Quotes & Sayings About Soccer Vs Football

You have to put all the criticism of this club down to jealousy. United have produced more players who have played for their country, more world-class players and more players who have won European Footballer of the Year than any other team in this country, so we must be doing something right. — Alex Ferguson

Substitution is a true test of strength. The real performance of a player is seen not only during playing time but also and more especially when the player is substituted. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The rules of soccer are very simple, basically it is this: if it moves, kick it. If it doesn't move, kick it until it does. — Phil Abraham

Some people think football [soccer] is a matter of life and death. I don't like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that. — Bill Shankly

People say I'm hard, I'm Mr Angry. I'm this, I'm that. I just want to win matches. There's no point going out there and being Mr Nice Guy. We get 55,000 at Old Trafford and I don't think they want fellas going out there and thinking: Ah, if we lose, so what? — Roy Keane

I think we have our sports within our own culture that are huge with baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Those are the sports in America that we grow up with and soccer isn't really there yet. — Claudio Reyna

Laddie, that man scored 200 goals in 270 matches - an incredible record - and he has won cup after cup as a manager. When he talks, pin back your ears. — Bill Shankly

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

Teddy has lost that yard of pace he never had. — Tony Cascarino

Rugby is a different game. There is an interruption every two minutes also in American football. Our soccer is a moving game: play, play, play, move, move - you don't interrupt. — Franz Beckenbauer

If you love Senegal so much, why don't you play for them? — Roy Keane

The one great thing about football is that whatever happens it will manifest itself on the pitch. If it's right, you'll see it on the pitch, if it's wrong, it will be on the pitch. In business you can get fellas who are doing crooked deals and nobody knows anything about it. There is an ultimate honesty about football. Politics is part of the lying game, I wouldn't trust any of them. In football you can hide for a while, but ultimately the truth comes out. I always loved that. — Johnny Giles

How on earth Traore gets into this team is beyond me. And he's a Champions League winner? Gimme a break. They've Riise sitting on the bench who's a different class to this fella. — Johnny Giles

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

It's a great start, but we have a tough group: we have big teams like Denmark, Armenia and Serbia, so starting here gives us a good opportunity to fight until the end. — Lorik Cana

Drogba is a fighter. He is the kind of player I would say 'With you I could go to every war.' — 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

I didn't win prom king. By that point, I'd quit sports except for soccer, so I was really just a theater guy. I totally lost to the captain of the football team. — Patrick Wilson

Do you know who I am? Why, have you forgotten? — Rio Ferdinand

[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

Professionally, it would be a logical choice, but my personal view is that he is the most insincere man I know in football — Tony Cascarino

Four wins in four matches. It could not be better ... the world is fantastic. — Jose Mourinho

If I were going to war I would want to be alongside an Englishman not a Frenchman. The Frenchman would think too much. — Arsene Wenger

Like many a Yank before me, I have tried to explain to European friends that Americans actually know soccer quite well, that many of us played it in school and college, but that, well, we just don't find it quite as exciting as, say, what we call football. — Serge Schmemann

I can see the carrot at the end of the tunnel. — Stuart Pearce

I have never seen anything like that before. He must have given his last three managers heart attacks. I like to see those sort of things - as long as they come from the other goalkeeper. — Terry Venables

All good athletes make mistakes; the great ones learn to make that mistake only once. — Raul Lopez

Greece won the 2004 European Championship with the oldest trick in the book: man-for-man marking. Why? Because nobody expected it - and by the time they knew what Otto Rehhagel's team were about, it was too late. Great football is like great comedy in that way. It is all in the timing. — Martin Samuel

While American football is very structured and linear and static - where everyone lines up, and there's a burst, and it happens - soccer is like the cosmos. It's like constellations. It's bodies moving in space. It's a very spherical game. — Gabriel Luna

The final true artform in what we're talking about is the goal itself. And for us to try and stop that from happening, we're kind of the anti-art. — Kasey Keller