From Jeddah to the Games of the Future

[00:00:00] From Jeddah to the games of the future Interpreting at the speed of the Gulf by Matteo Ippoliti Minutes before the first pre match press conference of the 2025 Asian Football Confederation Champions League Elite finals in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the audio support we had been counting on at the stadium fell through. [00:00:22] Not delayed, not half ready, simply gone at the worst possible moment. In the room next door, the staff of Al Nassr Cristiano Ronaldo's club were preparing to meet Japan's Kawasaki Frontale, and a wall of cameras was about to carry every word to millions of viewers across Asia and beyond. I am Italian, so I am culturally well equipped for a certain amount of drama, but even by my standards this was a generous serving. We had interpreters arranged in three different configurations, two languages that share almost nothing, a relay chain still to lock in, and an audio chain that had just collapsed under us. And we were, as they say, about to go live. That single moment captures the essence of what delivering language services at elite events in the Gulf today actually means. It is exhilarating, it is unforgiving, and it rewards those who can stay calm while quietly rebuilding the plan under the table over eight months. In 2025, my company, Landcross, provided interpreting services at two events that could not look more different on paper. The AFC Champions League Elite finals in Jeddah in the spring, the most prestigious club football tournament in Asia, and the games of the future in Abu Dhabi in December, the world's flagship phygital competition, where sport blends the physical and the digital. [00:01:44] One is tradition at its most intense. [00:01:47] The other is a glimpse of where sport is heading. Two versions of the future of sport, the AFC Champions League Elite is the pinnacle of Asian club football. [00:01:57] In its new elite format, the tournament culminates in a centralized finals stage, and in 2025 that stage was Jeddah from April 25 to May 3. Saudi Arabia did not win the right to host by accident. [00:02:12] The kingdom has spent recent years turning itself into a global sports destination and hosting the continent's biggest clubs, with Ronaldo's Al Nassr and the eventual champions, Al Ahli Carrying local and regional hopes was a statement of intent. The semifinal I mentioned ended with Kawasaki Frontale knocking Ronaldo's side out before the Japanese team fell to Al Ahli in the final. For the Saudi public, it was a night of history. [00:02:38] For those of us working the microphones, it was eight days of the highest possible stakes. [00:02:44] Why does language sit at the center of an event like this? [00:02:47] Because a modern football final is, in communications terms, a small United Nations. You have Arabic speaking Saudi clubs, a Japanese side whose staff work in Japanese, coaches and players who move between Portuguese, Italian, English, Thai and more, and a global press corps operating in a dozen languages within minutes of the final whistle. [00:03:11] Every official pre match and post match press conference has to work flawlessly in real time, because a mistranslated answer from a manager after a painful defeat does not stay in the room, it becomes a headline. The organizers expected international standards, the standard the football world takes for granted at a World cup delivered within the fast, fluid rhythm at which the region works. Eight months later and 1,300km to the east, the second stage could not have felt more different. [00:03:42] The Games of the Future 2025, held at the Adnec Centre in Abu Dhabi from December 17 23, is a phygital event wherein athletes compete in both the physical and the digital version of each discipline. Picture a football match followed immediately by its esports equivalent, a battle of robots, drone racing and a virtual reality arena, all under one roof. [00:04:07] More than 850 athletes from over 60 nations aged from 13 to 72 across 11 disciplines, broadcast in more than 13 languages to hundreds of millions of viewers. If Jeddah was the grand tradition of sport, Abu Dhabi was its laboratory of the future. The challenge the last second is not the exception. It is the weather. [00:04:30] People who have never worked in the Gulf sometimes imagine that a big budget makes everything smooth. The truth is more interesting. The resources here are extraordinary, the ambition is genuine and the pace is relentless, which means plans evolve until the last possible second, and often a little beyond that. [00:04:49] Agendas arrive late. [00:04:51] A press conference is brought forward. [00:04:53] An accreditation that was confirmed yesterday needs reconfirming at the gate today. [00:04:58] A room layout changes because a protocol requirement changed. None of this is a complaint. It is simply the weather you learn to work in. And the professionals who thrive here are the ones who stop fighting the weather and start dressing for it. In Jeddah, the complexity was multiplied by geography. The finals ran across two separate venues, the King Abdullah Sports City Stadium and the Prince Abdullah Al Faisal Stadium, which meant our language operation had to exist in two places at once, coordinated to the minute, with program changes and surprises landing on both fronts. This is precisely why I did not send a team and stay in Dubai. I flew to Jeddah myself and ran the operation on the ground. [00:05:40] When the margin for error is measured in seconds and the audience is measured in millions, the founder needs to be in the building. [00:05:47] There are decisions you cannot delegate over a phone line at 2200 hours. When a Coach has just walked in early. [00:05:54] Then there is the linguistic architecture itself, covering languages such as Japanese. For a press conference, feeding an Arabic and English audience is not a matter of adding another booth. [00:06:05] It requires relay, where one interpreter's output becomes another's input, using both simultaneous and consecutive modes. And every extra link in that chain adds latency and risk. Do it badly and the room feels the delay. The rhythm breaks and a manager's sharp answer lands three seconds too late to matter. Do it well and nobody notices you at all. Which is of course the entire point of our profession. We are the only people in