“Reg! Reg, do you see it?”

“Contain!”

“Sean John.”

“Yes Uly.”

“Stay tight.”

“Move, Seba, I’m here.”

“Reshape Jordy.”

“Yes Jaylu.”

The U.S. men’s national team is doing a pressing drill. On one side, the goalkeeper plays a short pass to one of his defenders, whose team is trying to break the press by working the ball into one of three small goals set along the halfway line. Their opponents are trying to contain them, take the ball away and score.

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It’s their second-to-last day in Bradenton, Fla., two days before the team is scheduled to fly to Los Angeles to play Costa Rica and mark the end of Gregg Berhalter’s first January camp.

I’m standing off to the side of the field, scribbling down everything I can make out, trying to decipher nicknames, occasionally asking the team’s spokesperson, Michael Kammarman, for help. “Reg” is Reggie Cannon. “Sean John” is Sean Johnson. “Uly” is Ulysses Llanez. “Seba” is Sebastian Lletget. Jordan Morris is “Jordy,” and sometimes “J-Mo.”

But Jaylu? Who is that?

“Jonathan Lewis,” says Kammarman.

I cross out “Jaylu” and replace it with “J-Lew.”

Kammarman helps me with a few others. Gyasi Zardes is “G.” Walker Zimmerman is “Wal.”

Some nicknames grow out of a story or a personality trait. These are different. They’re shorthand that allow people to identify one another as efficiently as possible. Within a soccer team, they’re part of an esoteric language that players use to communicate with each other on the field. It’s an aspect of the game that is largely masked from the public and yet essential to the way teams function, or don’t.

Brendan Aaronson is sometimes “Brendan” and sometimes “B,” and in this drill he is on the pressing team, high up the field, making a nuisance of himself between the center backs. At 19, he’s one of the less experienced players in camp, but his position at the tip of the press makes him one of the most important, at least during this exercise. His job is to funnel the ball into an area of the field where his teammates positioned behind him will be able clog it up. He is facing forward, looking at a center back with the ball at his feet, but all of the movement that will dictate the angle Aaronson needs to take as he closes him down — the options he needs to block, the direction his teammates want to force the ball — is happening behind his back.

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“It’s all about the guys behind you,” he says when he steps off the field. “They gotta tell you who’s behind you. You gotta cut off passing lanes so they can’t just play right through you.”

Right now, though, he’s receiving instructions from a number of people, each of them seeing something a little bit different.

“Brendan stay!”

“Middle.”

“B, right! B, right! B, right!

“Whenever I’m getting yelled at from a bunch of sides, I’m gonna go with my gut, but I’m also gonna listen to them,” says Aaronson. “Like, if it’s a lot of things coming at once, you gotta go with your gut, and you also gotta hear, like, what’s behind you.”

Someone finds a way out and sweeps the ball over to the other side of the field. The team in possession hasn’t broken through, but they have found Cannon, their right back, in relatively open space, remaking the game board. Aaronson is no longer in a position to lead the press. A new chorus calls out as the focus of the game shifts to a different sector of the field.

“Jackson left.”

“Uly left.”

“Slide! Slide!”

Jackson Yueill and Llanez — the pressing team’s central midfielder and left winger, respectively — shift over as fast as their legs and their eyes and their ears will let them.

“Go ahead. Go ahead. I’m with you. I’m with you.”

“Time!”

“Yes, Cappis, yes.”

“If you need. If you need. If you need. If you need. If you need.”

“Drive! Drive!”

“Good idea. It’s OK, you had a good idea.”

Justen Glad has misplaced a pass, but Cannon is reassuring him. There’s a brief lull in the scrimmage now taking place, allowing the ambient sounds of the IMG Academy to come into focus: the low buzz of a lawn mower dragging itself across an adjacent patch of grass, the caws of some large black birds and the drone of a drone, high up in the sky, where a camera is recording the training session.

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It’s eerie how these noises fade to the background when a ball is whizzing around, and it makes you wonder what would happen if talking were somehow forbidden during a match. What if you had to play a soccer game in total silence?

