World Soccer Quotes & Sayings

The adidas +Challenge is a really cool opportunity for kids here in Los Angeles and across the country to get excited for the FIFA World Cup this summer. As a big fan of soccer, Im looking forward to seeing the 32 youth teams compete for the title of Team USA and represent our country at the global finals in Berlin. — Luke Wilson

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

All that proves is that most of the world is too poor to build bowling alleys, golf courses, tennis courts and baseball fields. There's hundreds of millions of poor people out there who still ain't got indoor plumbing, but that don't mean there's something great about an outhouse. Soccer is boring. I've never seen a more boring sport. — Mike Royko

He delighted Murs in history with his focused study on the spread of personal electronics through the first world; he aggravated Adler in administration with his focused study on the disparity between Aglionby's publicity budget versus their scholarship budget. He screamed himself hoarse at the sidelines of Koh's soccer match (they lost). He spray-painted the words PEACE, BITCHES on the Dumpster behind a gelato parlor. — Maggie Stiefvater

When they looked in the mirror, the American and Chinese women had begun to see each other's reflection. To reach the World Cup final, the Americans had become tightly connected by the ligaments of teamwork, while the Chinese had realized the necessary freedom of individual expression. — Jere Longman

The fiesta of soccer, a feast for the legs that play and the eyes that watch, is much more than a big business run by overlords from Switzerland. The most popular sport in the world wants to serve the people who embrace it. — Eduardo Galeano

When I got injured, I think I was starting to sense that there was more to the world than just sports. This dream of playing professional soccer probably wasn't the best track for me. — Eric Swalwell

One day the UN Secretary General proposes that, in the interest of global peace and harmony, the world's soccer players should come together and form one United Nations global soccer team.

"Great idea," says his deputy. "Er, but who would we play?"

"Israel, of course. — Mark Steyn

I'm a little skeptical of foreign coaches in our league and in U.S. Soccer just because of how different our league is and our players are than other players around the world. — Landon Donovan

A message to the best football supporters in the world. We need a 12th man here. Where are you? Where are you? Let's be having you. Come on! — Delia Smith

I nodded, mollified. "Okay, I can roll with that. And then after that, I suppose it's just a matter of time until we're taking the kids to soccer practice."
Her eyebrows rose. "Kids?"
"Relax, it's years away. But can you imagine? Your brains, my charm, our collective good looks . . . then add in the usual physical abilities dhampirs get." She looked more amused than appalled at the speculation, which was something I'd never thought I'd see. "It's really not even fair to everyone else. Good thing you're on birth control, since the world obviously isn't ready for our perfect offspring." "Obviously," she laughed. — Richelle Mead

The only subject fewer authentic Americans cared about than the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo was World Cup Soccer. America is an epic global battle with ruthless savages who seek our destruction, and liberals are feeling sorry for the terrorists. — Ann Coulter

Contrary to popular belief, I don't spend a whole lot of time following soccer. But as I have traveled around the world to better understand global development and health, I've learned that soccer is truly universal. No matter where I go, that's what kids are playing. That's what people are talking about. — Bill Gates

There's more chance of me flying Concorde to the moon blindfolded than there is of you taking Wales to the World Cup. — Robbie Savage

It seems that soccer tournaments create those relationships: people gathered together in pubs and living rooms, a whole country suddenly caring about the same event. A World Cup is the sort of common project that otherwise barely exists in modern societies. — Simon Kuper

Quite frankly, I can't get enough of soccer. I tell my jingoistic friends in the United States there's a reason why it is the world's No. 1 sport. The rest of the planet can't be wrong. — Billy Beane

The world in books seemed so much more alive to me than anything outside. I could see things I'd never seen before. Books and music were my best friends. I had a couple of good friends at school, but never met anyone I could really speak my heart to. We'd just make small talk, play soccer together. When something bothered me, I didn't talk with anyone about it. I thought it over all by myself, came to a conclusion, and took action alone. Not that I really felt lonely. I thought that's just the way things are. Human beings, in the final analysis, have to survive on their own. — Haruki Murakami

