Shearer, Sutton and Dalglish. Morten Gamst Pedersen, Damien Duff and Roque Santa Cruz. All names who made Blackburn Rovers a global name through the Premier League.

Dr William Huddleston, who grew up in Lancashire supporting his local club, developed an interest in languages which has been sustained by football’s near-universal appeal.

Assistant Professor of Spanish and a Bye-Fellow at Gonville & Caius College for the 2025-26 academic year, Will read French and Spanish at University College London. His year abroad – divided between Lyon, France and Santiago, Chile – saw his academic and sporting passions converge.

“If you find yourself in a different country, one of the first things that you can talk to people about is football,” he says. “It's just a super easy tool of communication. It's such an easy way in.”

Will quickly realised the stereotype to be true: football was entwined in the culture of Latin America. His research journey is about finding out why, and he explains his interest in his teaching 

He adds: “One thing I always try and stress to students who want to work on football is that you almost want to ignore to an extent what's going on the pitch. That's not the relevant part of it.

“It's the conversations that people are having around what's happening on the pitch. It's how football is being used as a cultural and social object.”

His Master’s in Latin American Studies at Corpus Christi, University of Cambridge explored fandom in Argentinian football, and his PhD investigated the history of Uruguayan football.

“My aim was to maybe complexify and nuance the way that people think about football,” he says. “That sounds very grandiose, but I was just trying to understand a little bit more for myself some phrases used quite a lot: ‘football's key to national identity’, for example.

“I do think that's true, but I think it's worth reflecting a little bit on the processes by which that happens.”

Will explores his work through newspapers and oral histories. A new project explores football during the dictatorships in Uruguay and Chile in the 1970s and 1980s, where open expression was suppressed. 

Uruguay were the hosts of the first men’s World Cup in 1930 and have a long tradition, but their national sporting competitions have been depleted by the economic lure of Brazil and Argentina, not to mention Europe and specifically the Premier League in England. 

The football focus becomes the national team, but if success proves elusive – and Uruguay were twice the world’s best, winning the inaugural World Cup and lifting the trophy again 20 years later – then how is the national mood?

“Football's really essential to national identity construction, and it's very easy for people to understand sporting decline as national decline in various contexts,” adds Will, who says it is far more complex.

Will teaches for the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics as well as Caius. His teaching is varied. Just in one week his teaching features: translation classes; a lecture on Garrincha, related to films about the Brazilian footballer in the 1960s; supervisions on novels and films from Argentina between the 1920s and 1960s; a class on the history of political populism and urban expansion in Latin America.

“This is all through the kind of aegis of modern and medieval languages,” he says.

The 2026 men’s World Cup is hosted between the United States, Canada and Mexico, with the focus on US President Donald Trump and his policies. Ordinarily the tournament is a global spectacle, but with border restrictions and economic costs, there is doubt over the summer showpiece. Will is considering exploring the cultural issues for Latin American nations around the tournament. It really will be a study of football away from the pitch.

“Football’s place is universal, but at the same time it's constantly changing and shifting,” he adds.