When Roberto Lopes, a footballer playing in his hometown of Dublin, received a message in Portuguese on LinkedIn, he ignored it, thinking it might be spam. Months later, the sender nudged him in English. That’s when Lopes pasted the original message into Google Translate. It was from the manager of Cape Verde, his father’s home country, asking if he was interested in playing for them. “I messaged him as quick as I could,” recalls Lopes. Now he’s at the World Cup with Cape Verde.
This is a World Cup for the era of globalisation. Language is a central issue in many squads. Most African countries recruit players from their European diasporas. Even European squads include men who aren’t fluent in their team’s language, such as France’s winger Michael Olise, a Londoner with a French-Algerian mother, or Poland’s full-back Matty Cash, an Englishman with Polish grandparents. Some countries, such as Belgium, have multiple languages. How do teams cope?
Football clubs first became multilingual workplaces after the European Court of Justice ruled in 1995 that EU citizens could play professional sport in any EU country. Some of the first multinational teams were siloed by language. Early this century, Chelsea’s training ground consisted of six small dressing rooms. The “English section” included Icelander Eidur Gudjohnsen. Beyond that, recounted English midfielder Frank Lampard, “there was an Italian room, a French room and the rest of the world. It was a terrible set-up . . . and didn’t help at all in building and promoting the team spirit.” Brazil’s Italian manager Carlo Ancelotti recalls coaching Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) from 2011 to 2013: “First you tell the Italians, in Italian, then you tell the Brazilians, in pseudo-Italian, and then you tell Beckham, with grunts and gestures.”