Valery Karpin, the head coach of the Russian national team, has addressed his communication style with players and shared his thoughts on the use of strong language.
— You were a product of Romantsev’s system. Do you follow his methods, or do you take a tougher approach?
— What do you mean by a tough approach?
— There’s a video circulating from after a match…
— You mean where I’m swearing, right?
— Yes.
— We don’t see Romantsev videos on YouTube like that.
— Back then, it was unthinkable for anyone to enter the dressing room. We’re all about openness now—we’re the national team. We come for interviews, open up the dressing room, it gets filmed, and it’s shared. That was unimaginable before. Even the thought of it—Romantsev would never have let anyone in. It was just players and coaches. And the doctor, the masseur.
Now, with all these people coming in with cameras, filming everything—okay, fine, we’re for openness, it provides content. You’ll find ten more videos like the one from the Nicaragua game, all with bleeps.
— I’ve even seen an unbleeped version.
— Sure, even without bleeps. So what? This is hypocrisy. I’m watching the series “Gold Bottom” now. Every time there’s a business conversation—not about love, about business—it’s bleeped. So what’s the issue? I don’t get it. If we have series and movies bleeped on federal channels, why is this a problem?
— There’s a video of Ferguson shouting in the dressing room, raising his voice.
— They just don’t have as much swearing as we do. They can use it anywhere. And no other language has the variety of swear words we have. So, if we want, we can speak entirely in swears. Not just insert them—but hold entire conversations in them. In other languages, I think that’s impossible.
If you need to add fire to a speech—we don’t normally swear, but in certain situations, why not? In that speech, there were no personal insults. Someone probably needed a trigger. I’m against personal insults, and I never use them, Karpin said in an interview on Nadezhda Strelets’ YouTube channel.