The growth of women's soccer and women's sports all around the world has been slow. — Abby Wambach

The rest of the world loves soccer. Surely we must be missing something. Uh, isn't that what the Russians told us about communism? There's a good reason why you don't care about soccer - it's because you are an American and hating soccer is more American than mom's apple pie, driving a pick-up and spending Saturday afternoon channel-surfing with the remote control. — Tom Weir

Ibiza is a popular vacation place for a lot of the players in Spain. If you go in the summer, there are some of the world's most famous movie and music stars, so nobody cares about soccer players. — Xavi

He's got great credentials by winning the World Cup but he did it with Brazil - my granny could probably have managed Brazil to World Cup success. — Gary Lineker

I've never met anybody who says they don't like the World Cup. If you're a soccer fan or not, everybody loves watching it, and I think it could be the same for other sports. — Landon Donovan

My father was a basketball player, so I loved basketball because he did. It was a direct transference. But, more than that, basketball, in the United States at least, plays the same function that soccer does everyone else in the world. It's the sport of poverty. It's the sport born of poverty. It's the cheapest sport. — Sherman Alexie

England can end the millenium as it started - as the greatest football nation in the world. — Kevin Keegan

I'm sure sex wouldn't be so rewarding as this World Cup. It's not that sex isn't good but the World Cup is every four years and sex is not. — Ronaldo

It is a certainty that Keegan would not have agreed to return unless Mike Ashley had committed to sanctioning a mammoth spending spree. The downside, which Keegan will soon discover, is the law of diminishing returns in a league that is now the richest in the world. The type of multi-million-pound investment that bankrolled the first Newcastle revival under Keegan is now two-a-penny. Buying success just isn't as easy as it used to be. The Premiership's paradox is that the more money there is, the more the art of management gains in value. — Pete Gill

An astonishing void: official history ignores soccer. Contemporary history texts fail to mention it, even in passing, in countries where soccer has been and continues to be a primordial symbol of collective identity. I play therefore I am: a style of play is a way of being that reveals the unique profile of each community and affirms its right to be different. Tell me how you play and I'll tell you who you are. For many years soccer has been played in different styles, unique expressions of the personality of each people, and the preservation of that diversity seems to me more necessary today than ever before. These are days of obligatory uniformity, in soccer and everything else. Never has the world been so unequal in the opportunities it offers and so equalizing in the habits it imposes: in this end of century world, whoever does not die of hunger dies of boredom. — Eduardo Galeano

So, you wanna know what I want? I want it all. I want to be in love so much it hurts. The frissons. The pin pricks. The mind-blowing sex. The connection. And I want to be married with kids I adore and a husband who makes me feel safe, sexy, smart, secure, silly, serious, salacious, sinful, serene, satisfied. I want someone who makes me laugh until milk comes out of my nose (only I don't drink milk). I want to finish someone's sentences. I want to believe in someone, in something, in a future that's not just about laundry and soccer practice and subdivisions and minivans and guilt-tripping grandparents. I want to make someone a better person. I want to be a good example. I want to love some kids into the world. I want someone who stimulates my brain as much as my body. I want to taste everything and go everywhere. I want to give and I want to get. I want too much and I want it all in one person. — Bill Shapiro

In July 2011, U.S. Soccer announced that they'd fired Bob Bradley and hired Jurgen Klinsmann as head coach. Jurgen had once been a world-class German striker; now he was regarded as a successful, if controversial, coach. — Tim Howard

Tasks are the real-world activities people think of when planning, conducting, or recalling their day. That can mean things like brushing their teeth, preparing breakfast, reading a newspaper, taking a child to school, responding to e-mail messages, making a sales call, attending a lecture or a business meeting, having lunch with a colleague from work, helping a child with homework, coaching a soccer team, and watching a TV program. Some tasks are mundane, some complex. — Mike Long

