The universal language. That’s how football is pitched by anyone in a poetic mood. Not to say that it’s fanciful – it is, after all, a game that can be played by pretty much anyone, pretty much anywhere, by people who have never previously met and have no chance of understanding the sounds coming out of each other’s mouths. Let the football do the talking.

And that’s all well and good for a kickabout on holiday; you neither need nor necessarily want to know what that tanned Italian lad is saying as he nutmegs you for the seventh time. It becomes more of an issue when you’re a professional footballer who has made a move abroad. How else are you going to settle in at your new club, feel at home in a foreign land and subsequently, so the logic goes, play your best football?

“It’s absolutely crucial for integration with the team and society as a whole,” says Peter Clark, owner and director of Clark Football Languages, which provides lessons for players and managers at some of the top teams in Europe. With former pupils including Fabio Capello and Carlo Ancelotti, he goes by a tried-and-trusted method when he’s teaching English. “You get your really basic vocabulary that you need for everyday life, then I have Peter’s Football Vocabulary List. Simple things like ‘go on the overlap’ and ‘lead the line’ are new expressions, then you’ve got phrases like ‘handbags’, ‘gaffer’ and ‘hairdryer treatment’ that just do not make sense to a foreign player. But they love that stuff: they find it funny and they can’t wait to use it at training.”

“IT WAS A VERY SPECIAL TIME OFF THE PITCH BUT ALSO ON IT, EVEN THOUGH WE DIDN’T SPEAK THE SAME LANGUAGE”

Of course, not all players feel the need to speak like a native: Sergio Agüero’s English skills haven’t progressed significantly over the course of ten years at Manchester City, for example, while Gareth Bale has rarely been heard speaking Spanish in public during his time at Real Madrid. And Miroslav Klose – assistant manager at Bayern München, previously a prolific striker and still Germany’s all-time top scorer – thinks it’s possible for team-mates to have an understanding on the pitch even if they can’t fathom each other off it. He cites his time as a player at Bayern, when he arrived in the same 2007 summer as Italian forward Luca Toni and French winger Franck Ribéry. Toni scored ten goals in the first ten games; Klose seven in the first nine.

“It was great,” says Klose. “The three of us arrived together and spent the first three months at the hotel, because none of us had found a house. It was a very special time off the pitch but also on it, even though we didn’t speak the same language. That’s proof enough to show how much is possible in football without being able to communicate. If we’re aware of the right runs on the pitch and everyone looks out for each other, a lot is possible.”