“Oh, it would be terrible,” says Cannon. “Information is one of the biggest things about this game.”

“Oh man, a silent soccer game would be tough,” says midfielder Cristian Roldan. “Communication is essential. It’s vital. It’s probably the most important thing in soccer, and not a lot of people understand that. You may not hear it when you’re up in the stands — you can’t hear people talking to each other, saying ‘left, right, turn,’ all these types of things, and it really changes the game, because you really cannot see everything on the field.”

Players transmit two basic types of information during a game: data and encouragement. The data is largely designed to fill in the blanks that extend beyond the limits of their teammate’s visual field.

Speaking, then, first requires one to be able to see, and goalkeepers see more than any other position. From the goalkeeper’s vantage point, says Sean Johnson, “Your back’s almost never to anybody on the field, which is a unique position, and you can help organize guys, get them in the right places and give us the best opportunity to win games.”

The layers of sight extend up the field. A goalkeeper sees for his center backs — not, usually, activity that is happening behind them, thanks to the offside rule — but in possession. For instance, when “you can call out an open pass to help him make a decision,” as Johnson puts it. “Being able to see how things are shaping up as they’re going full speed, you’re able to kind of be a thought process for a player in a moment.”

Further up, defenders provide information to teammates in the line ahead of them.

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“Playing as the right winger,” says Arriola, “it’s vital for me to hear Reggie Cannon, who’s behind me, who’s the right back, for me to be able to block one lane and for him to take up the other space. He’s pretty much my eyes.”

In the friendly against Costa Rica that ended the camp, Arriola played Cannon through on an overlapping run in the box — something they had practiced in Bradenton. The play led to a penalty kick, and whether the move came down to a shout from Cannon or an awareness ingrained on the training ground, it seems clear that the familiarity of the partnership had something to do with the outcome.

But what happens when the eyes and the mouth and the ears become disconnected? There are no games without talking, but sometimes there are games without hearing, and that amounts to the same thing.

The last match Arriola can remember in which it was too noisy to hear was the 2019 Gold Cup final against Mexico, at Soldier Field in Chicago.

“Unfortunately, it was loud for Mexico,” he says, “but that’s one of them where you’re losing your voice by the end of the game, you’re screaming. I can’t even remember if we heard each other.”

The Mexican national team figures in a lot of these memories.

“Mexico City, World Cup qualifier,” says current U.S. head coach and former center back Gregg Berhalter when asked to name the loudest game he can remember. “It’s really hard, like at the end of the game, because the altitude, you end up with a sore throat.”

Estadio Azteca in Mexico City is loud. The air is thin. Maybe the wind has been sluggish, and so the smog is just sitting there, choking your windpipe. And you just hustled up the length of the field and back.

“Your communication should always be top-level,” Arriola says, “but there’s times in a game where you’re sprinting back and forth and there’s so many things going on, you can’t get a single word out of you.”

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That’s when you resort to other methods. Berhalter rattles them off.

“Gestures, thumbs-up signs, move-back signs. Eyes, sometimes — wingers to midfielders, looking where they want the ball. … It’s everything. It’s the non-verbal. It’s cues. It’s how you get your teammates to react. It’s body language. It’s all those things that are interconnected that bring good communication.”

Even when talking is tough, “I still find a way to communicate the important things in the game,” Cannon says. “A high-five is universal. A look in the eyes is universal.”

“Bring it home. Bring it home. Bring it home.”

Bill Hamid is in goal, looking to his right. He’s letting his right back know that he’s an option.

The defending team is suffocating the right back. By the time he plays the ball to Hamid, Morris, who is posted on the right wing for the defending team, has read the pass. He sprints from the opposite side of the field directly at Hamid, a good 30 yards. Hamid can’t see him — his body is turned as he waits for the pass to arrive — but every other player on his team has noticed Morris bearing down on their goalkeeper.

