Sports management

The third entry is o teto salarial, and the two languages do not reach for the same picture. Portuguese hangs a ceiling over the wage bill: o teto is the ceiling of a room, and the image is a room nobody can stand up in. English puts a hat on it instead. « A cap » is that ceiling — « a salary cap », « a wage cap » — and the verb comes with it, « to cap », as in « capped at two million a year ». So far it is only a change of image. The difficulty is that in sport « a cap » already means something else, and that sense is the older one: a single appearance for your national side. It began as an object rather than a figure of speech: the association once handed a player an actual embroidered cap for each international match, and the word outlived the thing. « He won fifty caps » therefore counts matches and not money. Only the nouns around it say which sense is running, which is why o teto salarial is « a salary cap » and never « a cap » alone.