Classical football quotes

[TheChosenOne]

There used to be a football club over there !

K.B.

 

[King of Otters]

I just selected the "philosofical" one's

Football quotes

"Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners."
-George Orwell

“Football has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disegard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”
-George Orwell

"I spend a lots of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered."
-George Best

“He can’t kick with his left foot, he can’t head a ball, he can’t tackle and he doesn’t score many goals. Apart from that he’s all right.”
-George Best on David Beckham

“The game is about glory, doing things in style.”
-Danny Blanchflower


“It (football) is not just a simple game. It is a weapon of the revolution.”
- Ernesto “Che” Guevara


“It’s the beautiful game.”
-Pele

"Football is like a religion to me. I worship the ball, and I treat it like a god. Too many players think of a football as something to kick. They should be taught to caress it and to treat it like a precious gem."
-Pele

“Football is a game you play with your brain.”
-Johan Cruijff

“It’s all very simple: if you score one more than your opponent, you win.”
-Johan Cruijff
“Five days shalt thou labour, as the bible says, the seventh day is the Lord thy God’s. The sixth day is for football.”
- Anthony Burgess

“All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.”
-Albert Camus

“Football is my religion.”
-Jock Wallace

“Every game has its own story.”
- Sven-Göran Eriksson

“The game replaces sexual enjoyment by pleasure in movement.”
-Sigmund Freud

“Football is an art.”
-Germaine Greer

“Footballers are more likely to work better if they get a pat on their back from the boss. A knife in the back is never the answer.”
-Gary Lineker

“My idea of paradise is a straight line to goal.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche

“In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”
-Jean-Paul Sartre

“The goalkeeper is the lone eagle. The man of mystery, the last defender.”
-Vladimir Nabokov

“Soccer is one of the most unifying activities amongst us.”
-Nelson Mandela

“Life itself but a game of football.”
-Walter Scott

"I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women. Suddenly, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain it would bring."
.Nick Hornby

“Train the right way. Help each other. It’s a form of socialism without the politics.”
-Bill Shankley

"Some people think football is a matter of life and death. It is much more important than that."
Bill Shankly

"Football is a simple game made complicated by people who should know better."
-Bill Shankly

"Rugby is a game for barbarians played by gentlemen. Football is a game for gentlemen played by barbarians."
-Oscar Wilde

“Football is all right as a game for rough girls but is hardly suitable for delicate boys.”
Oscar Wilde

"Footballers can be like artists when the mind and body are working as one. It is what Miles Davis does when he plays free jazz - everything pulls together into one intense moment that is beautiful."
-Lillian Thuram

"Football is a grand game for developing a lad physically and also morally, for he learns to play with good temper and unselfishness, to play in his place, and to play the game, and these are the best of training for any game of life."
-Robert Baden Powell

"Behind every kick of the ball there has to be a thought."
-Dennis Bergkamp

"Winning isn't everything. There should be no conceit in victory and no despair in defeat."
-Matt Busby

"The fans are the heart of football."
-John Charles

"If God had meant football to be played in the air he would have put grass in the sky."
-Brian Clough

"Beyond the touchline there is nothing."
-Jacques Derrida

"It's a conflict of parallels."
-Sir Alex Ferguson

"The point about football in Britain is that it is not just a sport people take to, like cricket or tennis. It is built into the urban psyche, as much a common experience to our children as are uncles and school. It is not a phenomenon: it is an everyday matter."
-Arthur Hopcraft

"Football is a game of tomorrows."
-Geoff Hurst

"To be a footballer means being a privileged interpreter of the feelings and dreams of thousands of people."
-Cesar Luis Menotti

“Our football belongs to the working class and has the size, nobility and generosity to allow everyone to enjoy it as a spectacle.”
-Cesar Luis Menotti

"Football is a grey game played by grey people on grey days."
-Rodney Marsh

"It's not about the long ball or the short ball, it's about the right ball."
-Bob Paisley

"Football is the last sacred ritual of our time."
-Pier Paolo Pasoloni

"Amongst all unimportant subjects, football is by far the most important."
-Pope John Paul II

"To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink."
-J.B. Priestley

"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

“Professional football is no longer a game. It’s a war. And it brings out the same primitive instincts that go back thousands of years.”
-Malcolm Allison

“I blew the lot on vodka and tonic, gambling and fags. Looking back, I think I overdid it on the tonic.”
-Stan Bowles

