Fabio Capello’s predictions tend to be forthright. Last season he asked anxious supporters to give him 50 days in charge of Real Madrid and he would turn them into a team that looked like champions again. We reached for our diaries and leafed through the next seven weeks, to find he had set himself a deadline one Saturday in October. That night Madrid lost to unfashionable Getafe. Capello gave up soothsaying for a while.

Give him a month with his English teacher and his irregular verb tables, Capello has told an anxious England football public, and he’ll be communicating fine with his players in his new, third language. His English is scratchy, and as he likes his words to have impact, it needs to get better. Interpreters, however talented, quick and sensitive to nuance, are the enemies of impact. No coach wants his players to have to wait before they process an instruction.

THE PERILS OF SPEAKING LITERALLY

He will need an interpreter at first. Sport can be an unfriendly field for a translator, with all its jargon. In football it is a thankless role. At major international competitions, a translator is usually provided at press conferences. If the interpreter is unlucky, he will find himself sat next to a wise-guy like Jürgen Klinsmann. The former coach of Germany, a good speaker of English, Italian and French, had a habit of correcting translations of what he had said in German when it was relayed in one of his other languages to his audiences. The effect was to humiliate the messenger.

But they do need monitoring, even the best translators. Michael Owen, whose Spanish developed little during his season at Real Madrid (in contrast to that of fellow English exile Jonathan Woodgate), gave a press conference there at which a comment in English about the fine form of Frank Lampard was relayed to local reporters in Castilian to peals of laughter. The interpreter, as highly skilled in Spanish as he is knowledgable about the game, had made a rare slip. He said that Owen had described Lampard not as good, but as good-looking.

Seldom has an interpreter for a football manager found himself under such close scrutiny as Ruben Reggiani, who turned Capello’s Italian into the English that would fill last Tuesday’s sports pages, reporting Capello’s introduction as England manager. Reggiani suddenly had a name, a profile, a legion of bilingual critics.

Sports reporters can be unforgiving if they think you are compromising their quotes. Ask Jose Mourinho, who used to turn the English of Bobby Robson, the head coach of England for most of the 1980s, into Spanish for the press when they worked together at Barcelona. Mourinho handed over the job of translating when it was complained that his answers were not a true rendition of Robson’s answers. What Robson said in paragraphs, Mourinho would render into short, pithy sentences.

Sometimes the manager needs saving from himself. The interpreter provided by Fifa to serve the press at last year’s World Cup finals match between Spain and France drew a short straw when he was asked to make sense of the eccentric Spain head coach, Luis Aragones. Inevitably, Aragones was asked to comment on the notorious episode in which he referred to the France player Thierry Henry as a “black shit”. Aragones replied: “I have gypsy friends, black friends and even a Japanese friend who sexes chickens!’’ That is an accurate translation, although not the official one: the interpreter thought the statement too surreal to carry it across a linguistic frontier.

Rafa Benitez, Liverpool’s manager, likes to tell how he learnt some of his English listening to Beatles songs – doubtless agonising as he tried to make sense of the lyrics to Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds – but hit language problems on the training field when he had his players practising crosses one breezy morning on Merseyside. “You have to adjust for the wine,” he kept shouting. The wine? He meant the wind. Other foreign coaches who have come to Britain have mastered enough vocabulary, but with insufficient nuance. Celtic’s Slovak manager of the late 1990s, Jozef Venglos, imagined he was giving his interrogators a thoughtful answer when he explained the reasoning behind the recruitment of a Norwegian player.

Once he had said, “He has good gymnastic movement,” Glaswegians just thought Venglos plain weird.

Capello is wise enough to be wary of turning Italian idioms into English ones. He knows what happened to his colleague, the Welshman John Toshack, who, like Capello, managed Real Madrid twice and fell out with a club president at the end of his second stint there. Toshack used to entertain reporters by putting English phrases, word for word, into Castilian. Asked to retract a critical comment he had made, he said, in Spanish: “Pigs might fly.”

Winged cartoon piglets then soared over a cartoon Bernabeu stadium on the front of next day’s Marca, Spain’s best-selling newspaper. Toshack was summoned to the president’s office and offered a typed resignation letter to sign. “They thought I was implying something about him,” Toshack says.

The last Italian to take on a big English job was Claudio Ranieri. Like Capello, he had acquired a second language before he set about his third. Like Capello, he had worked in Spain. After an awkward double entendre at his introductory press conference as head coach of Valencia, where he used the word for eggs, not knowing it also meant balls – anatomical, not footballs – he mastered the language well enough to work as a summariser on radio.

Ranieri’s English when he was Chelsea manager was a greater challenge. He spoke it better than Attilio Lombardo, an Italian who was put in charge of Crystal Palace with apparently no English. Lombardo gave his first team talk via an interpreter and Palace were 3-0 down to Aston Villa within 35 minutes. “The players failed to put into practice what I had told them – maybe it was the language problem,” he said. Ranieri was no Lombardo but did not speak as smoothly as either of his predecessors at Stamford Bridge. Ruud Gullit, a Dutchman, gave the game’s English vocabulary a catch-phrase – “sexy football” – and taught a few people that “netto” means “after tax”. The Italian Luca Vialli studied English hard and effectively.

Then came Ranieri, groping for the right word, his haphazard phrases set easily alongside his jumpy team selections. Where the English press sniggered at his stumbling syntax, the Italian media sympathised. “British reporters criticise his ‘Italese’,” wrote La Gazzetta dello Sport, “and cruelly confuse linguistic and coaching ability.”

It happens. The job of England manager is always up for ridicule, and is not for the tongue-tied.

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