I was gay before I began to play soccer over 40 years ago. It's been 28 years since a friend and I organized one of the first gay soccer teams in the world. — Rabih Alameddine

You know I don't think there will ever be a time when the English player is not respected, and feared, across the world of football. The English footballer is very brave and strong and committed and there is always enough high-class players in his team to cause concern in any opponent. It is a national characteristic. — Johan Cruijff

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

And the world around me was nothing if not an infinity of distractions: cute girls, novels and comic books, my budding record collection, neighborhood boys whistling from the playground under my window, beckoning me to a soccer game. — Aleksandar Hemon

Nightmare completed, another humiliating defeat. 10 goals in 2 game.
It will take time to come out from such humiliating defeat for Brazilian fans. But I think when you like something, when you fall to someone, when you are in love, you like them whatever happens, even they give tears to you time to time because you liked it from your heart. — Nutan Bajracharya

Many people say I'm the best women's soccer player in the world. I don't think so. And because of that, someday I just might be. — Mia Hamm

Every kid around the world who plays soccer wants to be Pele. I have a great responsibility to show them not just how to be like a soccer player, but how to be like a man. — Pele

If this can be termed the century of the common man, then soccer, of all sports, is surely his game ... In a world haunted by the hydrogen and napalm bomb, the football field is a place where sanity and hope are still left unmolested. — Stanley Rous

For me soccer provides so many emotions, a different feeling every day. I've had the good fortune to take part in major competitions like the Olympics, and winning the World Cup was also unforgettable. We lost in the Olympics and won in the World Cup, and I'll never forget either feeling. — Ronaldinho

Critics of soccer contend that the game inherently culminates in death and destruction. They argue that the game gives life to tribal identities which should be disappearing in a world where a European Union and globalization are happily shredding such ancient sentiments. Another similar widely spread thesis that holds that the root cause of violence can be found in the pace of the game itself. Because goals come so irregularly, fans spend far too much time sublimating their emotions, anticipating but never releasing. When those emotions swell and become uncontainable, the fans erupt into dark, Dionysian fits of ecstatic violence. — Franklin Foer

Officials from the soccer organization FIFA, which decides which cities get to host the World Cup, are accused of accepting bribes when making their decision. Of course the toughest part for the soccer officials was taking bribes without using their hands. — Jimmy Fallon

The philosophy of FIFA is to expand world soccer space, to spread out the world football space. — Vladimir Putin

Facebook revealed that Ebola was the most popular Facebook topic in the U.S. this year, with the World Cup coming in sixth. So welcome to America, where even Ebola is more popular than soccer. — Jimmy Fallon

You don't play triathlon. You play soccer; it's fun. You play baseball. Triathlon is work that you can leave you crumpled in a heap, puking on the roadside. It's the physical brutality of climbing Mount Everest without the great view from the top of the world. What kind of person keeps coming back for more of that? — Chris McCormack

When I thought I was retired, I wanted to travel around the world and watch soccer games. — Drew Carey

After all these years, I'm finally into soccer. The World Cup is on, and my band is an international group - they're all around me, cheering in the hotel bars. — Art Garfunkel

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

I don't get what's happening to Jose Mourinho of late. He's lapsing into the kind of Portuguese moroseness you get from staring at the Atlantic horizon and imagining you're the last place in the world, while listening to endless renditions of the fado. His latest line about 'everyone hates us and we don't care' sounds like vintage Joe Kinnear in the great days of the Wimbledon Crazy Gang. — Peter Chapman

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

In the world of my imagination, Esther was still my companion, and her love gave me the strength to go forward and explore all my frontiers.
In the real world, she was pure obsession, sapping my energy, taking up all the available space, and obliging me to make an enormous effort just to continue with my life.
How was it possible that, even after two years, I had still not managed to forget her? I could not bear having to think about it anymore, analyzing all the possibilities, and trying
various ways out: deciding simply to accept the situation, writing a book, practicing yoga, doing some charity work, seeing friends, seducing women, going out to supper, to the cinema (always avoiding adaptations of books, of course, and seeking out films that had been specially written for the screen), to the theater, the ballet, to soccer games. The Zahir always won, though; it was always there, making me think, I wish she was here with me. — Paulo Coelho

