Famous Quotes & Sayings

Matthew Engel

It is customary for columnists to complain about the excesses of Premiership footballers, whenever - as happens regularly - there is an incident involving some combination of sex, drugs, drink, violence and the constabulary. But modern footballers have a lot of both money and disposable time, a combination that has proved a recipe for personal disaster throughout history. And these incidents take place generally round night clubs rather than football clubs. The average Premiership player who turned up for work drunk would have a career-expectancy measurable in minutes.

Matthew Engel

Is this good for English football? In the short run, Chelsea's rise has broken up what was turning into an irritating Arsenal-Manchester United duopoly. But football leagues (look at Scotland, look at Spain) can get along OK with duopolies. A monopoly, however, is a disaster. Everyone else in the Premiership has to operate on some kind of business footing, and the terror stalking Highbury and Old Trafford is that Chelsea will be immune from financial discipline forever.

Matthew Engel

There are those who condemn five in midfield as a negative tactic, but when a side's centre-backs are as hapless as Chris Perry and Hermann Hreidarsson were on Sunday, it is not nearly negative enough.

Pat McAfee

Soccer just couldn't satisfy my thirst for watching violence up close.

Pat McAfee

I was a pretty good soccer player, but it just wasn't for me. I thrive in the intensified atmosphere on a football field.

I don't know how I kept sane - maybe I'm not sane

Kevin Williams

The linesman flagged initially because he thought I was an Oldham player. Fair enough, I did have a replica shirt on - but I also have a big furry head.

Eric Idle

I love being an older comic now. It's like being an old soccer or an old baseball player. You're in the Hall of Fame and it's nice, but you're no longer that person in the limelight on the spot doing that thing.

You can see there's a lot of soccer in that player, so we're hopeful.

Jo Nesbo

At nineteen I was pretty sure I was going to be a professional soccer player. At that time I played for one of the Norwegian premier leagues. But I tore ligaments in both knees, so I started studying business administration and economics and became a financial analyst, and I worked at a brokerage firm as a stockbroker.

Jo Nesbo

I don't think I'll ever feel as famous or as popular as I felt when I was a 17-year-old soccer player in Modle. Only about 20,000 people live there and 12,000 of them come to every game. Running onto the pitch each week was just the most fantastic feeling. Nothing can beat that.

James Surowiecki

Now, modern economies have a very effective mechanism for deciding if salaries are really too high: it's called the free market. That's how most people's salaries are set, after all, including those of major-league baseball players and European soccer players.

Simon Sinek

Any parent who tells their kids that they can't attend a school play or go to a soccer match because they have to work is kidding themselves. It's OK to miss a game or two or a performance here and there, but it's not all right to miss the majority of them.

Simon Kuper

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

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

Chelsea's players, coaches and agents are now football's wealthiest millionaires. Surely the billions taken from the Russian people by an oligarch in questionable privatisations couldn't be better spent?

Simon Kuper

Whereas fanatic is usually a pejorative word, a Fan is someone who has roots somewhere.

Tim Howard

I wanted to be a soccer player; I wanted to do it at the highest level.

Rio Ferdinand

Do you know who I am? Why, have you forgotten?

Rio Ferdinand

Our lives are quite boring. I spend a lot of time watching Coronation Street and Eastenders.

Tiffeny Milbrett

Soccer's not a game that you can restrict players, especially creative players and players who have proven themselves at that level.

Tiffeny Milbrett

The game of soccer has been able to give me what I wanted out of life. I just remember being a total Tomboy and athlete as a girl, but never having a lack of opportunity.

Tiffeny Milbrett

Everybody has down times and stuff that they have to work through. I worked through that stuff because I've always wanted to be playing soccer.

Lily Rabe

The focus of our family life was homework and what was for dinner; getting to ballet rehearsal and getting my brother to soccer.

Laura Benanti

Of course I wanted an agent from the time I was like 5, but my mother was like, 'No, you're going to be normal, you're going to go to school, you're going to get good grades, you're going to play soccer, and if you do well, if you keep your grades up, you can do one community-theater show a year'.

Thierry Henry

I can't stay in the box and wait for the ball. I can't - I would die.

Thierry Henry

Sometimes in football you have to score goals.

Terry Venables

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 Butcher

The beauty of Cup football is that Jack always has a chance of beating Goliath.

Terry Butcher

I said to them last week that I'd like them to win ugly and they certainly won ugly today. That was the ugliest thing I've seen since the ugly sisters fell out of the ugly tree.

Terry Eagleton

[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.

Shiri Appleby

I had a really normal childhood except I acted. It was like, my brother played soccer, and I was on television sometimes.

Marcelo Balboa

I was always taught as a kid if you do something, do it right. If not, go do something else. For me, soccer was life.