“Somebody compared him to Billy McNeil, but I don’t remember Billy being crap.”
-Tommy Docherty on Lorenzo Amoruso

“Football is working class ballet.”
-Alf Garnett

“Football at its best is a game of beauty and intelligence.”
-Ron Greenwood

“To put it in gentleman’s terms, if you’ve been out for a night and you’re looking for a young lady and you pull one, you’ve done what you set out to do. We didn’t look our best today but we pulled. Some weeks the lady is good looking and some weeks she’s not. Our performance today would have been not the best looking bird but at least we got her in the taxi. She may not have been the best looking lady we ended up taking home but it was still very pleasant and very nice, so thanks very much and let’s have coffee.”
-Ian Holloway

“He covers every blade of grass, but that’s only because his first touch is crap.”
-Dave Jones on Carlton Palmer

“There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy; the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium.”
-Milan Kundera

“Football fanaticism and high intellect seldom go together.”
-Hugh McDiarmid


“Football is only a game. That is the most outrageous nonsense of the lot. Football is a science, it’s an art, it is war, ballet, drama, terror and joy all rolled into one.”
-Tom Utley

“There’s some people on the pitch… they think it’s all over… it is now!”
-Kenneth Wolstenholme

Some of these are great, thanks.

Here's more from Nabokov on the art of goalkeeping

“In Russia and the Latin countries, that gallant art has always been surrounded with a halo of singular glamour. Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed in the streets by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying ace as an object of thrilled adulation. His sweater, his peaked cap, his kneeguards, the gloves protruding from the hip pocket of his shorts, set him apart from the rest of the team. He is the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender.”


“Mercifully the game would swing to the opposite end of the sodden field. A weak, weary drizzle would start, hesitate, and go on again…The far, blurred sounds, a cry, a whistle, the thud of a kick, all that was perfectly unimportant and had no connexion with me. I was less the keeper of a soccer goal than the keeper of a secret. As with folded arms I lent my back against the left goalpost, I enjoyed the luxury of closing my eyes, and thus I would listen to my heart knocking and feel the blind drizzle on my face and hear, in the distance, the broken sounds of the game, and think of myself as of a fabulous exotic being in an English footballer’s disguise, composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew. Small wonder I was not very popular with my team-mates.”

 

[Japhet]

Interviewer to Gordon Strachan "Can you give us a quick word Gordon"
Gordon Strachan " OK, Velocity"

 

[Ray_Evans]

'At the end of the day, it's all about tomorrow really'

- Glenn Hoddle

 

[lenny7]

Pleat: “The Swedish only have ten minutes to do something should they want to stay in the competition”
Tyldesley: “There’s still 26 minutes left of the match”
Pleat: “Oh dear I forgot to put my watch back to Swiss time”

 

[lenny7]

Pleat: "Marseille needed to score first, and that never looked likely once Liverpool had taken the lead"

 

[nailsy]

"I'd compare him to the incomparable George Best."
David Pleat

"Giggs is enjoying himself in the centre of the threesome."
David Pleat

"Some people say he has lost some pace, but pace is all in the head at the end of the day."
Rob Lee

 

[nailsy]

Beckham...

"I've had a great week - reaching the milestone of one-o-nine and now one-o-10 tonight"

"We want Brooklyn to be christened but we don't know into what religion yet."

"Alex Ferguson is the best manager I've ever had at this level. Well, he's the only manager I've actually had at this level. But he's the best manager I've ever had."

"My parents have been there for me, ever since I was about 7."

 

[nailsy]

Gazza....

Journo: Gazza Velkom to Norvay. Do you hav a message for Norvay?
Gazza: Yes ***** off Norway

Anne Robinson: "In the equation E=MC2, devised by Einstein, what does the letter E stand for?"
Gazza: "E? Erm ... elephant?!"

 

[BehindEnemyLines]

"Isn't it your turn to shove the iPhone up your bum and let me call you?"

 

[nailsy]

"No wind....just a little breeze." David Pleat.

I've never been so certain about anything in my life. I want to be a coach. Or a manager, I'm not sure which."
Phil Neville

Reporter to Shola Ameobi: "Does Bobby Robson have any nicknames for you?"
Ameobi: "Yes, Carl Cort."

 

[nailsy]

This one is brilliant...

"I've got nothing against foreign managers, they are very nice people. Apart from Arsene Wenger." Tony Pullis