You can find clips of Jose Mourinho, Manchester United’s manager, speaking Spanish, Italian and French, as well as English and his native Portuguese.
While often fluent, much of the foreign
contingent’s English is, to native speakers, non-standard. Pep Guardiola, the
Spanish manager of Premiership champions Manchester City, says: “We are so
satisfy.” Mourinho says “every one of my player”. And Antonio Conte, Chelsea’s
Italian boss, says “I’m a crazy”. But several times in each press conference, a
manager will produce one of the English sport’s set phrases. I am not talking
about clich?s such as being over the moon or a game of two halves, but the sort
of word sequences that the managers have heard on television or from
native-born coaches. So at their press conferences, Conte speaks of the need “to
find the right balance” and Guardiola on how important it is to “maintain our
intensity”. My fascination with the foreign manager’s set phrase dates back to
1989 and OssieArdiles’s appointment as manager of Swindon Town. Ardiles, a
world cup winner with Argentina, was one of the earliest imported players in
English football, charming fans of his then-club Tottenham Hotspur by calling
it “Tottingham”. On his accession to the top job at Swindon, he combined a
non-standard past tense with a perfect English set phrase, telling a television
interviewer that when the call came: “I just jump at the opportunity.”
Linguists call this use of familiar phrases “chunking”.