The chatter, normally localized to the players nearest the ball, ratchets up in intensity and volume. It’s not unlike watching a nature documentary: A member of the pack has noticed a predator and raised the alarm, which spreads into a general panic. There is no single, distinguishable voice telling Hamid what to do, but rather a swarm of noise — a warning so primal it has my own pulse skipping a bit faster. You don’t need language to know this means danger. Hamid gets the message. He kicks the ball away just as Morris clatters into his leg on the follow-through.

In this case, it’s not the words that matter but the tenor in which they’re delivered. “Tone,” says Johnson, “can display a sense of urgency, it can display a sense of calmness.”

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“Hey — time, time, time,” he says, before slightly upping the register of his deep voice. “‘Man coming’ turns into ‘man on’ turns into ‘clear.’ So things can get urgent, more urgent. It’s important to kind of control that as you go along so players either stay calm in a moment or they understand that there’s an urgent action that needs to be taken.”

There are other wrinkles to verbal and nonverbal forms of communication. Sometimes you can hear a teammate perfectly well and still be unable to understand one another.

“It’s extremely important for players for whom that’s not their first language to pick up the basic language of soccer,” says Arriola, a Californian who played early in his career for Club Tijuana, in Mexico. He’s referring to the fundamental terms: time, man-on, turn, left, right. “If you don’t understand and you have no clue what they’re saying, it’s gonna take away a little bit of your game, and your team’s game.”

Arriola and Roldan find that the right language comes naturally, even at game speed, depending on the person they’re talking to. Their fluency in two languages comes in handy with the U.S. men’s team, where Arriola says he communicates with players like Roldan, Llanez and Jesus Ferreira in Spanish: “I’m pretty comfortable, so I’m able to flow.”

Language can also be weaponized.

“If I’m looking at an opponent that I don’t think speaks Spanish,” Arriola says, “maybe I start speaking in Spanish to my teammates who speak it, so that we can be on the same page without having to get close.”

And then there are some players, especially attackers, whose speed and creativity can sometimes obviate the need to hear instructions from their teammates. Roldan plays with a few like this on his club team, the Seattle Sounders.

“Nico Lodeiro, honestly, I really don’t have to tell him to turn when he has time because he just wants to attack,” he says. “Raúl (Ruidíaz), the same thing. Sometimes I’m telling players to shoot, and Raúl’s shooting before I even say ‘shoot.’”

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Just like picking out a pass or anticipating movement, communicating well is a skill that players develop as they age. However, unlike almost every other attribute, excellent communication doesn’t necessarily show up in the performance of the person delivering it but rather in the play of their teammates. This insight is not unrelated to the fact that a number of players interviewed for this story named Michael Bradley as the best communicator they know.

Bradley was wearing the captain’s armband on the night the U.S. failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, in Trinidad. That’s a fact that he will never escape, and for some fans, it’s reason enough to keep him out of a U.S. jersey from now on. But it overlooks his value as someone who spreads information and encouragement throughout the team.

Johnson named Bradley and former U.S. captain Carlos Bocanegra as two teammates whose ability to communicate stands out.

Bradley is “by far the most vocal leader that I’ve been around,” says Roldan. “He helps you so much. He encourages you. Not just, you know, tells you ‘right, left, press, go,’ but he encourages you at the same time as he’s doing his job. He’s saying, ‘Good, good, Christian, keep going,’ and that’s just as important as good communication.”

Paul Arriola describes Bradley as “the easiest player that I’ve ever played next to.” He recalled their first game together, a four-nil win against Trinidad and Tobago in Jacksonville, Fla. “Coming from Mexico — where everything was in Spanish and, you know, I’m scrambling trying to understand — it was so easy to hear him next to me say ‘left, right, shift, hold, go go go.’”

Nobody watching that day would have noticed the way Bradley helped Arriola, a substitute, find his way into the game, but it made a lasting impression on the winger.

“That was kind of the time,” he says, “that I realized how important communication could be.”

(Photo: Michael Janosz/ISI Photos)