Pele called me the greatest footballer in the world. That is the ultimate salute to my life. — George Best

I think it's insane, absolutely insane for a person to have one of the highest and most important jobs in the entire world to be saying that he has to be at his children's soccer practice. — Charles Payne

Soccer must play a socio-cultural role. We reach 1.6 billion people, thanks to the positive emotions that soccer triggers, FIFA is more influential than any country on Earth and any religion. We move masses. We want to use that to create more peace, justice and health in the world. — Pope Francis

God is not calling us to win the world and, in the process, lose our families. But I have known those who so enshrined family life and were so protective of "quality time" that the children never saw in their parents the kind of consuming love that made their parent's faith attractive to them. Some have lost their children, note because they weren't at their soccer games or didn't take family vacations, but because they never transmitted a loyalty to Jesus that went deep enough to interrupt personal preferences. — David Shibley

I never thought I'd play soccer past high school, so to go from that team to actually being most-capped and three World Cups is pretty special. — Cobi Jones

You look at boxing being an international, world-famous sport, right up there next with soccer, and there's only two fighters the people want to see fight. Two little fellows, Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather. — Emanuel Steward

I will be the one lifting that trophy, not Paolo Maldini. Imagine me hoisting the trophy. It is an image I have in my mind and I want to make it a reality. We have world-class players and, believe me, they are in the mood to do it. The atmosphere around the club at the moment is just top-class. — Steven Gerrard

Red Bull is committed to providing not only quality domestic soccer, but also quality international soccer. You can't get much better than Barcelona. Our entire organization is excited about the opportunity to play one of the premier teams in the world. — Alexi Lalas

He lived in a fantasy world. There was not a day when he didn't add some Mickey Mouse story about a club that wanted him. First of all, he came in and told me that Arsenal wanted to buy him, then the next week it was Manchester Utd, then the next week it was Real Madrid. He made it clear that he did not want to be at the club so, in the end, there was only one thing I could do - send him to Wigan. — Joe Kinnear

When I was playing, they said soccer was a man's world and women should remain on the sidelines, all I can say is I'm glad I never had to go up against Mia Hamm — Pele

The World Cup experience is more than just the game of soccer. It's an event. And it will fly by faster than you think. It will end and you'll be saying, 'Wow, it's over already?' You have to remember to take it all in and enjoy it. — Cobi Jones

I played college soccer before I was hurt, and just to be able to jump back into something that you could be so competitive at or you can achieve, to get to the Paralympics, that's the first really big achievement that you can have. It's the second biggest sporting event in the world. To be a part of it and to get a medal for that, it's unreal. — Mark Zupan

The viewing figures we saw earlier in this book suggest that sport is the most important communal activity in many people's lives. Nearly a third of Americans watch the Super Bowl. However, European soccer is even more popular. In the Netherlands, possibly the European country that follows its national team most eagerly, three-quarters of the population watch Holland's biggest soccer games. In many European countries, World Cups may now be the greatest shared events of any kind. To cap it all, World Cups mostly take place in June, the peak month for suicides in the Northern Hemisphere. How many Exleys have been saved from jumping off apartment buildings by international soccer tournaments, the world's biggest sporting events? — Simon Kuper

Whatever exists is inevitably flawed. Buddha, in his detachment from the world, finds all its hustle and bustle ridiculous because he has nothing to do with it. A cynic finds the feelings of his fellow human beings ridiculous because he has no feelings himself. Someone who does not play soccer thinks it ridiculous to chase around after a little leather ball for hours at a time. He doesn't bother to ask whether this game might be a lot of fun. All he sees is the ridiculousness of grown men playing like little boys. People who do anything will no doubt appear ridiculous to people who do nothing. A person who acts can always make a fool of himself. A person who doesn't never runs that risk. We might even say that life is always ridiculous but death is never ridiculous. — Fritz Zorn

