Soccer Or Football Quotes & Sayings

A player who dives and wins a penalty in Portugal, or Spain or Italy is considered clever, experienced, cunning, someone who understands the game. In England a player who wins a penalty like that is a cheat. — Jose Mourinho

I am delighted to have you play football. I believe in rough, manly sports. But I do not believe in them if they degenerate into the sole end of any one's existence. I don't want you to sacrifice standing well in your studies to any over-athleticism; and I need not tell you that character counts for a great deal more than either intellect or body in winning success in life. Athletic proficiency is a mighty good servant, and like so many other good servants, a mighty bad master. — Theodore Roosevelt

Saturday comes again, welcome or not, it comes again like it always does, welcome or not, wanted or not, another judgment day - The chance to be saved, the chance to be damned. — Brian Clough

But before Derby go, would they mind telling the rest of the Premier League - the league which it has debased with its pathetically-inadequate presence for the past 12 months - where the money has gone? You know, the £30m or so in prize money that every team, even the one at the bottom of the table from August to May, automatically receives by being in the Premier League ... So what happened to that money? Or put another way, why was such a meaningless fraction of it spent on recruiting new players? It's one thing not to compete; it's quite another not to even attempt to do so. — Pete Gill

I'm the same as maybe six or seven people in every ten - I can't take f***ing criticism. — Martin Jol

Becoming a footballer is only the first half of the silent prayer a kid offers up to the sky or confides to his teacher in a primary school essay. The second part is the name of the team he wants to play for. — Andrea Pirlo

If it is the case that you need just a first 11 and three or four more players, then why did Christopher Columbus sail to India to discover America? — Claudio Ranieri

Bayern's midfielder, Owen Hargreaves, who scampered around the pitch like an office boy on amphetamines for the last 25 minutes or so. — Rod Liddle

I tape over most of them with Corrie or Neighbours. Most of them are crap. They can f***ing make anyone look good. I signed Marco Boogers off a video. He was a good player but a nutter. They didn't show that on the video. — Harry Redknapp

I've got no sympathy for him whatsoever. I just wish we had got 10 past him. At the end of the day we've got to be ruthless and we are in the business of winning for us. If they had scored three or four, nobody would have said do you feel sorry for Mark Bosnich? We don't feel sorry for Craig Forrest. — Gary Neville

It's not a problem. In four or five days I will be beautiful once again. — Cristiano Ronaldo

United have spent all season commemorating the 50th anniversary of Busby's decision to defy the Football League and take the club on a tragic and triumphant journey into Europe, but no orchestrated event could conjure the celebrations ignited by last night's outstanding obliteration of Roma or deliver a more fitting tribute. — Andy Hunter

We have demonstrated that we are the best, I'm also happy because everyone seems to enjoy our football, whether or not they are Barca fans. All over the world, I've heard people saying that they have been enchanted by us. This type of football deserves to be rewarded with titles. — Lionel Messi

As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive. Family and friends know, after long years of wearying experience, that the fixture list always has the last word in any arrangement; they understand, or at least accept, that christenings or weddings or any gatherings, which in other families would take unquestioned precedence, can only be plotted after consultation. So football is regarded as a given disability that has to be worked around. If I were wheelchair-bound, nobody close to me would organise anything in a top-floor flat, so why would they plan anything for a winter Saturday afternoon. — Nick Hornby

We have not made cricket and football [soccer] professional because of any astonishing avarice or new vulgarity. We have made them professional because we would have them perfect. We have dedicated men to them as to some god of inhuman excellence. We care more for football than for the fun of playing football. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

In my school, people liked the gym teachers because they were the football or soccer coaches. But look, if they're cool, they get respect. — Danny McBride

It didn't matter whether "football" for you was soccer or the American sport played by men in helmets. — Neal Stephenson

For the record, the vuvuzela is not my enemy - and I even have, for reasons of self-defence installed a mini-vuvu with surprisingly powerful performance levels around my neck - though I miss hearing the crescendo of noise from the crowd that should accompany a promising attack on goal or a goal itself. Instead, of course, there is the monotone drone - a constant that belies the ebbs and flows of a game. — Richard Calland

I asked the players: 'Do you want to enjoy the game? Or do you want to enjoy after the game?' The players told me they wanted to enjoy after the game so I said: 'OK, then we will enjoy after the game'. — Jose Mourinho

Do you have a brother or cousin in Ivory Coast, because I don't have the money to bring you to Porto. — Jose Mourinho

There is nothing you can be doing in lacrosse on your own in the fall that would be better for you than going to football or soccer practice every day. You can go bang a ball against a wall all you want, but how do you become a better team player? By playing other team sports. — Dom Starsia

If he'd been English or Swedish, he'd have walked the England job. — Brian Clough

I think Sepp Blatter is in danger ... or has reached a point now, where he is being mocked within the game. Whether he's getting too old, I don't know. But things can happen to people in power. Look at some of the despots in Africa ... From a position of great power, he has uttered so many ridiculous statements that he is in danger of seriously damaging his credibility. — Alex Ferguson

There's no in between-you're either good or bad. We were in between. — Gary Lineker

Look at my haircut. I am ready for the war. The objective is to win the Premiershp. I don't want to dominate, to finish without defeat, record points or goals or consecutive wins. The Premiership is so difficult you cannot be focused on that. I just think about winning. — Jose Mourinho

