David Beckham arrived to play for AC Milan with a suit, a smile and a limited vocabulary. When asked by the Italian TV host Llaria D'Amico if he had learnt any Italian, he replied: “Buona sera...er, Bellissimo!” That's not exactly plumbing the language of Dante to its very bottom, but he has been there only a couple of days.

It has become rather a middle-class thing: to despise people who are unable to speak more than one language with fluency without feeling the need to do so oneself.

For most Brits, the idea of being a polyglot polymath, cosmopolitan sophisticate never really gets beyond the theory. We admire, indeed envy, those who can switch from one language to another, as an amphibian switches from water to land: but mostly, it is a talent we leave to foreigners. Football is full of them.

Football gives us a constant supply of people who can change languages with nothing more than a double-declutch of the brain. The dazzling linguistic skills of Ruud Gullit blinded us to his vanity, a remarkable achievement, when he told us, after his meeting with the former South African President was cancelled: “I was just as disappointed as Mandela.”

José Mourinho had us entranced during his time as Chelsea manager. If you are Portuguese, you have to learn at least one other language, after all. (Not enough people know that one of the finest novels of the 20th century is in Portuguese*.) “There was God, and after God, me ,” he said nostalgically of his time in charge of Porto, an infinitely quieter assignment than his time in England. But when he came here, he announced his intentions from the beginning: “I am not out of a bottle. I am a special one.” This is not exactly idiomatic English. It works because of the Portuguese accent: it gains force from the knowledge that the speaker has many other languages, and is arrogant in them all.

Éric Cantona, of France, when playing for Manchester United, played the part of polyglot sophisticate without ever really speaking English. He was a secret monoglot: but he got away with it because he turned up the collar of his football shirt, stood with his shoulder blades touching and walked as if smearing insects with every pace. Every grunt seemed pregnant with meaning.

After he went to court for kung-fu kicking a fan, he said: “When the seagulls follow the trawlers it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.” Cantona certainly enriched our lives during his stay and enriched our language as well.

It is tempting to compare these prodigies with British exports who went abroad and hated every second of it, never mastering the language, never eating the food, never being able to get over the quintessential truth of British life: that abroad is absolutely bloody and all foreigners are fiends.

Ian Rush famously said that his time in Italy was “like living in a foreign country”. The vision of the British footballer overseas, hiding in his hotel room, mainlining Marmite and getting the plane home for lunch, has some elements of truth - but it's very outmoded.

Modern British footballers, if they play for the leading clubs, are pretty cosmopolitan people even if they never play for a foreign club. They have to be, to get on with their team-mates.

David Platt moved to Italy from the Midlands and said: “I don't miss the Villa. I live in one.” Gary Lineker, when playing for Barcelona, did television punditry in Spanish.

David Beckham may not have done quite so well in the language of Cervantes, but he made a very good fist of his time with Real Madrid. When he captained England against France in the European Championships of 2004, he and the French captain (and Real Madrid team-mate) Zinédine Zidane, exchanged cheek-kisses before kick-off: proof enough that a British footballer can be comfortable in an alien culture.

Besides, not all foreigners come here and shame us with their beautiful English. Claudio Ranieri, the former Chelsea manager and Mourinho's predecessor, never got topsides of English and spoke through an interpreter. Juande Ramos, until recently in charge of Tottenham Hotspur, was never remotely comfortable with English.

Come to that, the English spoken by the manager of England, the Italian Fabio Capello, is not yet Shakespearean, or even Cantona-esque. In his first press conference as England manager, he said a single word in English, in answer to the question as to how players should address him. “Boss!”

We Brits live on an island and so we lack the casual, everyday understanding of how one country and one language rubs against the next. In a smaller world we are, with infinite slowness, becoming more cosmopolitan, but it is a painful business. The truth of the matter is that footballers - their and ours - are actually facilitating the process. It's we who need to learn from them.

*The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa

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