Whichever country you are, if you lose games you are criticised. It's only when it's England it's like a new world war. — Sven-Goran Eriksson

That which interests most people leaves me without any interest at all. This includes a list of things such as: social dancing, riding roller coasters, going to zoos, picnics, movies, planetariums, watching tv, baseball games; going to funerals, weddings, parties, basketball games, auto races, poetry readings, museums, rallies, demonstrations, protests, children's plays, adult plays ... I am not interested in beaches, swimming, skiing, Christmas, New Year's, the 4th of July, rock music, world history, space exploration, pet dogs, soccer, cathedrals and great works of Art. How can a man who is interested in almost nothing write about anything? Well, I do. I write and I write about what's left over: a stray dog walking down the street, a wife murdering her husband, the thoughts and feelings of a rapist as he bites into a hamburger sandwich; life in the factory, life in the streets and rooms of the poor and mutilated and the insane, crap like that, I write a lot of crap like that — Charles Bukowski

I think I'm being conservative when I say there are more people playing soccer in the United States than in 90% of the world's other countries, probably 95%. — Rabih Alameddine

The first World Cup I remember was in the 1950 when I was 9 or 10 years old. My father was a soccer player, and there was a big party, and when Brazil lost to Uruguay, I saw my father crying. — Pele

This is a game between players from 12 national sides, a game that if you have a friend in China, in Brazil, in Qatar ... in half the world he wants to watch. I was thinking of this game when I signed for Chelsea. — Luiz Felipe Scolari

When people say 'American soccer,' they think of the U.S. national team. But American soccer also includes Major League Soccer, and until we have a league that produces players at the rate other leagues around the world do, I don't believe we'll ever get to where we want to be. — Landon Donovan

Those of us who believe in princesses are often laughed at. But I believe the world needs princesses and dukes and queens and kings. We need people who glitter and shine and make a room silent with their entrance. We need them the same way we need ice cream and soccer and music and stories. Oh, how we need stories. — Beverly Bartlett

It's a lot tougher to play soccer and make it look believable. But in boxing, it was easier for me. I got injured a lot more in the soccer world. In soccer, I pulled muscles. I thought boxing was going to be tougher. — Kuno Becker

I had to add Oguchi into the list. After all, he's a soccer player - fittest athletes ever. At 6'4 210 pounds, he's one of the most feared men in the world's game.
I've played against a lot of massive defenders. And no one has Oguchi's strength. His shoulders and chest are so big that people confuse him with an NFL player. He can move anyone in the game with one arm, including the best strikers in the world. Guys absolutely fear him. — Charlie Davies

An artist in my eyes, is someone who can lighten up a dark room. I have never and will never find difference between the pass from Pele to Carlos Alberto in the final of the World Cup in 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud, who stretches cords from steeple to steeple and garlands from window to window. There is in each of these human manifestations an expression of beauty which touches us and gives us a feeling of eternity. — Eric Cantona

We won the European Championship last September and now the world title. That is some year for French beach soccer! Now comes the hard part. We have to keep improving and that's difficult because it's tough to do better than winning a world title. — Eric Cantona

If you don't have that science and technology and brains as an input, as you don't have in large parts of Latin America, if you don't focus your education on that, if you don't find your 10,000 best scientists, but you do find your 10,000 best soccer players, the consequences are, you become a World Cup Champion in Soccer, like Brazil, but you don't become Korea, which earned 1/5 of what a Mexican did in 1975 and today earns five times more. — Juan Enriquez

