Quotes About Football

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.

There are two types of football - there's physical football and football talent.

All my life my priority was football, football, football. I was just fully focused on that and when my kids were born that focus changed gradually. I had something in my life that changed my perspective. You experience something that is more important than win, lose or draw.

Some people have this impression of me: 'Boy, he's always so serious on the field. Football. Football. Football.

Behind every footballing tough guy there lurks a mincing aesthete with a love of art for art's sake, football for football's sake. A win without art is somehow less than a victory; less, almost, than a beautiful defeat. In football, the romantic and the pragmatist are ever at war in the same breast. Beauty, it must be understood here, is not Barcelona's aim but their method. And last night they were ready to use this method at every opportunity - quick-fire passing of wit and purpose in the danger areas, seeking always to produce an unlooked-for player in a position of threat.

When I was a child I had a dream to become a football player. I always played as I played when I was a child. I tried to improve. I never dreamt of becoming a professional football player, I dreamed just to play with the best players in the best team. I never dreamed to be paid to play. I would have paid to play an FA Cup Final in front of 80,000 people in Wembley. I just tried to play the wonderful game that football is. So, I hope young players will still have this dream.

I wish you guys would just say, 'Michael Sam, how's the football going? How's training going?' But it is what it is. And I just wish you guys would see me as Michael Sam the football player instead of Michael Sam the gay football player.

I'm a football guy at heart; maybe I should have played football for a living instead, because I play a lot of football videogames, I'm really into them.

Football can stand parity better than any of the other sports, I think. Baseball, basketball and hockey need a defining team, in essence to frame the season. Football? Not so much.

Shevchenko is the best attacker in Europe. He has a great deal of consistency and he just keeps scoring - which in Italian football is very difficult. He is a complete player, someone who can do everything on a football field.

When I was a kid growing up, my dad being a football coach, he asked the same question of all the assistants that he ever hired: 'Is your goal to be a head football coach?

It brought Pittsburgh into the picture of football teams in the National Football League that, ‘OK, you have to deal with us now.’

I knew I had to be in football, but I didn't know what that looked like. I made a pact with myself that I would stand up for that challenge. I had no idea how big that would be. There were no jobs for women in football, and my work was elsewhere, but I kept with my passion, and thankfully, it ended up opening up doors.

I didn't even grow up with football. I learned the rules of football on this show [The League].

If two hitherto rival football teams, under the influence of brotherly love, decided to co-operate in placing the football first beyond one goal and then beyond the other, no one's happiness would be increased

Especially in this business of football you got to get on your knees multiple times a day, just thanking God. I pray while I'm on the field because He has to be with me. One injury away from being done from playing football for the rest of my life or just that fast it can happen. So I just always got to pray for that covering. Make sure He's with me out there making plays with me. God wants to be involved in everything that you do. And I just try to involve Him. And that's what God said to do, to help build up His kingdom.

I'm a very private person, and you have a lot of people looking into your personal life, away from football. That's the one thing that I don't like, but I always remember how lucky we are that we're playing football.

We (San Francisco) have football weather during baseball season, and baseball weather during football season.

Nelson Mandela is my hero outside of football. I was fortunate enough to meet him a couple of times. He was really clued up on his football and he knew me, so that was just unbelievable. It really stuck with me.

Baseball and football are very different games. In a way, both of them are easy. Football is easy if you're crazy as hell. Baseball is easy if you've got patience. They'd both be easier for me if I were a little more crazy - and a little more patient.

It's not like I had to throw the football and deal with that as well. It was more disheartening, to be honest with you, just to kind of see how the National Football League really is.

Arsene Wenger's idea is not only to play good football. It's to play good football to win. In my day, we knew that with our style we could hurt teams and win trophies too. But we did it our way, with the positional game, passing, movement.

I'm not claiming that football is the nation's salvation in this area, but it's one of them, one little thing that apparently has captured the imagination of a large sector of our society. But when football can't be a relatively pure outlet, a fun thing, then it hurts itself.

They say football is America's greatest game, but it's not. The greatest game in America is called opportunity. Football is merely a great expression of it.

Whether we meditate individually or collectively, there is one thing we absolutely must do: we have to meditate consciously. Making an unconscious effort is like forcing oneself to play football in spite of one's utmost unwillingness. One plays, but gets no joy. Conscious effort is like playing football most willingly. One gets real joy. Similarly, conscious meditation gives us inner Delight from the soul.

I wanted to be a football player. Football is a sport that I love, but the more I started playing basketball, the more I started dreaming of playing in the NBA.

The biggest regret of my whole football career was leaving White Hart Lane in 1970.....my interest in football weakened after that. I was heartbroken

I think it is important for all those young out there - who someday hope to play real football, where you throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands - [that] a distinction should be made that football is democratic capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist sport.

Football is an honest game. It's true to life. It's a game about sharing. Football is a team game. So is life.

When I grew up in Flatbush, 'we played football, stickball and baseball all the time, right out there on the city streets. Football was my favorite.

I love football and it's the sport I would really like to play. I've said on national television here that I would really love to play for one of our football clubs when I finished my tennis career.

One thing I can say about the Dallas Cowboys: They have always had talent around them. They have been one of the most talented football teams in all of football.

I have a great family. I can call them and they don't want to talk just football They want to find out how my day went outside of football.

Even a hundred and fifty years ago, football was popular because it provided a manly spectacle that lots of men needed, after the industrial revolution. We went from a culture that lived out doors and expanded the frontier and fought the Indians to a bunch of guys in offices. So football provided this jolt, a kind of exalted cult of masculinity. And it still does that. Perhaps even more so today.

I am very athletic, actually, and I'm good at most sports. But I was never a successful athlete, because I have a lot of trouble with authority. To be a good athlete, you have to have sort of a military attitude. You have to enjoy being coached, and that was not something I ever liked. But more than that, I don't like practice, and coaches hate anybody that doesn't like practice. If you saw me throwing a football, you'd say, "Wow, he knows how to throw a football." But put me on a field, I'm not gonna stand out.

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.

I do not feel that I have a mandate from the entire world of football - the fans, the players, the clubs, the people who live, breathe and love football.

Earning my college degree. It was a promise I made to my parents. I understand that football is only a certain time in my life, and my degree will help me sustain my life well past football. I was so proud of that, and the amount of work I put into it.

Obama said, basically, "I wouldn't let any son of mine play football, though I do watch." And that struck me as remarkable! It's like he's saying, yeah, let some other set of parents or guardians put their boys up for that kind of punishment (and for my amusement). But not mine! It's just abject hypocrisy from a guy who should know better.

Once Celtic got their equaliser, they played a sort of anti-football.

Few would deny that blacks have become very dominant in athletics: football, basketball, track, now dominant in tennis and dominant in golf.

I’m concerned that if one of those two areas doesn’t play up to par – if they give up some points or they can’t run the football – and it gets stuck on Russell Wilson’s shoulders…if he has to stay in the pocket against good defenses, read coverages, make the right plays, see the field, that’s where I worry.

I find American football quite ridiculous generally. I don't understand it. It looks like a lot of guys dressed up as spacemen shouting at each other.

Football boots are very technical and have lots of specific requirements.

Life though, is full of compensations and I have been well blessed throughout my 'Life Journey' with good friends met and made along the way. Life is a kind of swings and roundabouts situation; if you can't kick a football you turn to other pursuits.

It is difficult to single out one sport over another, but if I have to name one in my separation suit, it will undoubtedly be football.

There's never been completion in my football career because I've always been striving for that next thing.

More than anything I want to be fit so I don't get out of breath when I play football with the kids.