Coach Stilo: Bringing the “Other Football” to the World

If you grew up in the United States, chances are good that you know the basics of baseball, basketball, and what we call football (the rest of the world calls it American football). At the very least, you’d probably be able to follow a game if it were on TV. Sit down with a game of cricket or rugby, however, and I’m guessing you’d have a much harder time.

Reverse the situation, and something interesting happens. Cricket and rugby make plenty of sense when you grow up watching (and playing) them, and despite being invented in North America, baseball and basketball are played around the world. American football (not to be confused with soccer), however, remains something of a mystery outside of the US. What’s with the armor? How come there are giant forks in the ground? Why is that guy wearing only one shoe?

Enter Coach Stilo

These are all perfectly valid questions, and in an effort to answer them, the National Football League has put together an online introduction to the game. Delivered by the fictional Coach Stilo, the three-hour primer combines online seminars, situation comedy, film and quick quizzes in order to impart a basic understanding of the game to newcomers.

Using real-life examples from NFL footage, “Coach Stilo — the Experience” puts you right on the sidelines while you learn the rules. Definitions of basic terms eventually give way to more sophisticated lessons on strategy, and before you know it, you’re ready to yell at the referee yourself — that tight end was clearly offsides!

American Football for Parisian Audiences

When trying to explain American football to international audiences, you’ve got to speak the right language. That’s why the NFL teamed up with ALS to provide professional translations into French and Japanese, along with voice overs in French, Japanese and Spanish. These joined the existing Spanish and Mandarin versions, allowing sports fans to approach the game in a language they understand, instead of trying to tackle unfamiliar rules in an unfamiliar tongue.

Explaining the rules of American football to any newcomer can be difficult, but accurately translating its nuances for foreign newcomers is even trickier. Many of the terms used in the game aren’t found anywhere else, so there isn’t necessarily an existing translation for “touchdown” or “cornerback.” Part of the localization effort for the Coach Stilo tutorial involved determining whether the English word was recognizable enough to be used for audiences overseas, or if a similar term — like “goal,” “point” or “score” — would need to be substituted.

From Game Boards to the Gridiron

In a similar vein, sometimes metaphors just don’t quite work across languages. In the English version, Coach Stilo emphasizes American football’s strategic similarities to the game of chess. While many audiences are easily able to grasp this concept, Japanese viewers of the Experience would be left feeling a little lost, since chess isn’t terribly prevalent in Japan. Anticipating this, the Japanese version refers instead to the game of shogi, a similarly strategic board game.

American football is a complicated, dynamic game. You could watch for weeks and still not pick up every last rule or nuance. But thanks to translation and localization efforts — and some entertaining storytelling! — it doesn’t have to remain a mystery.