(The paradox of Italian soccer). As everyone knows, Italian men are the most foppish representatives of their sex on the planet. They smear on substantial quantities of hair care products and expend considerable mental energies color-coordinating socks with belts. Because of their dandyism, the world has Vespa, Prada, and Renzo Piano. With such theological devotion to aesthetic pleasure, it is truly perplexing that their national style of soccer should be so devoid of this quality. — Franklin Foer

You know me, I'm not that kind of person that cares to unveil all of my personal things to the world because frankly, in terms of my soccer, it doesn't matter. — Abby Wambach

There's a long history of resistance movements igniting in the soccer stadium. In the Red Star Revolution, Draza, Krle, and the other Belgrade soccer hooligans helped topple Slobodan Milosevic. Celebrations for Romania's 1990 WOrld Cup qualification carried over into the Bucharest squares, culminating in a firing squad that trained its rifles on the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. The movement that toppled the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner had the same sportive ground zero. — Franklin Foer

We'll call ourselves Victorious Secret and our motto will be 'We Live to Spank You.' Duuude. Yes! I'm basically the smartest person in the world. Ever. You in? Of course you're in. Practice begins tomorrow. — Gena Showalter

In 1972, my idol Gordon Banks was seriously injured in a car accident and lost an eye. He was still England goalkeeper and the world's Number One. I was absolutely gutted for Banksie. His career was over prematurely. He did make a comeback in America for a time, but he said he felt like people were coming to watch a bit of a circus act: 'Roll up, roll up! The world's only one-eyed goalkeeper.' And so he retired from football for good. When he lost his eye, I wanted to give him one of mine, that's how much I thought of him. — Stephen Richards

Vladimir Putin bribed a soccer official with a Picasso painting so he would support Russia's bid to host the 2018 World Cup. Putin was like, 'It wasn't Picasso, just picture of what his face would look like if he said no.' (Nose over here, eye up here, ear in forehead.) — Jimmy Fallon

You know the marathon in my country is just exceptional. It's like soccer in England. If England win the world cup and Ethiopia win the marathon - it's the same. — Haile Gebrselassie

Soccer is my first love. I've been playing since I was 4 years old. I traveled the world doing it. I broke my leg when I was 16 or 17, and acting kind of filled the void. — Kyle Schmid

The Democrats say we ought to give Barack Obama credit for trying. That sounds like the nonsense of giving every kid a trophy for showing up. Friends, we're talking about leading the country, not playing on a third-grade soccer team! I realize this is the man who got a Nobel Peace Prize for what he would potentially do, but in the real world, you get the prize for producing something, not just promising it. — Mike Huckabee

And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball. — Eduardo Galeano

You've got to believe you're going to win, and I believe we'll win the World Cup until the final whistle blows and we're knocked out. — Peter Shilton

Soccer is a great game, and the rich variety of styles and passions that come with being truly global makes the World Cup a nonpareil event in the universe of competitive sport. — Serge Schmemann

Also, she had been secretary to the soccer coach, an office pretty much without laurels in our own time, but apparently the post for a young girl to hold in Jersey City during the First World War. — Philip Roth

Getting a chance to practice six months against my own teammates, who I consider the best soccer players in the world, there's no way I couldn't improve. — Lorrie Fair

I've written about superheroes. I've written about talking ferrets and math geniuses being chased by madmen. I've written about spies and demon-hunting soccer moms. I've created an entire world that centers around a paranormal judicial system. — Julie Kenner

Reading all the quotes in the world won't make you or me into Plato, Gandhi Or Einstein, just like watching hundreds games of soccer won't make you a soccer player or taking a yoga class will make u a yogini, or reading a golf book will make you a golfer. We need to put the Knowledge to practice and that is the challenge. Put it to work for you, make the effort to Follow Through — Pablo

I feel I have grown up. I am a man. It's important in my football too. When everything is good, I don't think you grow up fantastically, I think maybe you need a few problems to grow up. It is good if people in England have started to admire me. I think I have changed a little since the World Cup. I am stronger with my mentality and with my game as well. — Cristiano Ronaldo