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Vandu at the World Cup

  • 04/03/2019
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We’re now into the knockout stages of what has been a pretty wonderful World Cup in Russia. We’ve lost Spain, Germany, Argentina and Portugal already, and some big names didn’t even make the flight to Russia at all (sorry Italy, Holland and the Côte d’Ivoire). We’ll leave the analysis of all the late goals, incidents and VAR penalty drama to the likes of BBC Football and Sky Sports, but we can tell you a thing or two about the languages of the world cup and other bits of trivia!

  • As you’d imagine, there are a lot of different languages at the world cup – 16 in total. The most common first language is Spanish, with a total of 8 countries using it, and in joint 2nd place is French and Arabic, with 4 a-piece. Though there’s no real way of measuring it, English is most likely the dominant language on the pitch, with its status as the world’s lingua franca it is probably the only common language between the two sets of players, the referees and assistants (whom have arrived from 46 different countries), and even some of the foreign managers.
  • 3.2 Billion people tuned in to watch the 2014 edition of the World Cup, just under half the planets population. The final itself peaked at 1 billion!
  • Portuguese-speaking Brazil are the only team to have played in every edition of the World Cup and have won it 5 times (25%), once more than either Italy or Germany.
  • Mexico has the most World Cup losses (25), though they do also have 14 wins and 14 draws.
  • The first world cup was held in Uruguay in 1930 and was thought up and organised by the then FIFA president and French national Jules Rimet, who named the original cup after himself before the design we are more familiar with made its first appearance in 1974.

And with all that, you ought to be pretty clued-up on your World Cup facts and figures, ready to ‘impress’ you friends at the next game. If you require interpreting or translation for any of the languages mentioned in the blog above, please call us on 01273 473986 or email info@vlslanguages.com for more information!

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