A Commentator's Nightmare: The World Cup Player Names That Trip Up German Tongues

• Twenty-Eight uses AI to analyze which player names pose the biggest phonetic hurdles for German fans and reporters

• Uzbekistan and Iran top the ranking of teams with the hardest-to-pronounce names

• A. Jahanbakhsh, João Félix and Hadziahmetovic are the biggest tongue-twisters for Germans

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is in full swing. While teams on the pitch battle for goals, points and a spot in the knockout round, commentators, fans and sports desks face a discipline all their own: pronouncing the players' names correctly. For some names, there is a wide gap between "just reading it off the page" and "articulating it cleanly on live TV." To find out which names hold the most pitfalls, the PR agency Twenty-Eight had the official shirt names of all World Cup participants ranked by an AI analysis.

Uzbekistan has the most complicated names on team average

With an average score of 61.3 points and 1,595 total points, Uzbekistan is the most linguistically demanding team. Names like Shomurodov with 84 points or Xamrobekov with 83 points can be especially unfamiliar to native German speakers because of Central Asian transliterations and longer strings of syllables. Iran's squad follows close behind in second place with an average of 60.8 points, followed by Algeria with just under 60 points in third. Rounding out the top five teams with the hardest names are Bosnia and Herzegovina (59.5 points) and Jordan (55.7 points).

At the other extreme, and hardly a surprise, the German national team turns out to be a true "phonetician's dream." With a team average of just 19.1 points and 497 total points, the DFB squad finishes last in the ranking and is the easiest for domestic commentators to articulate without error. The highest score within the German team goes to Ouédraogo with 76 points. Within the squad, his name is considered by far the hardest to pronounce. The names of the US players are also especially easy to pronounce, with an average of 24.2 points. Only then come the neighbors from Austria with an average of 24.6 points.

A. Jahanbakhsh and João Félix top the tongue-twister ranking

Looking at individual players, pronunciation is hardest for footballers from Iran and Portugal. With 96 out of a possible 100 points each, Iran's A. Jahanbakhsh and Portugal's João Félix share the top score in the ranking. For Jahanbakhsh, it is mainly the guttural and aspirated sounds and the Persian transliteration with gh-, kh-, sh- and zh-type sequences that make the stress hard to get right, while for João Félix it is the non-German sibilants and the typically Portuguese nasal "ão." Just behind in third place is Hadziahmetovic from Bosnia and Herzegovina with 95 points. Similarly challenging are the names of Portugal's F. Conceição (93 points) as well as Iran's Mehdi Ghayedi and Tunisia's Chikhaoui (92 points each).

At the other end of the scale, and therefore easiest to pronounce, are German internationals such as Tah, Raum, Neuer or Groß, along with the shirt names of players from Austria, Canada and England, for example Wimmer (15 points), Sigur (16 points) or Toney (17 points).

Lukas von Zittwitz, founder and managing director of Twenty-Eight, comments on the results:

"Anyone who has ever tried to read a player's name out loud live, fast and without rehearsal knows that football is sometimes a sport for the tongue, too. Of course, how a name is pronounced doesn't decide a match. But it does affect how present a player is in the coverage and how easily fans form a connection with him.

In international football especially, names become brands. If they are constantly mispronounced, shortened or avoided out of uncertainty, a piece of visibility is lost. And the fix would often be fairly simple: audio guides, phonetic notes in press kits or short pronunciation aids for newsrooms can go a long way. In the end, what matters isn't linguistic perfection but respect, recognizability and a little less stumbling at the microphone."

About the study

To find out which names of the players in this year's official 2026 World Cup squads are hardest for Germans to pronounce, ChatGPT was asked to rate pronunciation difficulty on a scale from 0 to 100 based on phonetic criteria. The rating is based on the players' official shirt names. In addition to the ranking of all player names, an evaluation by team was then compiled by calculating both the total points and the average score per team (study date: June 18, 2026). 

The prompt used was as follows:

"You are a language expert and phonetician. Your task is to rate the pronunciation difficulty (NOT spelling difficulty) of the names of the 2026 World Cup players for a German-speaking audience from 0 (very easy) to 100 (very hard). Analyze all 26 players of the official 2026 World Cup squads for the following teams: [list of all World Cup groups]

Criteria for the ranking: 

- Phonetic unfamiliarity for Germans (e.g. Czech "ř", click sounds, guttural sounds). 

- Grapheme-phoneme discrepancy (spelling differs strongly from German pronunciation). 

- Length and unusual stress. 

Output format: Create a Markdown table with the columns: Group | Country | Player name | Score (0-100) | Phonetic reasoning. Sort the table by score in descending order."