Football Quotations

I never learn anything talking. I only learn things when I ask questions.

If it doesn't matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?

Don't give up at half time. Concentrate on winning the second half.

One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.

For me, winning isn't something that happens suddenly on the field when the whistle blows and the crowds roar. Winning is something that builds physically and mentally every day that you train and every night that you dream.

The reason women don't play football is because 11 of them would never wear the same outfit in public.

What I do is play soccer, which is what I like.

If you are first you are first. If you are second, you are nothing.

Football has very direct and strong connections to New Orleans. The game of football has served as a positive beacon in our city. It has given our citizens hope in tough, trying times.

The saddest day of my life was the day I didn't get to play football anymore.

I was meant to date the captain of the football team, I was going to be on a romantic excursion every Saturday night, I was destined to be collecting corsages from every boy in town before prom, accepting such floral offerings like competing sacrifices to a Delphic goddess.

If you never concede a goal, you're going to win more games than you lose.

I just had a normal African childhood; we played football a lot, but it was always in the street and always without shoes. Boots were very expensive, and when there are seven in your family, and you say you want to buy a pair, your father wants to kill you.

You know, I never really paid attention to sports, which, coming from the mecca of football in Texas, is kind of odd. I played sports, but I was nerdy. Having a single mother, the pressure was on me to get good grades and a scholarship and go to college.

But quite honestly I can't help being a passionate football supporter. If that's my sin, I'm guilty

Halfway through the decade, we realized that we had a great team and that we could do great things, and that we could probably have something here that we believed we had a chance to reach greatness.

I think if you want to become a great football player, professional, you must give all the time one hundred percent, you must work hard - to be lucky is a good thing - but if you work hard and you give everything you will have great success.

Growing up in a group home, and with an undiagnosed learning disability to boot, the odds of success were not on my side. But when I joined the high school football team, I learned the value of discipline, focus, persistence, and teamwork - all skills that have proven vital to my career as a C.E.O. and social entrepreneur.

One of my beliefs is that there are certain institutions within a community which stand for the spirit and heart of that community, there's the church, the local football team, the local pub and the theatre.

One accusation you can't throw at me is that I've always done my best.

The truth is the Super Bowl long ago became more than just a football game. It's part of our culture like turkey at Thanksgiving and lights at Christmas, and like those holidays beyond their meaning, a factor in our economy.

I don't miss playing football, but I do miss going into the dressing room every day and having a laugh.

One of my most vivid memories of the mid-1950s is of crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes - there were no washing machines - while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier.

I developed a mechanism so that whatever mistakes I made, I would bounce straight back. Whatever was happening off the pitch, I could put it to one side and maintain my form. Call it mental resilience or a strong mind, but that is what we mean when we talk about experience in a football team.

Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.

My NFL pension can barely pay my son's tuition. You know, it's very little money.

I went to school with a guy named Truxton. He and I played football together, and he knocked me out once because he's bigger and strong than I am.

The mistake is to imagine that perfection is possible when the very idea is unthinkable.

The chairmen of the largest companies in the world can cancel an appointment or move a board meeting; a manager cannot change the date of a game. In the combined 42 years that Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger have managed in English football, I can only remember one occasion when Sir Alex did not attend a Manchester United game.

I certainly didn't think of myself as gifted. The standards for being gifted in my environment were if you were good in Little League or if you were good in football.

More and more these days what I find myself doing in my stories is making a representation of goodness and a representation of evil and then having those two run at each other full-speed, like a couple of PeeWee football players, to see what happens. Who stays standing? Whose helmet goes flying off?

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important.

Looking back I find it hard to believe that I could forge a career in anything other than football but I didn't do too badly in my final exams and there were a few business-related courses that interested me.

If you truly believe something, and it's incorrect, that doesn't mean you don't have integrity.

Cause there's only one reason for doing anything that you set out to do. if you don't want to be the best, then there's no reason going out and trying to accomplish anything.

Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.

When you win, say nothing. When you lose, say less.

If other people think I’m okay looking, that’s great, but I don’t see it myself. When I look in the mirror all I see is a bunch of fake teeth and football scars.

Before the first year, nobody gave it a chance. Now, 36 years later, everybody knows Monday Night Football.

Football is controlled violence, but it is violence, which people have loved to watch since the gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome.

Racism and discrimination of any kind have no place in football.

As a kid, there are some things you looked forward to. You looked forward to Charlie Brown during Halloween and you looked forward to Monday Night Football.

I was OK in school, but I always missed a lot because I was playing so much. But if I'd stuck at it, I imagine that I'd be doing something financial or economical. Finance always attracted me, even though maths was always a bit of a love-hate relationship. I would have tried playing football, but I don't think I'd have made it.

I was not a very good football player when I started out.

People are interested in pro football because it provides them with an emotional oasis; they don't want football to get involved in the same types of court cases, racial problems and legislative issues they encounter in the rest of American life.

We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.

I'm comfortable with my femininity, and I don't try to change what I look like just because I'm reporting on football at the end of the night.

I mean no disrespect to Scottish football, but the Premier League is the biggest stage and highest profile league of all.

I may be dumb, but I'm not stupid.

To me, football is so much about mental toughness, it's digging deep, it's doing whatever you need to do to help a team win and that comes in a lot of shapes and forms.

If you spend a whole afternoon just eating popcorn and watching football, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But if that's all you do, you get swept along with the tide, without any idea of where you're going.

Lombardi, a certain magic still lingers in the very name. It speaks of duels in the snow and November mud He remains for many the heart of pro football, pumping hard right now.

My thing is, and I've always been this way - to get to know as many people as I possibly can on a personal level, so that way, when you get on the football field, you've got your buddy right beside you, and you're ready to go.

I was meant to be a composer and will be I'm sure. Don't ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football - please.

