Trent spoke Spanish?! If this shocks you, you’re thicker than footballers…

It spoke of the extremely low regard footballers are held in intellectually that Trent Alexander-Arnold could have so impressed a room full of journalists by speaking in Spanish for a full minute, like it was the most remarkable thing they’d ever seen. An English footballer speaking a foreign language!! It’s against the natural order. Jeff Powell’s head must have burst into flames.

You can hear it after an interview with a player; the presenter or pundit will say “he speaks very well” when all he’s done is speak normally, like a normal person. It doesn’t mean he’s one of the greatest orators of the era; it just means he can just talk reasonably cogently in sentences.

In what other walk of life do we congratulate someone on being able to cohere sentences? It’s because footballers are held to a different standard because some, far from all, seem to struggle with talking to people who aren’t footballers and stare blankly or look terrified when asked a question, like a teacher has asked them something they don’t know because they’ve not done their homework

Of course, players come here from all over the world and are able to be fluent in English, or at least get by. Ugly English exceptionalism dictated ‘we’ didn’t need to do this, you just needed to shout louder to make Manuel understand. ‘Abroad’ was a foreign country to be escaped from at the first opportunity and foreign clubs were only to be joined as a last desperate measure. We still see this underlying attitude in the ‘best league in the world’ attitude. They can’t be as good as us; they’re foreign.

While the last vestiges of this attitude may exist, though largely with ex-player pundits and Reform-voting thick-necked xenophobes, of which football can count many amongst their number, it’s largely a thing of the past and more British players play abroad than ever, embracing non-British cultures. Often, as with Scott McTominay, to great success at a title-winning club.

Regardless, footballers have a long-held reputation for being, well, a bit thick, and having a narrow cultural topography, as the days of those Shoot! Interviews in the 1980s proved. Favourite food? Fillet steak and chips. Favourite music? Phil Collins. Favourite TV programme? Match of the Day. And it lives on in our cultural DNA as the reaction to TAA’s Spanish showed.

It must be odd being hailed for such a simple thing, like they’re saying patronisingly: “I never thought you could learn Spanish.” And there’s no doubt British footballer anti-intellectualism still exists and you can see it when a footballer admits to liking anything apart from video games as if it’s an embarrassing thing to admit to enjoying reading novels or appreciating art.

I go back to that story I was told 10 years ago by an agent, when two French players for a prominent London club were talking in the dressing room and said, in English, that they were going to see the Monet exhibition, only to be interrupted by a famous England player who said, “Why do you want to see an exhibition of money?”

Non-British players often seem more sophisticated and culturally broad than domestic players. I suspect that we tend to draw more often on deprived communities for players and they’re brought up without having a lot of education. Britain has always been comfortable with society having a substantial deprived underclass as long as they think they’re paying less tax, despite the clear evidence of this folly.

READ: Man Utd have a knackered, demoralised squad and a devalued, reviled brand

Many players spend time and money working for charities. Some roles are fairly meaningless, perhaps a cynic might suggest they’re created merely to make the player look less like a selfish money-hoarder and are good for their image but take little time and effort. But those ‘ambassadorial’ and shirt-signing effort-free roles aside, some have built actual hospitals with their staggering salaries and don’t deserve to be treated like idiots.

Trent himself is an ambassador for the Liverpool-based charity An Hour for Others that offers a range of services, including food hampers, toys, cooking lessons, and science classes. In 2021, he was amongst other icons and business leaders who united to launch Football For Change (FFC), aiming to empower young people nationwide through transformative initiatives. How much time he committed to these projects isn’t clear but at least it seems well-meaning.

No other sport’s fans attract such cynicism of its players’ intellectual capability, but it might be time to reassess such default thinking. It’s probably unrealistic that we’ll hear them speaking out about the pervasive, perverting and corrupting effect of nation state ownership or the creeping fascism in America, greater awareness of many issues isn’t as unlikely as it was in the 80s when Pat Nevin was asked why he was reading and had his NME torn up at Chelsea.

As more and more British players treat world and certainly European football as a normal place to ply your trade, we know that travel broadens the mind and the chance to play in another country is a chance to expand your horizons, so it seems likely that coming generations will do so more and more.

After all, how many must have seen McTominay flourish at Napoli as Manchester United mooch in the boondocks and have been inspired to leave?

Are we seeing the last of anti-intellectualism in British football? If you read the football press, you’d think not, but they’re ever less significant. In the real world, we are probably now more jerk chicken and rice than fillet steak and chips, and that’s to be welcomed.