‘Footballspeak’ from Eric Cantona to Albert Camus

Colin Randall looks at the curious world of footballspeak

Barcelona's Lionel Messi says he'd like to be remembered as a "decent guy". Andrea Comas / Reuters

If we placed our trust in received wisdom, we would cheerfully accept that words and football make poor soul mates.

Typical footballers, it is almost obligatory to believe, are essentially athletic dimwits who would struggle in almost any other chosen pursuit.

Yes, they may be blessed with physical skills. But no, they cannot string together a few coherent words, and those hired to manage them are not much better.

These are familiar assertions of the sort I have been known to exclaim despite a lifelong passion for the game. I am no longer sure they are valid.

Leaving aside the stench of scandal again engulfing the game’s world governing body, Fifa, one piece of drama, Saturday’s Champions League final between Barcelona and Juventus in Berlin, remains of the 2014-2015 season. But with the other issues decided in most major European leagues, as well as in the UAE, it seems an appropriate moment to challenge the weary stereotype.

Anyone with a radio or television knows generous airtime is still given to players and managers who seem strangers to grammar and vocabulary.

A leisurely trawl through one of those useful “famous quotation” websites, on this occasion brainyquotes.com, produces ample material to reinforce the stereotypes, the compilers of the list seeing no reason to protect the guilty.

But there is also evidence galore of insight and intelligence from footballers and managers. Sportsmen – and all of those quoted are men – can, after all, express themselves with warm, witty and sometimes even wise words.

The Barcelona striker Lionel Messi talks simply of wanting to be remembered more as a ”decent guy” than a great footballer. Steven Gerrard, just ending a commendable career at Liverpool, cautions against cheapening overuse of such words as “hero” and “legend”.

If we are looking for depth, we may turn to the Spanish midfielder Xavi Hernández, newly signed from Barcelona by the Qatari club Al Sadd. “In football,” he says, “the result is an impostor. You can do things really, really well but not win. There’s something greater than the result, more lasting – a legacy.”

This may seem easy to say if you have played for 17 years at one of the grandest clubs in the world, but the words have resonance for anyone who has ever truly supported a team of little achievement.

History offers more bons mots. The eccentric French player, Eric Cantona, likened the media to seagulls following the trawler in the hope of scraps of fish being thrown overboard. There was the late Liverpool manager Bill Shankly’s observation that football was not a matter of life and death, but much more serious than that, uttered only partly tongue-in-cheek. The Nobel Prize-winning French philosopher Albert Camus, who was born in Algeria and played for his university before tuberculosis ended sporting ambitions, said rather loftily: “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.”

They cannot all have practised their lines. Nor did the Dutch manager Dick Advocaat, having accomplished a remarkable escape from Premier League relegation for my own club, Sunderland, rehearse his exposition of wordlessly emotional eloquence, weeping softly but not quite silently in a radio interview.

There will always be clumsy or oafish instances of footballspeak to counter my argument. But the next time you find yourself groaning at a wretchedly mixed metaphor or meaningless platitude, try to remember the uplifting words of Joseph-Antoine Bell, the former Cameroonian goalkeeper.

Speaking of his days in Marseille, a French city notorious for bloody gangland feuds but also accommodating a rich mix of cultures that otherwise get along rather well, he said: “When we [Olympique de Marseille] score, blacks, Jews, Arabs and everyone else rises to their feet at the same time.”

Colin Randall is a former executive editor of The National