Kmflett's Blog

Footballers & Managers at the World Cup. Multinational & Multilingual

I’ve extracted a few key points from a longer piece Simon Kuper wrote in the Financial Times on 13^th June 2026

Kuper notes that football clubs became multilingual workplaces from 1995 when the European Court ruled that EU citizens could play sport in any EU country.

Numbers of squads at the World Cup have players representing them who were not born in the country and don’t necessarily speak the language well.

Until recently Kuper argues this was  a problem. He quotes Carlo Ancelotti when he managed PSG from 2011-2013 ‘first you tell the Italians in Italian, then you tell the Brazilians in pseudo-Italian and then you tell David Beckham in grunts and gestures’.

On occasion translators have been used but in general things have moved on.

Kuper notes that Kylian Mbappe learnt Spanish at PSG well before he moved to Real Madrid. Mbappe told Kuper ‘it is important to speak multiple languages if you are playing with players of international dimensions’.

Belgian striker Romelu Lukaku grew up in Brussels where Kuper notes ‘he used to start a sentence in French and finish it in Dutch and throw in some Spanish or Portuguese or Lingala depending on the neighbourhood’

Kuper concludes ‘some multinational businesses could learn from the linguistic sophistication of football teams’.

I think we may also see here why Nigel Farage is really not that interested in football. It is  a world of which he wishes to have no conception