Alex Aljoe talks with Liverpool's Luis Diaz
Alex Aljoe artfully switched between English and Spanish during her chat with Liverpool’s Luis Diaz
In footballing terms, Alex Aljoe is enjoying a breakout season. The presenter went viral last month for conducting bilingual interviews on the sidelines, adding a distinct European flavour to Amazon Prime’s Champions League coverage.
Her chat with Luis Díaz after Liverpool’s 4-0 win over Bayern Leverkusen, in which the Colombian had scored a hat-trick, made significant waves online. Artfully switching between English and Spanish as she asked questions and translated Díaz’s answers, Aljoe turned to the camera at the right moments to keep viewers at home engaged. This rare display of versatility underlined the rewards that can be gained by conducting post-match interviews in a player’s native tongue.
At the time, Aljoe thought nothing of it. She decided her interview with Díaz, which lasted around three minutes and 15 seconds, would probably be a major switch-off for viewers. It was, however, an instant hit.
“I was overwhelmed by it,” Aljoe says. “I honestly didn’t know how it would go down. I thought some people would go, ‘Ugh, why can’t we just hear from a player that speaks English?’ To be honest, I don’t know why it hasn’t been done more in the past.”
Alex Aljoe pitchside for Amazon Prime during a Champions League night
Aljoe says she always tries to make her interviews ‘as natural a conversation as possible’
It is a valid point when you consider the Premier League has one of the highest percentages of foreign players compared to other European countries. Some 70 per cent are from overseas, with French and Spanish being the most common.
Players who have a poor command of English rarely make an appearance in front of the camera, but this is where Aljoe, a self-confessed language aficionado, has set new standards for sports broadcasting.
So, how does she do it? “Keep it as simple as possible,” she says, smiling. “At the end of the day, you’re talking about football. My style has always been to never ask long-winded questions. I always try to make it as natural a conversation as possible. My goal has always been to bring the viewer in as if they were there and give them that detail that you wouldn’t normally get.”
Modern foreign languages have been declining in schools in England at such an alarming rate that last year the Government unveiled a £15 million fund in an attempt to make Britain more bilingual. Aljoe, though, will attest that some of the best learning takes place outside of the classroom.
‘You have to be willing to step out of your comfort zone’
She began perfecting her art while working as a student for Real Madrid TV during her university placement abroad in 2013, where she conducted her first post-match interview in Spanish with one of the biggest names in sport.
“It was Cristiano Ronaldo,” she says, laughing at the memory. “I remember standing outside the dressing room. It was the first day I was allowed to do my own interview because up until that point I’d been shadowing. He scored a perfect hat-trick: right foot, left foot, header. So, I was told: ‘Right, we’ve got to get him.’ And I was like: ‘What do you mean we’ve got to get him?’ We didn’t have the luxury of someone like a press officer bringing the player to us – working for the club channel, you just grabbed players.
“He was amazing. Someone had told him: ‘Be nice, this is her first-ever interview.’ Watching it back now, the questions were like three words long, as I thrust a microphone in his face! It wasn’t my best interview, but it was the start of everything. It’s still on my mum’s Facebook.”
It proved to be an invaluable life lesson. “They were like: ‘If you don’t have the courage to do this now, forget a career in journalism. You have to be willing to step out of your comfort zone to try to get interviews.”
We meet over Zoom, the morning after Aljoe has been pitchside for Aston Villa’s 3-2 victory over Leipzig. She confesses to having eaten four bratwursts from the city’s Christmas market, but the conversation quickly turns to viewers savouring another one of her bilingual interviews – this time with Jhon Durán – after the Colombian scored a 25-yard stunner.
“Duran notoriously doesn’t give many interviews,” Aljoe says. “The press officer was unsure, but I positioned myself on the side of the pitch where he had to walk past. Sometimes if you can just say, in their native tongue, ‘Two questions?’ [that’s enough]. At Madrid, I even learned how to say that in Croatian for Luka Modric, because they look up, it’s in their language.”
It caps some rise for the budding linguist who scrawled “I love languages” on one of her year-seven folders and was consequently branded a “geek” by a classmate. “Now I say to everyone, keep going with your languages, because lots of industries use them,” Aljoe says. “I use them on a daily basis in this job.”
Alongside being a fluent Spanish speaker, Aljoe is also competent in French and Italian and over the Covid lockdown, added Portuguese to her repertoire because “I was sitting at home thinking I needed to do something”. Within months, she conducted her first sit-down interview with Bruno Guimarães, the Newcastle United and Brazil midfielder. “That’s one of the best interviews I’ve done,” she says. “He hadn’t spoken to anyone because he didn’t speak any English. His wife was in labour at the time – it was the weirdest thing ever – so he arrived two hours early.
“He got really emotional and said how he wears the number nine on his back because that’s his dad’s taxi number. Everything he does was for his father and he offered this insight into his life growing up in Brazil and how much Newcastle meant to him. We would never have got it if it wasn’t in Portuguese. It’s hard for anyone to do that in English, asking about someone’s life and backstory in an hour. Those interviews absolutely have to be in your native tongue, there’s no way you can express the emotion and talk about deep things, struggles growing up.”
She also counts interviewing Alexis Mac Allister in an Argentine restaurant after the then-Brighton player won the World Cup as another of her career highlights, but she circles back to her Díaz and Durán work as being “up there”. “Prime has really pushed for it,” she says. “It is the perfect platform for me to do it.”
So, what’s next for this remarkable sports polyglot? “They want me to learn German,” Aljoe says.
Prime will exclusively show 10 Premier League matches from Boxing Day to Dec 27, with Alex Aljoe reporting at Arsenal v Ipswich.
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