More than it is an exhibition of football, the World Cup is a drama of understanding. At this year’s installment of the Greatest Show on Earth™, FIFA has debuted a bewildering number of regulatory innovations. Among the most consequential are the introduction of on-field microphones for referees to announce the outcome of video-assisted reviews, and a new rule stating that any player who covers his mouth during a “confrontational situation” with an opponent will automatically be dealt a red card. Together, these two changes elevate clarity of speech into an iron edict of world football, and tar concealment—of words, of intentions, of interpretations—with the sport’s darkest brush. The reasoning behind each reform is sensible: Soccer’s belated embrace of video review has created a need for better on-field communication of contested decisions, and in recent years, thanks to the TV cameras’ panopticon, some players have begun to deploy the concealing hand during heated mid-match exchanges as cover for racist abuse.

During the group match between Paraguay and Türkiye in Santa Clara, Salvadoran referee Iván Barton was asked to stop play by the video assistants, surveying the action from a centralized control room in Dallas, and review an incident of potential mouth concealment by Paraguayan forward Miguel Almirón. Barton, a wonderfully intense character who carries himself with the pettifogging self-importance of a minor general in a García Márquez novel, blew his whistle and strode over to the sideline monitor to watch the tape and confer with his video assistants. A cursory examination of the evidence followed, then Barton returned to the field. Producing a card from his back pocket, he announced his verdict as if condemning Almirón to summary execution, a powerful reverb from his on-field microphone adding an extra layer of totalitarian emphasis to the drama: “Number ten, Paraguay—cover his mouth! The decision is rrrrred card!”

Players, referees, administrators, pundits: If any of the protagonists at this World Cup motion to speak, they must be heard. The competition’s compulsion for ever-greater exposure has brought us closer to the apocalypse, to an absolute union of footballing thought, intention, utterance, and action. This is no bad thing. Though few referees can match Barton’s martial grandeur, the delivery of thundering on-field sentences similar to his dismissal of Almirón has become a frequent and unexpected delight of this World Cup, and the many varieties of accented English spoken by the competition’s match officials—all those Poles and Colombians and Jordanians and Mauritanians struggling to maintain a measure of dignity amid the heat and linguistic xenophobia of America—supply a welcome rustle of texture to a sport that, in recent years, has begun to seem predictably homogenous. Meanwhile, the ban on sparring hand to mouth has had the happy side-effect of unveiling the World Cup competitors’ many polyglot talents: In the Round of 16, as Paraguay attempted to goad a transcendentally gifted French team into a barefisted brawl, star French striker Kylian Mbappé could be seen complimenting defender Júnior Alonso on “la concha de tu madre.”

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On the field, every World Cup is a contest of idioms: between the Spanish-influenced juego de posición and post-German Gegenpressing, between philosophies that rely on holding the ball and those that assert themselves by working without it, between the set piece–heavy structuralism now fashionable in the English Premier League and the crashing unpredictability of the South American game. At an official level, however, the World Cup’s cacophony of on-field styles cedes to a party-pooper monolingualism. Though FIFA has four official languages, and there are three languages of state between this tournament’s three host countries, English is the undisputed lingua franca of the World Cup: All match reports and major on-field decisions are communicated in the language of Shakespeare and Markwayne Mullin. Even the matches held in the stadiums of co-host Mexico must bend the knee to the linguistic hegemon: Mexico City’s legendary Estadio Azteca has been renamed “Mexico City Stadium” for the duration of the tournament. Every arena in this World Cup has a sideline placard on the halfway line displaying the name of the host city. “Mexico City,” the Azteca’s sign limply informs the viewer, in English.

There’s some irony to the official crowding out of other languages at this World Cup, since the tournament, at its core, is about the eruption of difference through the seams of bureaucratic uniformity, about the individuality that the collective cannot contain. The human scramble of displacements and naturalizations that have created each national squad means there are now many countries that count non-native and other accented speakers of their national language among their most important footballers. Beyond its all-American core, the US’s own team includes players who speak English with Dutch, German, and English accents, brilliant young athletes who’ve grown up overseas and come to represent the US thanks to family connections or sheer chance. Star striker Folarin Balogun, for example, who grew up in East London, was born in New York in 2001 after his mother was deemed too far along in her pregnancy to board a flight home to the UK. But that’s just the USMNT, innit? That’s just this intensely diasporic and migratory sport’s beautiful confusion of dialects and accents, yeah?

