Quotes

I am a member of a team, and I rely on the team, I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion.
-Mia Hamm

If a team wants to intimidate you physically and you let them, they've won.
-Mia Hamm

Every time I went away I was deceiving my mum. I'd tell her I was going to school but I'd be out on the street playing football. I always had a ball on my feet.
-Ronaldo

Rugby is a beastly game played by gentlemen; soccer is a gentlemen's game played by beasts; football is a beastly game played by beasts.
-Henry Blaha

A champion is someone who does not settle for that day's practice, that day's competition, that day's performance. They are always striving to be better. They don't live in the past.
-Briana Scurry

Everyone tells me that the Italian championship is the toughest in the world, but I'm not afraid. In my career, I've always scored goals, wherever I've been.
-Ronaldo

If you are first you are first. If you are second, you are nothing.
-Bill Shankly

We lost because we didn't win.
-Ronaldo

Pele called me the greatest footballer in the world. That is the ultimate salute to my life.
-George Best

Every kid around the world who plays soccer wants to be Pele. I have a great responsibility to show them not just how to be like a soccer player, but how to be like a man.
-Pele

Whoever invented football should be worshipped as a God.
-Hugo Sanchez

I fell in love with football as I would later fall in love with women: suddenly, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain it would bring.
-Nick Hornby

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.
-Roy Keane

In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.
-Jean Paul Sartre

The goal was scored a little bit by the hand of God, another bit by the head of Maradona.
-Maradona

I think football would become an even better game if someone could invent a ball that kicks back.
-Eric Morecambe

To the aesthete it is an art form, an athletic ballet. To the spiritually inclined it is a religion.
-Paul Gardner

Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.
-Mia Hamm

The person that said winning isn't everything, never won anything.
-Mia Hamm

Football's a difficult business and aren't they prima donnas? But it's a wonderful game.
-Queen Elizabeth II

The rules of soccer are very simple, basically it is this: if it moves, kick it. If it doesn't move, kick it until it does.
-Phil Woosnam

Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I'm very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.
-Bill Shankly

It's why we play the game. Anything is possible, anything can happen, and we proved that again tonight.
-Casey Korkus

I'm here to score a lot of goals. It's my speciality, that's what I've been brought here to do, and I want to score plenty; like I did with Barcelona. And here, there's every reason to think I can do it.
-Ronaldo

Soccer is not about justice. It's a drama - and criminally wrong decisions against you are part and parcel of that.
-Pete Davies

Some people tell me that we professional players are soccer slaves. Well, if this is slavery, give me a life sentence.
-Bobby Charlton

Five days shalt thou labour, as the Bible says. The seventh day is the Lord thy God's. The sixth day is for football.
-Anthony Burgess

Italians can't win the game against you, but you can lose the game against the Italians.
-Johan Cryuff

Every single day I wake up and commit to myself to becoming a better player.
-Mia Hamm

The Vision of a Champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, and the point of exhaustion, when no one else is watching.
-Anson Dorrance

Other countries have their history. Uruguay has its football.
-Ondino Viera

Football is the opera of the people.
-Stafford Heginbotham

In Latin America the border between soccer and politics is vague. There is a long list of governments that have fallen or been overthrown after the defeat of the national team.
-Luis Suarez

Football is all very well a good game for rough girls, but not for delicate boys.
-Oscar Wilde

Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.
-Mia Hamm

To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.
-J. B. Priestley

When I go to the press conference before the game, in my mind the game has already started.
-Jose Mourinho