748 Quotes About Soccer

Players taught to watch the man with the ball leaves them totally unprepared for the next move, which is always dictated by a player without the ball.

If that lad makes a First Division footballer, then I'm Mao Tse Tung.

Coaching soccer, like disciplines including journalism, you'll always learn if you're open to it, you'll learn from your players. If that's being smart, fair enough.

A combination of acting, lying, begging, and cheating.

I wanted to be a soccer player. And then I wanted to be a rabbi.

Music and soccer. They would be my two major passions.

If you don't have that science and technology and brains as an input, as you don't have in large parts of Latin America, if you don't focus your education on that, if you don't find your 10,000 best scientists, but you do find your 10,000 best soccer players, the consequences are, you become a World Cup Champion in Soccer, like Brazil, but you don't become Korea, which earned 1/5 of what a Mexican did in 1975 and today earns five times more.

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.

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.