Still, English is the language of serious business, and nowhere more so than in football. Cape Verde defender Roberto “Pico” Lopes, born and raised in Ireland, initially ignored a message on LinkedIn from the Cape Verdean football association asking him whether he would be interested in representing the land of his paternal ancestors. The message was in Portuguese; it was only once the Cape Verdean selectors followed up, this time in English, that Lopes paid attention. Among the many now-axiomatic truths the World Cup has given us is this: If you’re a small, resource-strapped national football association and you’re not LinkedIn spamming your future first-choice central defender in English, you’re just not trying hard enough.

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Many of the non-native English speakers competing at this World Cup seem eager to prove themselves in America, which means proving themselves in American English. The tournament began with 1,248 players. To help frequently flummoxed TV commentators master this nominal Babel, FIFA produced a video for each team in which the players held up a landscape A4 sheet displaying their full name and slowly sounded the words out. Several players took this as an opportunity to “Americanize” their names, offering a glimpse into a parallel world where Marcus Thuram, Rayan Cherki, and Charles Pickel did not grow up, respectively, in Turin, the eastern suburbs of Lyon, and Solothurn, but in some generic exurb of Middle America.

The sovereignty of English in soccer can feel crushing at times. A video of Cesc Fàbregas, the Spanish coach of Italian club side-cum-luxury brand Como 1907, that went viral toward the end of this past European club season showed him addressing his squad in English: “You are the reason that this is so fucking beautiful,” Fàbregas told his charges, who had just secured qualification in the lucrative European Champions League. “Enjoy a fucking good holidays!” And yet, the World Cup inevitably trips up all attempts at linguistic standardization. The distribution of the games across three countries means that this tournament will forever resist the easy naming of France ‘98, say, or South Africa 2010, or Brazil 2014. What exactly are we living through? CANMEXUS 2026? USA & Former Allies 2026? Our very own annus infantinus? This year, as every four years, the commentators on American TV—a curious mix of soccer jocks, haggard Brits, and squeaky stattoes—have labored to match script to speech, launching into the challenge of correctly enunciating “Paraguay,” “Quiñones,” or “Yaya Sithole” with the lunging desperation of tackling defenders going in with both feet. On the field, the World Cup leaves dreams, careers, and reputations in tatters; off the field, it presents the wreckage of whatever the latest attempt on American TV to pronounce “Herzegovina” sounds like.

This is where those name card videos should, in theory, come in handy: But how does one approach the pronunciation of players’ names in a phonetically difficult and unpredictable language like Portuguese, with its nasal vowels, its whispery r’s, its dancing palatalizations and rhythmic compressions? On this issue the English-language play-by-play community seems divided. Take Nuno Mendes, the starting left back for Portugal. Most English commentators default to a kind of phonetic quasi-Spanish when attempting to pronounce Portuguese, which is why for many years the coach José Mourinho was (and occasionally still is) misnamed “Ho-zay,” with the proudly palato-alveolar Portuguese j devoiced into a Hispanic voiceless velar fricative. (A more accurate pronunciation would put it closer to “Joe-seh.”) “Nuno Mendes” has followed this template, most play-by-play announcers rendering the name Spanishly, as “Noo-noh Men-dez.” But others have done their bit for progress by bravely attempting the full Iberian whenever Mendes is on the ball: “Noon Mensshhhhhh bursting upfield”; “A brilliant block from Noon Mensshhhhhh!” Meanwhile, every Anglophone announcer still seems to pronounce the tournament’s dueling Araújos (Portugal’s Tomás Araújo and Uruguay’s Maximiliano Araújo) the same way. Does Portuguese present us with the limits of what’s possible when enunciating foreign words in English at a World Cup? Should we all be going around pronouncing Ronaldo as “Honald” and Bruno Fernandes as “Bhoon Fernantsh”? What would Charles Pickel do?

At the World Cup of Innovations (let’s ™ this one too; FIFA certainly would) every change has had its defenders and detractors—especially those that touch on the transparency of the sport, which is ultimately a matter of its intelligibility. The expansion of the competition to forty-eight teams from thirty-two, as was the case in previous World Cups, has surprisingly proved to be a huge success on the field and less linguistically calamitous than many imagined it might be. How, some fretted prior to the launch of this supertanker of a tournament, would soccer’s leading tongues cope with the challenge of naming the new knockout stage needed to sort out the identity of the World Cup’s final sixteen teams? While English is lumped with the rather inelegant “Round of 32,” the Romance languages have taken the change in stride. In French, for instance, the Mondial now proceeds from the seizièmes de finale (Round of 32) to the huitièmes de finale (Round of 16) and onward, while in Spanish, the Mundial passes through dieciseisavos de final (so pleasingly sibilant), octavos de final, and so on.

