Good guess - I am talking about the World Cup!
I think it was while I was watching Uruguay v South Korea I was wondering how players that don't speak English, manage to communicate with the officials. If there is a Spanish-speaking ref with a Spanish-speaking team, are they allowed to speak Spanish or does everything have to be conducted in English? Surely the Koreans all speak to each other in Korean, and swear at the other team (and the ref and linesmen) in Korean as would the Spanish-speaking teams. The English speaking teams can't get away with it as everyone understands them swearing (even if you can't hear them it's pretty easy to lip-read certain swear words) or sometimes you want the other team to understand what you are saying; to rile them and put them off their game.
In my past life I use to help organise football tournaments for the Asian Football Confederation. I always remember one Team Manager's Meeting when I was in Binh Dinh, Vietnam for one of the legs of the AFC Champions League. The Match Commissioner was from Hong Kong and the referees from Indonesia. I had assumed that English would've been the one common language. The Japanese team had a foreign coach, I can't remember where from so let's say Russia, and a translator for him but the translator only spoke Japanese and Russian. So when the coach had something to say the translator translated it into Japanese, one of the Japanese translated into Vietnamese (neither of these Japanese spoke English) so one of the Vietnamese had to translate into English and then back again... I was beside myself, and as you can imagine, the meeting took about 5 hours!
As a native English speaker I use to have this assumed arrogance that everyone should speak English to accommodate me, or at least be trying to learn it, to accomodate me. As and when I travelled I would always make the effort to learn Hello, Goodbye and Thank You at minimum but I would not really make any further effort. Now I'm embarrassed that English is my one and only language and am desperately trying to learn Portuguese as fast as I can as we settle into Sao Paulo. I don't think it's a bad assumption to make (that English is the common language in a group of people) but I can't impose the same expectation I have of others to learn a second language when I don't force the same upon myself.
Source for different names for Association Football in each country
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