In yesterday's article from the BBC, England's fear of crossing borders, former England international, Chris Waddle asserts that if more English football players played abroad they would be more likely to succeed at the World Cup because of a wider exposure to different styles and approaches to playing the game.  He suggests that the reason that more English players don't make the move abroad is because of the language barrier, the need to learn Spanish, Italian German or French in order to get on as a player on the continent. Following this line of thought, perhaps this creates an interesting case for making languages compulsory once again at GCSE: success at languages in school could be for a future generation the key to success at soccer on the world stage.

Back