Хөлбөмбөгийн ертөнц дэх “зовох урлаг” ба дэлхийн аваргын финал

“You have to suffer,” said Argentina striker Julian Alvarez when explaining how his side reached its fourth major tournament final in a row. “And you have to know how to suffer.”

Spain against Argentina is the first men’s World Cup final in 96 years — since Uruguay played Argentina in the 1930 first edition — between two nations that share the same language.

One word prominent in Spanish-speaking football parlance has dominated the build-up: sufrir. This translates literally into English as to suffer.

Before Spain’s semi-final win over France, head coach Luis de la Fuente quoted Julius Caesar: “In history there is no greatness without suffering.” The Spain coach said this was the motto he passed on to his players and staff: “If you want to achieve anything in life,” he continued, “you must suffer”.

His Argentina counterpart, Lionel Scaloni, struck the same tone. “We have suffered a lot,” he said. “At this stage of the World Cup, it’s very difficult not to suffer.”

It’s not only coaches and players who talk about suffering; football fans do too.

The Athletic’s Felipe Cardenas, fluent in both languages, says sufrir is “a state of mind” in Latin American football culture, particularly prominent in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. “It is a point of pride and honour to not always be the protagonist but to get a positive result,” he says.

Before the World Cup, The Athletic launched its ‘Language of Soccer’ series, speaking to supporters of all 48 participating nations. The aim was to capture each country’s unique fan and football culture. Uruguay fan Raul Guizzo said it was “in our DNA to suffer”, and Paraguay supporter Nati Martinez recalled: “My mum would say, ‘If the team doesn’t make you suffer, it is not Paraguay.’”

To show suffering is a way of expressing loyalty. In Spain, one Atletico Madrid fan group is called “the sufferers”.

But why do Spanish speakers enjoy suffering so much, and why does the word feel unnatural in an English-speaking football context?

Do linguistic nuances mean that one language’s understanding of suffering is different to another’s, and if so, does that shape the contextualisation of identity within football cultures, and how the game is played?

‘Culturally embedded significance’

Felipe Schuery, an associate professor in Portuguese at the University of Cambridge, helps break down the verb’s structure and origins. “Sufrir comes from the Latin sufferre — a compound word built from sub (under/beneath) plus ferre (to carry/bear). Hence, it implies ‘bearing something upon oneself’ and, consequently, carrying a heavy load’, ‘enduring’, ‘being under pressure.’”

Alex Harshaw, a legal linguist and translator, highlights how sufrir in a football context is a prime example of how “lexical equivalence does not necessarily mean functional equivalence” in translation. In other words, sufrir has undergone a semantic extension that suffering in English has not. “It triggers different sporting and emotional assumptions in the two languages,” he explains. “The Spanish has acquired additional, culturally embedded significance.”

Translator and philologist Carlota Palacin Jordan believes sufrir demonstrates how nuances in languages can be influenced by cultures and missed in literal translations. “In the context of sport, the suffering involved in achievement encompasses resilience, endurance, effort and struggle,” she explains. “It is the virtuous quality of hard work, or of avoiding the ‘easy’ decision.”

Ryan Abberley, a translator and academic English teacher based in Spain, believes the evolution of languages helps explain that cultural difference. “Sufrir sums up many things, but in English there are lots of different ways and meanings to express them. Because sufrir is so wide-ranging and easy to say, it has almost become a cliche, but it still has actual tactical and meaningful substance.”

Harshaw believes the broadening of sufrir’s definition is why it is so liberally applied in a sporting context. “Spanish packages a broad range of footballing experiences into a single, highly productive verb, whereas English expresses the same range of meanings through a repertoire of context-dependent expressions.

“It conveys enduring pressure, defending resolutely, surviving difficult moments, demonstrating resilience, emotional investment and a lot more besides. It isn’t necessarily negative, whereas, in English, suffering has overwhelmingly negative connotations: pain, illness, misfortune, victimhood.”

After England’s quarter-final win over Norway, coach Thomas Tuchel was critical of his side’s performance immediately after the game. Speaking to ITV Sport, the German head coach pointedly said of England’s approach to the game: “I didn’t talk about suffering. I never said that.” Tuchel strongly distanced himself from using the word ‘suffering’, implying that it would reflect a negative mindset going into the match.

The art of suffering

“Primero hay que saber sufrir.”

“The first thing,” begins the verse in the classic Argentine tango Naranjo en Flor, “is you have to know how to suffer”.

The lyrics address a love that has withered away and the subsequent process of emotional maturation. The central message is the acceptance that suffering is a necessary stage in the process of love, loss and personal growth — of life itself.

