Football Coach Gives Players iPads To Overcome Language Barrier

Technology is amazing, especially when you consider apps like Google Translate where you can translate words and sentences on the fly. It can even translate signboards and menus just by pointing your camera at it. Pretty amazing stuff, right? This is why we suppose it doesn’t really come as a surprise that football (or soccer as it is known in the US) coach Gary Neville has reportedly handed out iPads to his players.

As it stands, Neville is currently coaching the Valencia football team and because his Spanish isn’t quite up to par, he has relied on the iPad (although we suppose any other tablet should be good enough to do the job) to get his message across to his players in terms of showing them formations and what he wants them to do. Given that football teams these days consisting of players from varying nationalities, language barriers are to be expected.

According to his assistant Miguel Ángel Angulo, “He has given an iPad to each player to help them follow training and different actions during games.” Angulo adds, “What he is looking for is that the players understand as quickly as possible what he wants and the games against Lyon and Eibar were really games of adaption.”

This is obviously not the first time that tablets have found their way into sports. For example in 2014, NFL teams used Microsoft’s Surface tablets to review games while on the sidelines, so for the idea of other sporting teams to use tablets shouldn’t really be too much of a surprise.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Tablets
Tags: iPad, sports