And when I go around and talk to schools, what I tell the kids are, first of all, you have to accept each other's differences. Some of you are going to be a crappy football player, some of you are going to be a great mathematician. Whatever it is, accept each other's differences and help prop each other up.

My job is to protect the integrity of the NFL and to make sure the game is as safe as possible.

Quite honestly I never had a desire to be an actor. I tell people, I did not choose acting; acting chose me. I never grew up wanting to be an actor. I wanted to play football. In about 9th grade an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school so I did on a whim. I got accepted.

I am disappointed and disturbed by both the NFL and the Dodgers - but much more by the Dodgers.

I like to read the papers. I make my living from football, and I like to know what's going on.

Athletic competition clearly defines the unique power of our attitude.

I don't want to be the center of attention, which is ironic. I hate having all eyes on me - unless it's for my job, and my job is playing football. I'm not that attention-hungry.

Baseball is what we were, and football is what we have become

Football is a simple game based on the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass. It is terribly simple.

I think my stubbornness, hardheadedness and stupidity is what has allowed me to play for 20 years.

I went to Dartmouth College, graduated, and had the opportunity to play two professional sports - I played for the New England Patriots in the NFL and professional lacrosse for the Boston Blazers. I had an injury, so I had to stop so I could heal. But when I was playing football, I wasn't making a lot of money; I wasn't a superstar.

I'll put you through hell, but at the end of it all we'll be champions.

When you spend a lot of money on one player, you want him to prove himself, but the way football works, one day you can be good, the next you can be bad, and the next after that, you can be very bad. I have come to Manchester City to work very hard and to help my friends make Manchester City great.

Money is not everything. My ambition was football itself, not the money I'd make from it. If that brings me and my family a more comfortable lifestyle, then that's fine. But I don't spend my time between games and training sessions thinking about figures.

You can do more, you can always do more.

There's two times of year for me: Football season, and waiting for football season.

One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organizations do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always.

I think Jim Taylor was very underrated, never hear much about him. We played Green Bay every year in exhibition, and generally we played them every couple of years in regular season. And I always thought he was a fierce competitor.

I want to play for Arsenal. When you see football all around the world, you see very few teams who play the way that we play. I just enjoy it. I feel it is my home now.

I come from West London. I support a football team there called Queens Park Rangers, whom I'd like to give a shout-out to. I'm a die-hard Rangers fan. I think that I would always hopefully have a strong connection to and live in London, because it's a brilliant city.

The first ninety minutes of a football match are the most important.

In the last year my wife has noticed me struggling to get downstairs on a Sunday morning. I've two young children and football has been so good to me over the years I don't want to spoil it.

I learned that if you want to make it bad enough, no matter how bad it is, you can make it.

I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.

Football is a team sport and not an individual sport. We win as a team, and every individual is better if we are part of the team.

If you play football, theres going to be a 100 percent injury rate. Something is going to be bothering you. So I just try to focus on the things that I can do to help my team.

If you worried about falling off the bike, you'd never get on.

As a professional football player, I have known perfectly well from the day I started playing that every day I have to fight for my place.

I think the thing about that was I was always willing to work; I was not the fastest or biggest player but I was determined to be the best football player I could be on the football field and I think I was able to accomplish that through hard work.

I've always written. At the age of six or seven, I would get sheets of A4 paper and fold them in half, cut the edges to make a little eight-page booklet, break it up into squares and put in little stick men with little speech bubbles, and I'd have a spy story, a space story and a football story.

I couldn't settle in Italy-it was like living in a foreign country.

My dad was a football player - a soccer player - for Manchester United, and I loved playing football, but I also happened to be the guy in class who was pretty good at sight reading. My teacher gave me scripts, and I was very comfortable.

As a kid, you obviously dream of being a professional footballer. I would watch players like Ronaldo of Brazil and pretend to be him in the playground. But I don't think about trying to become one of the best in the world or anything like that. I just play football.

I was just different. When the other kids gravitated to football or basketball, I went fishing and skating. I was into trapping animals, pheasants and squirrels. Not only was I trapper, I was a taxidermist.

I do enjoy playing some sports, even though none of them are organized. I enjoy football most of all.

I think any football is a guy that is able to one, be able to be humble and hungry off the field, but at the same time on the football field understand what they have to get done and be a little bit ferocious.

I think that when people join clubs as simple as a sorority or a fraternity, a football team, a baseball team, it's just - you want to be in a group. You want to be around people, you want to be with people.

You know that a given in life in human nature, is that at a sporting event, a baseball game, a football game, you never introduce a politician, is because he'll be booed. I don't care if he's the most beloved person in the world, its part of the game.

Coming from bad results, you have more tension and you get more into the game, maybe. You never know which is best. I prefer to come from good results. You have more confidence and you believe you are doing things well. But in football everything can change very quickly.

I remember the '70s constantly being winter in Manchester and the Irish community in Manchester closing ranks because of the IRA bombings in Birmingham and Manchester, and you know the bin-workers' strike, all wrapped up in it... They were violent times. Violence at home and violence at football matches.

I never dreamed about being an actor, because that was out of reach. Coming from a small town that was big in farming, and also big in clothing factories, you don't dream about being a professional football player or an actor.

I love Halloween, trick or treating and decorating the house. And I love Thanksgiving, because of the football and the fall weather. And of course, I love Christmas - that's my favorite of all!

When I was in college there was a girls' flag football league. The girls were extremely aggressive.

I still love football, though, and I think cooking is like football. It's not a job, it's a passion. When you become good at it, it's a dream job and financially you need never to worry. Ever.

Deeper fulfilment is rather different from the happiness of seeing a good film or watching your team win at football, and it doesn't come at the push of a button.

It's all about putting the best team together - not just in the front office but the players on the field.