the building whose greatest success is to be invisible. Add to this the sheer number of stakeholders, each with their own priorities. The tournament organizers, the broadcasters working to unforgiving television timings, the club's press officers protecting their people, the confederation setting protocol, and the teams themselves, who often have specific preferences about how they want to be heard. Satisfying all of them simultaneously, in real time, with cameras rolling is the actual job. Interpreting is almost the easy part. There is also an emotional dimension that colleagues outside sport tend to underestimate. [00:07:11] A corporate conference is usually a controlled environment where speakers choose their words carefully. A post match press conference is the opposite. A manager walks in 90 seconds after a defeat that may cost him his job, adrenaline still high, and a journalist asks the one question he does not want to hear. The interpreter has to carry not only the meaning, but the register, the restraint, sometimes the barely contained frustration into another language without adding or softening a single degree. [00:07:41] Elite sport is one of the last places where interpretation is performed with genuinely no safety net, and where the emotional accuracy matters as much as the lexical one. The solution? Choreography under pressure. [00:07:55] Let me take you back to that first press conference, the one where the audio nearly fell apart with a few minutes on the clock. My own technician and a video technician who happened to be on hand, rolled up their sleeves and rebuilt the audio chain by improvisation testing channels, literally as the participants were taking their seats. [00:08:13] To this day, I am convinced that the single most valuable asset we brought to Saudi Arabia was not a piece of our Bosch hardware. It was a team of technicians who spoke Arabic and had years of experience working in the Kingdom. In a last second environment, local language and local experience are not a nice to have. They are the difference between a broadcast and a disaster. And sure enough, the hardwired Internet connection did not work as it was supposed to. But we had brought a 5G router that saved us. We had expected as much. The setup we designed for Jeddah was deliberately hybrid at The King Abdullah Sports City stadium we ran on site interpreting between Arabic and English. At the Prince Abdullah Al Faisal stadium we delivered remote interpreting over a secure platform, which let us cover the second venue without cloning the entire team. [00:09:04] For Korean, Japanese and Thai, we built relay chains from consecutive interpretation. And a Bosch infrared system carried clean interference free audio to everyone in the room, which matters more than you would think. Inside a live stadium full of ambient noise, the most beautiful piece of choreography, and I use that word deliberately, happened around the Japanese side. [00:09:28] Imagine the layers running at once. A consecutive interpreter working from Japanese into English, a remote colleague taking that relay to feed the Arabic simultaneous channel. And on top of that, interpreters providing whispered interpretation. Choux tage in Portuguese and in Italian from the Japanese colleagues relay. It was frankly a complicated machine, combining our interpreters with interpreters provided by the teams themselves, who know their players and coaches intimately. And it ran exactly as the client and the teams had requested. [00:10:02] There was even Italian in the mix. The interpreter brought by the team did an excellent job across English, Arabic and Italian, taking English and Arabic from the journalists in the room and Italian straight from the coach. [00:10:15] Having worked as an interpreter myself many years ago, I could put myself in their shoes and truly appreciate how demanding that job is. [00:10:23] I still remember the Italian basketball Cup Final Eight in floral back in 2006, when coach David Blatt from Benetton Treviso stopped my consecutive interpretation mid flow to add a personal remark I had left out. None of this runs on talent alone. [00:10:39] Behind the comm on screen sat a carefully sized operation, a multilingual team of interpreters selected not only for their language pairs, but for their ability to hold their nerve, supported by technicians and coordinated across the two venues to the minute. [00:10:54] When people ask me what we actually sell, I tell them we sell the absence of problems. The client sees a smooth press conference and a clean broadcast feed. What they do not see is the dozen small decisions taken in the previous 10 minutes to make sure that is what they get. In a market that is still learning to distinguish a genuine language partner from a cheap supplier. That invisible layer is the whole value. [00:11:17] Now hold that image of controlled human complexity. [00:11:20] Because eight months later, in Abu Dhabi, Langpros delivered something that looked almost like its mirror opposite. And this is where the story turns toward the future. [00:11:31] For the games of the future, the entire operation was delegated to our United Arab Emirates team. [00:11:38] Not because it mattered less, but because the setting was more contained, being indoor and single site. And because by then the team had been tested and I trusted them completely. The Abu Dhabi solution shows where interpreting is heading for the opening ceremony and the summit. We deployed on site simultaneous interpreting in six languages Arabic, Russian, Azerbaijani, Chinese, Spanish and French, all paired with English from booths with relay support and an infrared system. [00:12:10] But for the daily press conferences we switched to remote simultaneous interpretation delivered through an RSI platform in Arabic, Chinese, Spanish and French. There were no traditional receivers to hand out and collect. [00:12:26] Attendees simply listened on their own smartphones through a web widget, and we procured disposable earphones so anyone could tune in instantly. The interpretation feed was carried into the live YouTube stream and broadcast. [00:12:39] Lean, smart and quietly radical compared with a stadium full of infrared receivers. In all honesty, the choice to distribute the audio via smartphone was driven as much by its appeal as a modern tech forward solution as by any hard advantage over a