Back in the 1930s, when men with handlebar moustaches played football in long johns and tails, and the ball was a spherical clod of bitumen, did fans weep in the stands when their team lost? No. They limited their responses to a muttered 'blast' or a muted 'hurrah' before going home to smoke a pipe and lean on the mantelpiece. — Charlie Brooker

Manchester United have risen to the pinnacle of the English game at a time when the rewards are so high - thanks to the ticket to the Champions League - that they have resources that only a handful of other sides, through merit or the exploitation of the people of Russia, can approach. — Phil Cornwell

[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey. — Terry Eagleton

In England everything is liberalised. Within certain boundaries and rules everybody can do what he likes. Maybe London's society has a different tempo, a different dynamic. London is fast, productive, creative but it is not England. If you want to transfer that to football, you could say: in the four big English clubs and maybe in the one or two behind them there is a top level. Everything that comes after that rather mirrors English society. It's honest, fair and hard, sometimes also fast, but not always so perfect. — Jens Lehmann

Soccer isn't the same as Bach or Buddhism. But it is often more deeply felt than religion, and just as much a part of the community's fabric, a repository of traditions. — Franklin Foer

I loathed the game, and since I could see no pleasure or usefulness in it, it was very difficult for me to show courage at it. Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about, but is a species of fighting. — George Orwell

I think that in any argument about right or wrong in football, a reference to Don Revie's Leeds United is the nuclear option. There is, quite simply, nowhere to go after that. There has never been a more horrible football team. The Leeds of the Seventies were found guilty, week in, week out, of crimes against humanity. — Giles Smith

Football is based on desperation. All clubs are desperate in one form or another - desperate to succeed, desperate to survive, desperate to stay where they are, desperate that things get no worse, desperate to arrest the slide. — Simon Barnes

I am happy to be a role model for anybody - whether they are black, white, yellow, pink or purple. — Paul Ince

If a player is not interfering with play or seeking to gain an advantage, then he should be. — Bill Shankly

I don't believe skill was, or ever will be, the result of coaches. It is a result of a love affair between the child and the ball. — Roy Keane

I actually don't feel the years passing, although the younger players make sure to remind me of my age. If there's a clip of Bobby Charlton playing or a game's in black and white they'll ask: Were you playing in that Giggsy? — Ryan Giggs

Let's be honest. We're not Manchester United or Arsenal, are we? — Paolo Di Canio

He's not fit, either physically or biomechanically. — Aidy Boothroyd

If Ashley Cole is ready we have 15 players for the final. I'll have to choose between Hilario, who's not bad playing forward or I'll bring in one of the kids. — Jose Mourinho

Scots they're either nice or they're horrid and these two are horrid. The Scots wont like that Eamon, thats bordering on racism. Its not racism its ethnic criticism Bill. — Eamon Dunphy

I can remember certain Manchester United defeats the way most people remember family bereavements or great political events. The four-nil drubbing by Barcelona, the failure to score against West Ham, the New Year's Day calamity at home to Spurs, the mauling by Middlesborough. — Tom Dunne

Soccer's appeal lay in its opposition to the other popular sports. For children of the sixties, there was something abhorrent about enrolling kids in American football, a game where violence wasn't just incidental but inherent. They didn't want to teach the acceptability of violence, let alone subject their precious children to the risk of physical maiming. Baseball, where each batter must stand center stage four or five times a game, entailed too many stressful, potentially ego-deflating encounters. Basketball, before Larry Bird's prime, still had the taint of the ghetto.
But soccer represented something very different. It was a tabula rasa, a sport onto which a generation of parents could project their values. Quickly, soccer came to represent the fundamental tenets of yuppie parenting, the spirit of Sesame Street and Dr. Benjamin Spock. — Franklin Foer

I think if you've managed Celtic or Rangers you can go on to be Prime Minister of Great Britain, it's that hard. — Gordon Strachan

Though the legs of a football coach are never so active on the field of play during playing time, his mind is the best or worse player on the pitch! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Even before 2007, this half of a small island was the richest football country on earth. In 2005-2006 the Premiership's total revenue was about £1.4bn, 40 per cent more than its nearest rival, Italy's Serie A. That was before take-off. Now foreign television channels are sending so much cash that the Premiership is expected to take in nearly £1.8bn this season. Even the team that finishes bottom of the table (Wigan might be a good bet) will get £26.8m from TV. That's more than all of Argentine or Belgian football put together. — Simon Kuper

Nearly everything possible had been done to spoil the game: the heavy financial interest; the absurd transfer and player-selling system; the lack of any birth or residential qualifications; the absurd publicity given to every feature of it by the press; the monstrous partisanships of the crowds. — J.B. Priestley

Really, I want to get this individualistic-thing down. I want to walk across the football field alone without looking like the last one picked to play soccer. I never was a cheerleader, I was a slut on my own with the thinking that if a tree has a good time and no one's around to hear it, it's not a slut. But sometimes you do need another tree around to double-dare you, or else you might end up doing nothing but watching TV when no one's around. — Erika Lopez

Nice to meet you," Blake said and seemed almost genuine about it. "You play?" "Play what?" Mark asked. Blake looked slightly offended. "Football, dude!" Right. As though he couldn't have possibly been referring to anything else. Although, going on his size alone, it made sense. "Do you mean soccer, or rugby, or league, or AFL, or that other shit?" Mark asked. — Lisa Henry