Language as a barrier in football

Language can be a huge barrier on the path of development for any aspiring sportsman. My few years experience into football gave the opportunity to contemplate this issue from very close. As most of footballers in our nation come from underprivileged families, education for them has never been remained a compulsory factor. Besides, the prolonged believe that footballers do not need to continue regular schooling someway brought about great apathy among the footballers about education. Thus, as consequence players with poor background often suffer a common problem when they have to train under any foreign coach or play with players from different countries and states.

In some instances it has been observed that despite extraordinary talent many footballers cannot succeed in this profession. One of major factors that hinder their progress is language. In 2018 when the Dutch coach Remco Boere, who has an envying coaching career in our continent, joined our team our expectation from him was really high. Despite all his hard work and desire to uplift our team in the football map of India, we couldn’t meet the expectation of the footballers of this country. We rather suffered an unexpected downfall into Premier ‘B’ division from ‘A’.

Here, also language played a salient factor for our relegation. Remco, who is undoubtedly one of the great coaches in Indian football, had almost faced the language problem in every task while he was trying to make the footballers understand about any strategy or game plan. In fact footballers who we expected to be into the good list of Remco, had never managed to make to make it into the first eleven and for few it was even worst as they have to leave the team in between the season. Simply they were incompetent to grasp what Remco was trying hard to convey to them. On the other hand those who were intelligent enough to understand the coach very unexpectedly confirmed their place in the first team.

Language can indeed be a major hindrance for any budding footballer. In the developing country to evade any such possibility where a player may face difficulties for language often use interpreter or educate their footballers so that they have adequate knowledge to understand the common languages like English, Spanish etc. It is our bad luck that notwithstanding so much of talent, footballers in our country can never flourish up to their potential due to lack of familiarity with the English language. In order change this tragic scenario we need to educate our footballers and likewise, give them necessary facilities so that they can learn the most common language ‘English’ for their holistic development.