traditional infrared system, which would have served the room just as well. There was more to solve behind the scenes. The client wanted all the cameras to have a specific video splitter box which simply did not exist in the local market. So our technician built one to spec and when headsets were handed out in gift style bags at the opening, risking that guests would walk off with them as souvenirs, we deployed stagehands and stationed people at every exit to bring the equipment home. Abu Dhabi had its own version of adrenaline, only wired differently. The day before the opening we learned that the president of Azerbaijan would attend, which meant Azerbaijani had to be covered on site to protocol standard with almost no notice. [00:13:40] There was no such interpreter available locally, so we flew one in and I remember the quiet relief when the booth was finally staffed with the ceremony already counting down. The technology around us could not have been more futuristic, a phygital arena where footballers became their own avatars and robots fought two floors below. [00:13:59] Yet the decisive moment came down to the oldest question in our is the right human with the right language in the right seat in time? [00:14:08] In the end, the audience never queued for a receiver. They lifted their own phones and listened. The future had arrived and it fit in a pocket key takeaways Hard, rewarding and only just beginning. [00:14:23] Step back from the two events and a bigger picture comes into focus. [00:14:27] The Gulf is not hosting a few marquee tournaments and moving on. It is positioning itself as the center of gravity for global events over the next decade. [00:14:37] Saudi Arabia will host the AFC Asian cup in 2027, the Asian Games in Riyadh in 2034 and unopposed the FIFA World cup in 2034. [00:14:49] Qatar, fresh from the 2022 World cup, will stage the Asian Games in Doha in 2030. The UAE continues to invent formats like the games of the future that did not exist a few years ago. [00:15:02] For anyone in the language industry, this is not a regional footnote. It is one of the great growth stories of our field, and it is happening now. What does interpreting at these events teach us about the future of the profession? Two things which pull in the same direction rather than against each other. [00:15:20] First, technology is quietly changing the plumbing, rsi, smartphone, audio, artificial intelligence, AI assisted workflows and streaming integration are turning what used to require a truckload of hardware into something far more agile and flexible. And clients increasingly expect both. Integrating low latency AI interpreting and live captioning tools with existing interpreting workflows and audio visual equipment can widen access, contain costs, and let a small team cover more languages with far less hardware than before. [00:15:55] Used poorly, they are just noise with a subscription. The technology is not the story. What you do with it is. Second, and this is the part the technology headlines miss. The human interpreter is more essential than ever, precisely at the moments of highest pressure. A relay chain feeding a coach's raw emotion into three languages live with no second take is not a problem you hand to a machine. The future is not human or technological. It is the elite human interpreter amplified by the right technology. And the two events in this article are simply the same truth seen from opposite ends. This will apply not only to sports events, but to every arena where languages meet under pressure. Government summits and diplomacy, corporate conferences, media and entertainment, courtrooms and healthcare. Wherever people need to understand one another in real time and get it right the first time, the same partnership of elite human skill and smart technology will define who does it well. If there is a practical lesson in all of this for peers in the language industry, it is this Winning work in the Gulf is not about being the cheapest booth on the market. It is about being the partner who can absorb uncertainty. [00:17:10] Build a local team that speaks the language of the country, not just the languages of the event. [00:17:15] Invest in technicians who can rescue a broadcast when the plan collapses. [00:17:19] Treat the last minute change not as an insult to your process, but as the process itself. Layered on top of all this is a multicultural, multilingual and deeply religious environment that shapes how work actually gets done, timings that flex, decisions that land at the last second and the ever present inshallah that a newcomer mistakes for vagueness and a veteran learns to read as a rhythm of its own. [00:17:44] It is genuinely challenging, especially in a country like Saudi Arabia, and you do not master it by importing a Western playbook, you master it by respecting that the local logic has its own coherence. The Gulf rewards those who understand it, but it does not hand that understanding to anyone quickly. It is earned over years, one impossible deadline at a time, and those who have not lived it tend to discover its rules the hard way. I will not pretend it is easy to work here. It is demanding in ways that would surprise colleagues used to a more predictable calendar, and the region has its share of complexities that I will not wave away. But it is also, without exaggeration, some of the most rewarding work I have done in my career. [00:18:28] The scale is enormous, the ambition is contagious, and every event stretches you into becoming better. [00:18:35] Whatever the wider geopolitical backdrop, I have genuine confidence in the local leadership and in a resilience this region has proven time and again. Which brings me back to that room in Jeddah a few minutes before going live. The audio in pieces, two teams and a relay chain held together by nerve and experience. [00:18:54] We went live and it was clean. Almost nobody watching had any idea how close it had come. That is the job in the Gulf. More than anywhere I have worked. The distance between chaos and a flawless broadcast is measured in the last few seconds and in the people you brought with you to fill them. This article was written by Matteo Ippoliti is the founder of Langpros International, Dubai, providing localization and event technologies for the Gulf and beyond. [00:19:23] Originally published in Multilingual Magazine Issue 254, August 2026.