The Most Multilingual Person in the Stadium (Nobody Thanks Him) | ConnectedTraveler
ConnectedTraveler / Sergio Musetti FIFA World Cup 2026 Series
Chapter 2 | The Referee
Nobody thanks him. Nobody even notices. He is the world's worst-paid simultaneous interpreter and he works every 90 minutes.
There is a man on that field who speaks four languages fluently and is required by FIFA to use only one of them. He arrived before the players. He will leave after the crowd. He has no coach, no substitute, no VAR review of his own decisions, and absolutely nobody in the stadium is rooting for him. He wears black. He carries three cards. He has exactly one tool for every situation, regardless of what language the situation arrives in.
His name, for the purposes of this conversation, is The Referee. And he is the most multilingual person in the building.
I want you to think about what the referee actually does for a living. A Colombian striker is screaming at him in Andean slang. A Senegalese defender is explaining, at some length and volume, why the foul call was not only wrong but a personal insult. A Moroccan captain is asking, in Arabic, a question that requires a nuanced answer about the interpretation of the offside rule. And a French midfielder is simply standing nearby making a face that needs no translation.
The referee processes all of this in real time, under pressure, while running at match pace, with 80,000 people in the stadium and 200 million watching at home, all of whom have opinions. He has no earpiece for a translator. No pause button. No opportunity to say "could you repeat that in English, please." He has the whistle, the cards, and the look. The look, in every language on earth, means the same thing: we are done talking.
He invented the world's most efficient multilingual communication system. Nobody gave him a linguistics award.
Consider the yellow card. It requires no translation. No interpreter. No cultural adaptation. You show it, the player understands it, the crowd understands it, the television audience in 47 countries understands it. It is a piece of colored cardboard that functions perfectly in every language simultaneously. The referee did not set out to solve the problem of multilingual communication at a global sporting event. He just needed people to stop arguing, and he needed it to work in Portuguese, French, Arabic, Korean, and Yoruba at the same time.
The yellow card has been shown over 18,000 times at World Cup tournaments since 1970. It has never once required a translation. Linguists have largely ignored this achievement.
FIFA, meanwhile, had a harder time of it in the press room. While the referee was managing 20 languages on the field with nothing but body language and a piece of cardboard, FIFA's press office was struggling with two.
Morocco captain Achraf Hakimi, who was born in Madrid and speaks Spanish, Arabic, French, and English, sat down at a press conference after the Morocco versus Brazil match. A journalist from Mexico's TV Azteca asked him a question in Spanish.
A FIFA press official intervened. Spanish was not available. Only English and the official languages of the competing teams were permitted. For Morocco versus Brazil, those were Arabic and Portuguese.
Hakimi looked at the official. "How should I reply, in English or Spanish?" He answered in English. The clip went viral within the hour.
One of the three host nations of this tournament is Mexico. Mexico speaks Spanish. The referee on that same pitch had already been handling Spanish for 90 minutes without any assistance from FIFA at all.
Then there is the case of Omar Artan. Africa's best referee in 2025. Selected from across 50 countries to be one of only 52 referees at the entire tournament. A man whose entire professional life had been building toward 90 minutes on a World Cup pitch.
He was denied entry into the United States before a single whistle was blown.
There is also the matter of the Dutch VAR official. The video assistant referee sits in a booth in Dallas, watching feeds from every camera angle simultaneously, reviewing decisions in real time for matches being played across three countries. His job is to catch what the referee on the field cannot see.
He was arrested in England before the tournament began.
The man reviewing offside calls from 5,000 miles away had his own offside moment. Nobody on the VAR monitor caught it in time.
The VAR monitor did not flag it. Nobody reviews the reviewer.
The referee on the field handled 20 languages with a whistle and a piece of cardboard. FIFA needed a committee meeting to handle two.
There are new rules this year as well. A substituted player must now leave the field within 10 seconds. If he delays, his team plays a man down for at least one minute. The referee is responsible for enforcing this. He must communicate the countdown to a player who may or may not speak his language, who is almost certainly furious about being substituted, while the clock is running and the coach on the sideline is screaming something entirely different.
- 01 The referee speaks English on the field. FIFA says so. The field disagrees.
- 02 With 32 nations competing, around 20 languages are active on the pitch at any given moment. FIFA lists four official referee languages: English, Spanish, French, German.
- 03 The yellow card has never required a translation in 56 years of World Cup use. It remains the most efficient multilingual communication tool in sporting history.
- 04 The first U.S.-based referee crew of the tournament was led by Ismail Elfath, who officiated the Netherlands versus Japan 2-2 draw in Dallas on June 14. He handled it in English. The players handled it in Dutch and Japanese. Nobody missed a beat.
- 05 The referee earns roughly $70,000 base plus $3,000 per group stage match. A UN simultaneous interpreter earns similar figures annually, in a booth, with headphones, and nobody screaming at them in Yoruba.
I thought about all of this on the walk back from the bar in Deep Ellum. The French-Canadian and the Mexican fan had shaken hands. The Nigerian guys were still arguing about something, but happily now. The family from Seoul had figured out the menu. Nobody had needed a certified interpreter. Nobody had consulted a language policy document.
The referee had been doing this for 90 minutes, alone, on a pitch, for the entire duration of the match. And when it was over, nobody thanked him. That is the job. That has always been the job.
The bar figured out its own language in about four minutes. The referee figures it out in real time, every match, without a committee.
Next chapter: the ten words every fan learns at every World Cup. Eight of them cannot be printed here.
The referee handles the field. For everything else, certified translation exists. Visa documents, medical records, legal paperwork abroad, anything where getting it wrong has real consequences. The Spanish Group covers more than 90 languages and has been my go-to for exactly that kind of work.
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