For Dr Txuss Martin, an affiliated lecturer in linguistics at the University of Cambridge, this construction is crucial in deconstructing the linguistic concept of suffering. Saber sufrir is an evolution from sufrir because it conveys the message not only of suffering, but also of how to suffer. It puts the individuals in control of the suffering, rather than at its mercy.

“That expression (saber sufrir) transforms suffering from something passively undergone into a skill: remaining organised, emotionally controlled and collectively committed when things go against you,” he says. “English expressions like ‘no pain, no gain’ present pain as a price for improvement or eventual reward, but saber sufrir is suffering as a capacity exercised during adversity, particularly when events are no longer under one’s control.”

Legal linguist and translator Harshaw believes saber sufrir adds a “moral dimension” to the phrase and can be seen to legitimise successes. “That makes it demonstrative of discipline, sacrifice and collective commitment. Those suffering qualities are the evidence that the success was earned.”

For Harshaw, he finds the literal translation of suffering into English “jarring”, because it does not encompass the intention of the phrase. “We praise teams for ‘digging in’, for ‘soaking up pressure or ‘riding their luck’, but none of those carries the same emotional and cultural weight as saber sufrir. The same period of play is being described, but they are being conceptualised differently.”

Abberley agrees that the cultural differences between the English and Spanish languages give room for confusion. “You could argue sufrir is almost an opposite of English suffering, because of the difference between the positive and negative.”

Football is not the only sport where suffering has become a rite of passage for success. In tennis, an individual sport with significant physical and emotional tolls, the Spanish seven-time major champion Carlos Alcaraz has said grinding out victories on the red clay of Roland Garros requires an ability to “find joy in the suffering”.

He doubled down when asked about his love of the surface, which is conducive to long, hard-fought points: “I think the key is to enjoy suffering.” His compatriot, the great Rafael Nadal, previously said: “There is no happiness without suffering.”

‘Enough suffering’ — when is it culturally rejected?

Spanish is not the only language which eulogises the art of suffering. Saber sufrir, knowing how to suffer, is used in sister Romance languages Italian (saper soffrire) and French (savoir souffrir), with both often applied to football. Few high-profile managers embraced the ‘suffering’ mantra to the same degree as Italian coach Antonio Conte.

In Portuguese, it is saber sofrer, used by Cristiano Ronaldo during the tournament: “The important quality to win a competition like the World Cup is knowing how to suffer.”

However, the cultural impact in Brazil — a nation whose self-defined identity jogo bonito, a concept of its football successes being achieved through joy, expressiveness and risk — is rather different. Schuery, Cambridge University’s associate professor in Portuguese, explains that his home nation of Brazil does not fully embrace the term as virtuous.

“Tite, Brazil’s national team coach between 2016 and 2022, used the saying a lot,” he says. “But Brazil fans don’t enjoy using this term for its national team. In Portuguese, we say teams ‘sofrer um gol’ — literally ‘to suffer a goal’. Perhaps this helps explain why Brazilians struggle with the concept of ‘knowing how to suffer’ in football.”

Indeed, Brazilian coach Eduardo Barroca has said knowing how to suffer “was the worst phrase in football”. Barroca was drawing on a sentiment expressed two decades earlier, when Brazil won the 1994 World Cup. Despite the team’s success, the pragmatic playing style meant they were not universally loved in Brazil.

After Brazil defeated the United States 1-0 in the last-16 stage of that tournament, sports journalist Mario Neto wrote a column that was scathing about the style in Jornal dos Sports, the Rio de Janeiro daily sports newspaper. Titled The Masochists, the piece concludes with the line: “Now, after all this suffering, can’t things change? Or can we only try something relevant when we are on the verge of collapse? Enough suffering.”

In FIFA’s Spanish-language summary of Argentina’s 2026 World Cup, world football’s governing body argued the nation had “made suffering its defining characteristic”, drawing the parallel between the side that reached the 1990 final. Nicolas Tagliafico, Argentina’s left-back, said of his side: “We have had to suffer in every game, and we’ll have to keep suffering because it’s a World Cup.”

The same tone was struck by Spain midfielder Rodri. “If anyone thinks we’re going to win a World Cup without suffering, they’re mistaken.”

In his final pre-match press conference, Spain coach De la Fuente was asked about the values he and Argentina boss Scaloni shared: “We both know when it is our turn to suffer, and we will suffer.”

Spain have conceded just one goal in seven matches this tournament. Argentina, by contrast, have twice required extra time to progress and their other two knockout games involved comeback wins with last-minute goals. These two paths to the final are tangibly very different, but have each been characterised by the same, all-encompassing verb.

Suffering and knowing how to suffer will define this World Cup final, in more ways than we think.