Welcome, everybody to soccer 101.

My name is Taylor Rockwell.

And with me this week, as always, is Graham structurally unsound. Ruthven. Graham, how are we today? I'm sore, Taylor, I'm sore. What happened was we spoke about this yesterday in the main feed. I went to a concert like a young person, thought I was still a young person. Turns out I'm not a young person and I am paying for that with his sore back today, which was developed at said concert. And today's episode is going to be about languages and football clubs and language

barriers. It turns out I'm actually speaking my own language now. It sounds a bit like this.

Oh, ah, as I sit down. The language of the... You're not even 40. Get out of here. You're a young buck. What are you? Like, 35? 33, as Joe would say, basically dead. Oh, well, yeah. According to Joe, when Joe hits 30, it's going to be a rude awakening for him. He'll have finally finished, fully developing, I guess, at that point. Is that, like, 25 when Joe thinks that players stop? Yeah, I think so.

Cool. Well, that's, I presume that's when he's, he's going to do a Bjorn Borg and retire at 25. I presume Joe, like, that's when he's old. That's when he'll be old. See, I found that as I wasn't able to run as fast or do certain physical things, I made up, I had to make up for it.

And so that's when you, like, learn to add wrinkles to your game.

So I always think aging is good.

I also think being able to communicate with your teammates is kind of good, which is my clumsy segue to today's episode. It comes from a list or question from Stephen Schuller, which was meant for the TSS list of questions, although he does say up front for a soccer 101 series, I would love to know how teams handle language barriers between players and staff.

These days, a top flight team might have a half dozen native languages represented in just the starting 11 with more on the bench.

Obviously, many players are bilingual or even trilingual, but how do team members and coaching staff communicate with each other in this multilingual environment?

Do teams just designate a couple languages that everyone needs to know or learn?

Does everyone just have to learn the GM's language?

Are there a bunch of translators on the coaching staff?

How do teams make this work, Graham?

Let's start, before we even get to the language, let's start with why this is important.

Because I would say that communication and like verbally communicating with your teammates is the most important part of soccer.

Certainly scoring a goal and be able to kick a ball.

But it's the hardest thing to get kids to do.

It's the hardest thing to get new players to do is say man on time, turn, all of the things you need to be able to do. Communication is for me the most underrated and most important aspect of soccer. It's funny you mentioned that, Taylor, about playing soccer when you're young. I don't know about you. You might have played for a good soccer team that did these things, but I always thought there were two things that my Dunblane Soccer 7's team didn't do. One was doing anything in Central Midfield. It was just an abyss in there. Another thing was communicate. Like other teams, the good teams seem to be communicating all the time, and we were a very quiet team. Not entirely sure how I ended up in podcasting where I have to talk for six hours a week because

I'm generally quite quiet and I was quiet on the football pitch as well. Taylor, were you a, were you a shouter, a screamer? I was and am and maybe it's my upbringing that only as an adult, again, you learning thinks as an adult did my centerback partner say, you know, you don't have to yell instructions, right? And I was like, no, you, that's, but that's all my coaches did.

He was like, yeah, you don't have to yell instructions, right? And I was like, no, you, that's, but that's all my coaches did. He was like, yeah, you don't have to though, which was a good learning experience. But I had to get yelled at by my coaches to learn how to communicate, how to verbalize things. And I think it's totally normal, especially with kids. It's really, really difficult, number one, just to have the confidence to be able to verbalize things and be able to communicate and believe that you're saying the right thing.

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