The AI earbuds shattering the language barrier in Sydney FC’s dressing room

Secondly, one-on-one: Talay and whichever player he is catching up with will each wear an earpiece, enabling them to talk to one another directly, without a third-party interpreter – as I am doing with Campuzano.

Timekettle is not a Sydney FC sponsor, nor are they the only company making these devices. There is no commercial arrangement here. Alexander Baumjohann, the club’s head of player management, came across the technology himself, thought it was worth a look, got in touch with the company and a unit soon arrived at Sky Park.

Minds have been blown ever since.

“We first tried it with Alex – he was speaking German and I was speaking Turkish into it – and it was unbelievable, the conversation that we were having,” Talay recalls.

After a bit of fiddling with the Bluetooth settings, the club’s media manager David Warriner puts his phone down on the table, and as Campuzano and I talk, the Timekettle app does its magic. Others in the room watch on in amazement, as if they are seeing the future, right in front of them.

“Were you saying we can hack Dave’s phone, now that he doesn’t understand us?” Campuzano asks me in Spanish.

I remind him that, since I’m speaking English, Dave can understand me, so I have to be careful.

“Only I have freedom,” Campuzano says with a laugh.

It works. Pretty much perfectly. Our conversation feels smooth and natural, and we joke about how he suspects teammate and Peruvian international Piero Quispe secretly spends his team meetings listening to the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny instead of the Spanish translation of Talay’s speeches. We speculate about whether, one day, I could take one of these things to a Bad Bunny concert so I could actually understand his lyrics.

By the end of our chat, I feel like I’ve built much more of a rapport with Campuzano than I would have if we both spoke in English. I imagine he feels more comfortable expressing himself this way, and can say the things that come naturally to him, rather than having to reach for the right English words in his brain. He can simply be himself.

“I think it creates a much more intimate atmosphere,” Campuzano says. “I think the future is bright with these things, and we’ll use them for everything. You’ll also be able to travel to any country in the world, literally, and talk to anyone … and I think that’s really nice, because you’ll be able to share experiences with the whole world, and there won’t be a language barrier.”

Since he can speak English and Spanish, I ask him for his judgment on accuracy.

“Almost 100 per cent,” he says.

The only major snag is that it takes three to five seconds for the audio translation to come through, which is a little bit awkward, but not a deal breaker. The app on Warriner’s phone also provides a transcription in both languages, so we spend a fair bit of time leaning forward and reading what’s on the phone while waiting to hear the spoken version – which, if we’re searching for negatives, does sound a little bit wooden, like Apple’s Siri.

Give it a couple of years, I reckon, and it’ll be instantaneous.

There are many ways that this technology could revolutionise the way we work and live, but I was fascinated by its use in sport, and particularly football.

Having covered the world game for this masthead for the past seven years, I am all too aware of the challenges of cross-cultural communication. At major tournaments such as the World Cup, earpieces are given to players and coaches for official press conferences; through an app, journalists can select the language they would like to hear the questions and answers in.

But those translations are delivered in real time by a human interpreter in a nearby booth, who is under immense pressure to operate with speed and precision, at risk of embarrassment, defamation, or even diplomatic friction if they don’t reflect the full meaning accurately.

I vividly recall, at the 2019 Asian Cup in the United Arab Emirates, hearing foreign journalists ask questions in Arabic of then Socceroos boss Graham Arnold, and then getting the English version through an earpiece – except the translation lasted for about a third of the time that the journalist was actually speaking.

All nuance is lost, and by the time the English versions of the questions got to Arnold’s ears, they were surely mangled beyond recognition, rendering the experience largely a waste of time for all involved. It was like Lost in Translation, but set in Abu Dhabi.

Inside team environments, there are other pitfalls. Let’s use Ange Postecoglou’s time at Yokohama F. Marinos as an example: he would deliver speeches to his players in English, which would be translated into Japanese by an interpreter for the majority of his squad. But then another interpreter would translate from Japanese into Portuguese for the Brazilian players, and another would translate Japanese into Thai for their other import.

So while Postecoglou was trying to inspire his troops, there was all sorts of murmuring going on at the back of the room, which must have been very distracting.

“I haven’t had any very clear examples like the ones you describe,” Campuzano tells me.

“But I have a friend who played for a team called Grenada. I think that year there were 26 players, and 21 of them were of different nationalities. So imagine the mess it was for the coach to explain it in a way that everyone could understand. It was chaos. With this, it would be very easy, because the coach would speak and everyone with their tongue would understand it the first time.”

Timekettle’s grasp of specific football terminology isn’t perfect, but it’ll get there.

When Talay was playing for Avispa Fukuoka in Japan, he had an interpreter who he said practically man-marked him during training sessions, telling him what his coach wanted from him in his specific midfield role.

That’s one setting the Sky Blues haven’t experimented with: on the field. In a match, that wouldn’t be allowed, anyway. Yet.

The world’s biggest clubs have endless resources, enabling them to employ as many interpreters as they need. Clubs such as Sydney FC cannot. For them, Timekettle is a cost saver, a noise reducer and a cultural accelerator all at once.

Talay’s assistant coach John Maisano can speak Spanish, as can Baumjohann, so they could get by without them. But with them, they can speed up the process of helping integrate a player such as Quispe, who is playing in a non-Spanish-speaking country for the first time in his career, and is nowhere near conversational with his English.

Talay and Campuzano are sure this tool has helped him feel more comfortable in his new surrounds, and trust the people around him, sooner than he otherwise would.

“You’re able to connect a lot quicker with the individuals,” Talay says. “You always question it – how good will it actually work? But I think it’s been working quite well. This device makes life a lot easier, a lot simpler. It’s better than having more bodies in the room.”

The sceptic in me can see an obvious drawback: what if this makes us all too lazy to learn other languages? Quispe is taking English lessons and is eager to learn, so credit to him; he might be an exception. But won’t we lose something beautiful about the world? These are questions we will all have to reckon with one day, and they are much bigger than sport.

For now, my head is spinning. Football has always been a universal language. That’s more true now than it has ever been.