over a season. American English says shutout. It is a statistic fans quote about keepers and defenders: "He has twelve clean sheets this season."

Example sentences

  1. Our goalkeeper kept his fifth clean sheet in a row.

  2. We're delighted with the clean sheet, but we need to score more.

Common collocations

  • keep a clean sheet
  • clean sheet record
  • back-to-back clean sheets
  • first clean sheet of the season
  • goalkeeperThe player who defends the goal and is the only one allowed to handle the ball, but only inside their own penalty area.
  • saveA goalkeeper's action of stopping a shot or header from going in by catching, blocking or pushing the ball away.
  • defenderA player whose main job is to stop the other team from attacking and scoring, usually playing in the line closest to their own goal.
  • nilZero, used in British English when saying football scores aloud, as in two-nil for 2-0.

More terms: Competitions & Results

Practise with graded reading

Reading at the right level is the fastest way to make new words stick. Pick free English books by level: