Pep Guardiola described it as “the best lesson you can take”.
Abdukodir Khusanov’s language teacher might beg to differ.
The Manchester City manager was talking after Khusanov endured a difficult debut against Chelsea recently, when the 20-year-old gave away a goal and picked up a yellow card inside the first five minutes.
Asked whether he considered substituting Khusanov at that point, Guardiola replied: “Well, I have to learn Russian or Uzbek to communicate with him. He doesn’t speak English.”
On the same day, at the other end of the country, another player who arrived in the Premier League without a word of English was enjoying the best moment of his career so far. Dango Ouattara, who joined Bournemouth from the French club Lorient two years ago, scored a hat-trick against Nottingham Forest.
(Warren Little/Getty Images)
Born in Burkina Faso, Ouattara moved to Bournemouth in the same window as the Ivorian midfielder Hamed Traore, and it was clear from the outset that both players were going to need help with the language. Bournemouth reached out to a familiar face.
Mathieu Baudry, who is a native French speaker and played for Bournemouth a decade or so ago, was recovering from a serious injury at Swindon Town when he answered a call to join the Premier League club’s staff in a translator role.
“For me it was more than just a job,” Baudry says. “Because I’d been through it myself I felt like I had to help them.”
Both players, Baudry says, were “starting from scratch” with English. “They’re from Africa, so the academic system there is totally different — they’ve got their local language and then they learn French, but they wouldn’t have done what I did and been lucky to do some English at school. They didn’t know one word of English. It’s like you going to China tomorrow.”
Forget Duolingo or following the GCSE syllabus. Language lessons for players start with football terminology, team-mates’ nicknames and the manager’s stock phrases (Baudry had to explain to Ouattara and Traore that “the corridor” Gary O’Neil kept talking about wasn’t where they walked through to get changed every morning). Trips to Sainsbury’s supermarket with a Colombian central defender to discuss fruit and veg come later.
Claudia Madeley has done all of that and more across 15 years of teaching English to footballers, managers, coaches and their families in the West Midlands. She even ended up translating for a Brazil international and his partner in a delivery suite. “The most amazing experience,” says Madeley, who runs Language Partners with her husband Jeremy.
Andre, another Brazilian, is currently one of their newest students and it’s interesting to see an example of the kind of thing that the Wolves midfielder is learning in lessons.
Presumably, Wolves’ Brazilian contingent must keep the Madeleys busy. “(Matheus) Cunha has never had lessons,” Claudia says. “His English is very good — he’s able to give interviews. Then you’ve got Joao Gomes, who’s stopped now. I think he will get back to it but… busy life, new dad, and he knows enough. We have Pedro (Lima) who is learning — still has a long way to go. And Andre, who is having lessons at beginner level. Andre says when Cunha or Joao are saying something in English, he can pick it up. But obviously when they’re talking to a native speaker, it’s much harder.”
Some players are outstanding students. Lizzie Hider, whose company Communicate Well provides language teachers for 15 of the 20 Premier League clubs, still marvels at Cesc Fabregas’s approach to mastering English at Arsenal. “He was so driven and was always asking for extra lessons to learn,” she says. “A highly intelligent man who realised that it was going to be the key to all sorts of things — settling in, playing well, connecting with the rest of the team, connecting with the Premier League.”
Fabregas in 2003, aged 16, soon after joining Arsenal (Photo: Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
Riccardo Calafiori, a current Arsenal player, had a headstart. Signed from Bologna in the summer, Calafiori arrived with an impressive level of self-taught English. The Italian learned the basics in Pittsburgh while undergoing knee surgery as a teenager and the rest is down to the combination of a misspent youth listening to UK drill music and watching Netflix, and being around an eclectic mix of multinational players at Bologna and Basel.
Indeed, it seems strange to think there are teams in mainland Europe where English is the unofficial ‘club language’. Last week, Niko Kovac took his first session as Borussia Dortmund manager partly in English. The Italian Domenico Tedesco, who speaks six languages, communicated in English during team sessions at RB Leipzig, and there’s a similar working culture at St Pauli, another Bundesliga club.
The fact that English is so widely spoken provides an excuse of sorts for British players — in fact, British people full stop — generally being so poor at learning languages (with apologies to David Platt, Gary Lineker et al).
The former England midfielder Joe Cole admitted he went “full Derek Trotter” when he signed for Lille. David Beckham struggled to string a sentence together in Spanish while playing for Real Madrid and Gareth Bale wasn’t much better — at least not in public. As for Harry Kane, his response to a question at October’s Ballon d’Or ceremony about whether his German was improving said it all. “Nein,” replied the England captain.
Speaking the language in the country where you play isn’t the be-all and end-all. Carlos Tevez had a successful career in the Premier League despite showing zero interest in learning English and Kane hasn’t exactly struggled to score for Bayern Munich.
(Leonhard Simon/Getty Images)
Generally, though, the message from clubs to any overseas signings is that they will be a lot happier on and off the field if they can pick up the language to at least a conversational level — and also earn respect from supporters.
Chris Smalling, who was determined to learn Italian after moving to Roma from Manchester United in 2019, nods in agreement. “The encouragement you get back from the fans, from the other players and from the staff, just makes you want to do it more and more,” Smalling says. “My first interview in Italian, which was a long time coming, wasn’t perfect. There were lots of mistakes. But I think the fans can see that you’re trying to settle into their culture and community, and I think that goes a long way.”
Some players are super motivated. Bruno Guimaraes said from the day he arrived at Newcastle that his target was to be fluent. Hider taught one overseas Premier League player who challenged himself to be able to read The Da Vinci Code in English. Another wanted to be confident enough to pick up a broadsheet newspaper.
As for Emiliano Martinez, he just wanted to get rich. “I had a bonus in my contract because Arsene (Wenger, the Arsenal manager) said you need to speak the language,” the Aston Villa goalkeeper told the Premier League’s Inside the Game show. “So if I passed the test they would give me £20,000. I said to my teacher, ‘Please, I need to pass this test!’”
@premierleague Emiliano Martinez couldn’t learn English fast enough! 🤣 #BehindTheGame #PremierLeague #ArseneWenger
As a vocal central defender, Smalling knew he had to get to grips with a few key words at Roma straight away. “I arrived at the end of the window and I said, ‘Look, I want to do lessons but let’s just get some basics’ so that on the pitch I could say things like squeeze up, which is ‘sale’, and left and right, ‘sinistro’ and ‘destro’, and man on, ‘uomo’,” he explains. “I had a little book of what must have been 10-15 words that I just memorised and then slowly got used to saying in training.”
(Ben Roberts Photo/Getty Images)
In fact, those words became so embedded in Smalling’s mind that he found himself still talking in Italian on the pitch when he moved to Saudi Arabia to sign for Al Fayha in September. “I had to snap myself out of it,” he says, laughing.
Listening to Smalling’s experience of learning Italian, it’s obvious that it required a big personal investment. “I would say I had lessons at least two or three times a week at the club. Depending on our training schedule, if we trained in the afternoon, maybe I would come in a bit early and do it then, or if I trained in the morning I’d have lunch and then maybe have 45 minutes with him (the translator). Sometimes it would be an hour. He would write down new things that we’d spoken about and then after the lesson I would take that home and try to make different sentences and other conversations.”
Clearly, that kind of thing isn’t going to be for everyone. “There are some who struggle academically,” says Hugo Scheckter, who worked as player liaison officer for Southampton and West Ham before setting up his own consultancy business, The Player Care Group. “But also sometimes it’s, ‘I could be playing FIFA. I could be out shopping’ — that’s more exciting than being in a classroom. But often they know what they’re very good at — playing football, and they know what they’re not very good at — learning, and so that can be quite scary for them.”
Some teachers might need to be more creative to engage players. Claudia Madeley, for example, often uses Match of the Day interviews as part of her lessons. Mauricio Pochettino’s first English teacher got him to listen to Adele, and now he’s manager of the USMNT. Others have brought along a Subbuteo board to reenact the game.
(Dustin Satloff/USSF/Getty Images for USSF)
Hider, who first started teaching footballers in the early 2000s at Arsenal, gives an interesting response when it’s put to her that she must be proud of their work around languages. “I feel really proud of people hosting World Cup games whom we’ve taught. But I also feel incredibly proud of the more covert achievements of working with players. For example, players who have struggled with literacy and penmanship — we’ve actually taught handwriting in a couple of cases.”
According to Hider, goalkeepers tend to make exemplary language students — something she attributes to “the autonomy of that position” and the fact that they recognise the importance of giving “very clear, time-sensitive, demands” to team-mates.
Petr Cech, the former Czech Republic international, is a case in point. At Arsenal, Cech spoke to the defence in front of him in their native language: Hector Bellerin and Nacho Monreal in Spanish, Laurent Koscielny in French, and Per Mertesacker in, well, English actually; English because Cech and Mertesacker speak English better than most English people.
Talking of polyglots, Romelu Lukaku and Henrikh Mkhitaryan, who both speak eight languages, are top of the football class. For many others, the learning curve is steep.
In his first season at Real Madrid, Jude Bellingham was playing superbly but admitted he had disappointed the manager Carlo Ancelotti in one respect.
“How?” asked the interviewer for the Italian publication Tuttosport.
“I just don’t speak Spanish yet,” Bellingham replied. “I’m sorry, but I’m encountering unexpected obstacles with this language. It’s hard for me, I admit. In any case, I promise maximum commitment.”
(Michael Regan – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)
Naby Keita ran into a few hurdles too. Signed by Liverpool in 2017, Keita was barely able to speak a word of English when he joined a year later and progress remained slow. There were a couple of awkward moments, including one over breakfast at the training ground. A member of Liverpool’s staff came over to inform Keita that they were going to step up his rehabilitation later that day with a light jog around the training field. Keita, much to his team-mate Sadio Mane’s amusement, replied, “Yeah, yeah. I like eggs.”
It’s easy to laugh when people get things wrong, but anyone who has tried to learn a language will tell you how hard it is to, in Smalling’s words, “put yourself out there”.
“But that’s the way to progress,” Smalling adds. “When I was speaking to a lot of the Italians and they were trying to speak English, they’d make mistakes and they didn’t care, and we’d just chuckle together.”
It’s very different for a manager, however, as Arsenal and Unai Emery discovered. The Spaniard’s commitment to speaking English from day one was initially applauded, but that narrative changed when results deteriorated. Instead of getting full marks for effort, Emery ended up being mocked inside as well as outside the club.
“I had a decent level (of English), although I needed to improve,” Emery told The Guardian in 2020. “When results are bad it’s not the same. You lack the linguistic depth to explain. And take, ‘Good ebening’: OK, it’s, ‘Good evening’. But when I said, ‘Good ebening’ and won it was fun; when we were losing, it was a disgrace.”
(Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)
An interpreter is an option, although that’s something that rarely appeals to clubs. Leeds were willing to make an exception with Marcelo Bielsa and for good reason.
“We were so in awe of him and everyone was so happy to have him,” says Adam Forshaw, the former Leeds midfielder.
“People were intrigued,“ he adds. “Everyone would ask, ‘Does he speak any English?’ And you were like, ‘No’. I think he could understand it a bit, but he couldn’t speak it. But no one ever got annoyed. Even when results were going wrong, there wasn’t that throwaway line: ‘He hasn’t even bothered learning the language’. No one cared the whole time he was there.“
One of the curious aspects of this scenario is how the interpreter behaves when the manager is angry. Should they convey the manager’s emotion or just translate their words?
When Terry Venables was manager of Barcelona in the 1980s, the players liked the fact that his interpreter Graham Turner transmitted his own feelings and not just the message. “I had to deliver a few bollockings in the same way Terry did,” Turner told The Times.
But that wasn’t how it worked at Leeds, where the players could see the pity in the translator’s eyes, along with a ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ expression on his face, after Bielsa had just scolded them in Spanish.
“If the manager was really animated, he (the translator) could be looking at you as if to say he was sorry as he was saying it,” Forshaw says.
Bielsa with one of his translators at Leeds, Andres Clavijo (Alex Davidson/Getty Images)
Some translating roles are less official and more impromptu. In April 2023, Liverpool were playing Tottenham Hotspur in the Premier League and Thiago Alcantara, who was not even named in the matchday squad, suddenly appeared in the technical area next to Darwin Nunez, who was about to be introduced as a substitute.
