Eric Cantona
Eric Cantona
Éric Daniel Pierre Cantonais a French actor and former international footballer for the French national team. He played for Auxerre, Martigues, Marseille, Bordeaux, Montpellier, Nîmes and Leeds United before ending his career at Manchester United where he won four Premier League titles in five years and two League and FA Cup Doubles...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionSoccer Player
Date of Birth24 May 1966
CityMarseille, France
CountryFrance
I am very mistrustful of people who are constantly over intellectualising things. It kills passion. You have to allow yourself to lose control from time to time.
I don't play against a particular team. I play against the idea of losing
Actually, I wanted to act even when I was still playing football.
I don't play against any team in particular. I play to fight against defeat.
Messi, he's exceptional. When you watch him, you feel there's a child inside him and he is making some childhood dream come true. He's a Great Player, not only for today but also tomorrow.
I manage a team, for beach soccer. I'm the coach. Player, coach.
In football you have an adversary; in cinema that adversary is yourself.
If you have only one passion in life - football - and you pursue it to the exclusion of everything else, it becomes very dangerous. When you stop doing this activity it is as though you are dying. The death of that activity is a death in itself.
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.
We knew that you don't get to be world champions without a struggle.
Whatever happens, there are always things you could have done better. You score two goals and you usually feel you could have done better. You score two goals and you usually feel you could have scored a third. That's perfectionism. That's what makes you progress in life.
Sometimes you surprise the goalkeeper and sometimes the goalkeeper surprises you. In my career, I tried to do more of the first than the second.
Ferguson, as a manager, and Ken, as a director, are very similar. One's a great manager, the other a great director, but both have a lot of humanity and a lot of humility. They always give you the energy... with Ferguson when we played a game it was like it was his first game - he's so passionate and gives you ambition every time. And Ken works the same way - they're very similar.
I would love him to save me a place in his team, George Best that is, not God.