TAMPA, Fla. — The Tampa Bay Sun football club is making the soccer experience more immersive for Spanish speaking fans.

What You Need To Know

  • Tampa Bay Sun forms new partnership with Language Services Associates

  • The partnership will incorporate Spanish into their signage and ticket buying process

  • Spanish speaking fans will feel immersed into the soccer experience

The club recently partnered with Language Services Associates to help provide interpretation.

You could say the passion for soccer runs in Erich Leite’s veins.

He is a first team assistant coach with the Sun, an all-women’s soccer team. He says soccer has always been part of his life.

“It was definitely a family thing in Brazil, and you know in the whole world football and soccer are the number one sport," Leite said.

While it’s a sport that drew him close to his Brazilian culture, he says it was a bit difficult adjusting to the language when he moved to the U.S. 10 years ago.

"Culturally, it’s a little bit of a shock and it’s hard for us, so I do believe that the sport, especially football it is what brings you together," he said.

Leite says the new partnership between the Sun and Language Services Associates is a way to ease that culture shock and bring more people together.

The team’s senior director of business operations, Desiree Phelps, says it’s another way to attract Spanish-speaking fans.

“The number of times we’ve had Spanish speaking people not being able to purchase tickets because they just can’t understand what they’re doing and the ticket that they’re trying to buy, you know, they a lot of times have their children who are bilingual try to speak on behalf of them," Phelps said.

The partnership will make buying tickets easier by translating everything to Spanish, and signage at games will be in Spanish too.

For Leite, it means more people can connect with the sport.

“You can relate to the game, you know what’s going on, so you can bring that energy, you can feel part of it, and we can bring the best of both worlds,” he said.

People from different cultures are brought together by their shared love of soccer.

Language Services Associates is also using AI interpretation for non-English-speaking players on the union team that allows players to understand the English language in real time.

The technology could be brought to Tampa as well.