If language is adaptable, national team managers have had to be, too. Iraq, competing in their first World Cup since 1986, arrived in North America with a squad including Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, and a good smattering of players born in Europe. Iraq’s non–Arabic-speaking Australian manager Graham Arnold soon revealed that he had set his team up on the field in linguistic blocs to take account of its diversity. “When I started, I played the best players to their positions and strengths but then I realized some couldn’t speak the language so there was no communication; what I’ve done lately is pretty much English-speaking players on the left side of the field and Arabic on the right,” Arnold explained ahead of the first match. This strategy of linguistic consolidation didn’t do the team much good, in the end: Iraq ended the group stage with three losses, conceding twelve goals and scoring just one. Could a bigger dose of heteroglossia in the starting formation have given the Lions of Mesopotamia a better chance against Senegal? Would Iraq have made it out of the group playing more native Arabic speakers down the left? Let’s be honest: probably not. But these are the meaty linguistic questions a World Cup forces us to confront.

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The beauty of football is that, with ball at feet, even the most leaden conversationalist can become a quicksilver wit. Harry Kane, England’s greatest ever goal scorer and the spear of its attack at this World Cup, is as inarticulate off the field as he is savagely expressive on it: A man who mouth-breathes and cotton-balls his way through every interview, evincing neither emotion nor humor nor joy in the spectacle of his own record-smashing supremacy (Kane’s standard response to any question after a victory is to look at the ground and note that he is “absholutely buzhing”), has seemingly compressed all of his energy and personality into the act of leathering a football into a net. Perhaps the price of efficiency on the pitch is dullness off it.

Or perhaps it’s possible to achieve a perfect fusion of economies across speech and movement. That’s the counter-example presented by Michael Olise, the most beguiling playmaker on display at this World Cup. Olise is the sport’s great embroiderer, a player with the vision and grace to stitch, thread, needle, and pierce the pitch according to his own imaginative whim. Others play a game of more: more speed, more power, more violence. Olise subtracts, taking away time (from his opponents), space (from the field), and breath (from anyone who has the privilege of watching him in action). Born and raised in England, he represents France at the international level (thanks to his Franco-Algerian mother) and is magnificently reticent in both his native English and his rapidly improving French. Where Kane bores, Olise’s refusal to engage in soccer’s game of language tickles. After scoring a last-minute winner for Crystal Palace against West Ham in 2022, Olise, who, like Kane, has since moved from England to play for Bayern Munich (or should that be München?) in the German Bundesliga, was asked by a reporter to talk viewers through the goal. “I think Wilf [teammate Wilfried Zaha] passed me the ball; shot; scored,” Olise deadpanned. At a press conference with Les Bleus before this World Cup a French journalist asked the side’s on-field conductor to describe himself, his qualities and flaws. “Normale,” Olise replied. “Je suis une personne normale.”

There comes a point, of course, where success removes altogether the need to indulge the whole enervating business of sports talk. Lionel Messi, who has spent the past three seasons playing for Inter Miami in Major League Soccer and is now leading Argentina on adopted home soil, famously refuses to speak English in public—and why shouldn’t he? He’s widely regarded as the greatest footballer in history, a title that surely comes with at least a few privileges and opt-outs, and besides: There’s something charming about a modern sporting celebrity who refuses to submit to English. Spanish boy-genius Lamine Yamal may be learning our language, but Messi’s career race is largely run, his legend secured—and his Anglophone mutism has hardly prevented him from reaping the commercial benefits of his unequaled standing in the game. According to a recent report, the Argentinean appears in a quarter of all World Cup–themed ads on US TV this summer. Like a silent movie actor brought back to life for the talkie era, Messi has smiled, grunted, and shrugged his way into American hearts one packet of Lay’s, pair of Adidas sneakers, and undrunk Michelob Ultra at a time. He also stars in a teaser for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, in which his verbal contributions amount to the following: “Spider-Man,” “Si,” “Como,” and “Waaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

Can the World Cup escape English? No way Ho-zay. But English, for all its banal ubiquity, cannot evade the glossal other: Even as the World Cup marches down the road of full-scale Anglicization, it is haunted by the sight of paths not taken, the sound of languages and half-languages still spoken, the intuition of some wordless depth that precedes and exceeds its own descriptive power. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

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