For context, Nunez could politely be described as reluctant when it comes to learning English. As for Thiago, he speaks English, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese and German.
Wearing a pair of trainers and a Liverpool coat, Thiago looked like the Liverpool manager — and behaved like him too for the next 15 seconds. Linking arms with Nunez, Thiago whispered in the striker’s ear as the Uruguayan bent over to adjust his socks.
At the end of Thiago’s pep talk, Nunez put his arm around the Brazilian and kissed him on the forehead. Thiago walked off with his head down, making no eye contact with the Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp, who had watched this whole scene unfold right next to him and with a look of total bemusement on his face.
Baffled and confused, Klopp did a triple take. He stared at Thiago, then looked back at Nunez, and then turned on his heel to look at Thiago again as the midfielder returned to the stand. Picture Vincent Vega trying to find the intercom in Pulp Fiction.
Although most overseas Premier League players who enrol on lessons will be able to speak English well enough within a year or two of signing to be able to get by, the majority never sit the UK language test that could extend their 12-month international sportsperson visa to three years.
“In my experience, 12 years doing this, we rarely get a player who will do the test, and that’s mainly a timing thing as well,” explains Stephen O’Flaherty, partner and co-head of sport at Lewis Silkin.
“Because if a club rings me and says we’re going to bring a player in, it’s normally, ‘We want him at training tomorrow’. If I were to say, ‘You could get a longer-term visa if you did an English language test’, it would be, ‘We’ll worry about that when we get him in’.
“The other thing is, a player can continue to extend (the visa) for 12 months at a time, so it’s not compulsory that he would do the test. We don’t encourage this because it’s not cost-effective for the club (about £5,000 a time) and it’s a lot of hassle to go through the visa process every year.”
Some Premier League clubs have made learning English part of the onboarding process and stipulate that a player has to reach a certain level (for example, capable of giving a post-match interview) before they stop lessons. Generally, though, that kind of approach will only work with the support of the manager and the sporting director, otherwise a player liaison officer ends up trying to man-to-man mark a South American right winger before a lesson to prevent them from disappearing home.
Naturally, some of the learning is informal. For example, at Bournemouth, Baudry made a conscious decision to step away from any translating duties when Ouattara and Traore were in a more relaxed setting at the club.
“It’s good for them to be exposed to the language,” Baudry explains. “So after training, I wasn’t going into the changing room to try to help them with having banter with team-mates. I think it’s good for them to bond. The same at lunchtime — we stayed apart and they sat with their team-mates.”
Some managers discourage players from the same nationality from sitting together in social settings at the club to prevent them from reverting to their mother tongue — Rafa Benitez had a big thing about that at Liverpool and it annoyed a couple of players.
“I would say it’s hard enough to be in a different country. So if there are people of a similar background to you who you can relax and speak to, then why not?” Scheckter, the former player liaison officer, says.
“At West Ham, there was a photo during Covid that showed (Manuel) Lanzini having dinner with some of the Spanish and South American Spurs players — they put it on Instagram. The anger aimed at them for breaching the (Covid) rules was fine. But people were also asking why players who are rivals are mingling with each other. Most of them had known each other for years. They’re in a country where they don’t know that many people, so why not?”
At least the players get to share what one agent describes as “the common language of football” with their team-mates every day. For their partners, it’s often more difficult.
“If the whole family is relocating, everyone’s got to feel that they can connect in some way with the new place,” Hider adds. “And certainly in those early days, I have come into contact with family members who are feeling really lost. ‘I don’t speak English, it’s freezing here, I can’t buy the ingredients I like to cook with’. And they’re on their own an awful lot of the time. Any player care support they receive from clubs is invaluable.”
All of this is a challenge, of course, but it’s also a fantastic opportunity.
Smalling nods. “Until I moved to Italy, I had no desire to learn a language. But then I saw in Italy how much joy I got from it and that it’s a life skill to be able to communicate with so many more people. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, and it took me longer than I thought, but it’s something that will stay with me for the rest of my life.”
(Photos: Getty Images/Design: Eamonn Dalton)
