Quotes from Sol Campbell

The only pictures you saw of me when I was playing, I was crashing into a centre forward! Or running down a line to save my team. I'm not gonna be happy, be smiling.

My message is simple to all the knockers: I am knuckling down and want to play my football with a great club and a great manager. Then you can judge me.

My wife's family kept inviting me to shoot and I just didn't want to go, but since retiring from football I've had more time and I thought... let's get all the kit and practice.

A lack of street footballers dulls the imagination, dulls that natural thinking outside the box. You need that on the street when you're 9 and have to beat a 14-year-old on the dribble. Or if you get knocked out and have to sit on the side and come on.

Young players have to realise pretty quickly that it is not about one game, but how you perform over the whole season.

Some people need safety nets. Some people need two safety nets. I've grown up with no safety nets around me.

Yes, I was a footballer, but there's more to me than meets the eye. I've got more levels. So many levels. I'm not going away - and I'm going to keep on talking until things start changing.

I've been abroad, I've been at home. I've even flown 10 hours away for an interview, so I've done a lot of miles. I should probably be an ambassador for British Airways.

With the Tube, it just needs more investment. Maybe lengthening some of the platforms to get more carriages in, things like that. It just needs more investment put into it.

I'm a street footballer and you still get street footballers from Africa, South Africa and really poor parts of Europe.

The main thing is when you make mistakes, you try to learn from them.

Most footballers are quite tense, aren't they? So many footballers have been stitched up over the years. They've got to mind what they say, be careful about this, careful about that, because something might be misconstrued, twisted around.

Look at France and Didier Deschamps; he was just a guy who just did his job but he was captain of one of France's most successful teams. Then you've got Iker Casillas; he's not into PR or things like that, but he's one of the most successful captains of Spain.

Every case is different, but what I want to do first and foremost at Southend is to get the players up to speed.

Sometimes you get a team that has almost forgotten how to win. That's maybe fallen away from the standards that should be set at this level. Some are big problems, some of them are small problems.

If you have got diversity on your board, then you are going to have new ideas come to the table.

With Newcastle there are 50,000 people watching and they want it to be a success, and that is what I am all about.

I like building teams and I want to run my own show, in the nicest possible way, to see how far I can go, starting with getting Macclesfield further up the table.

But when you look at some of the other guys who have started with their careers in management, they all started with no experience. You have got to start somewhere.

I'm a doer and I just want to do it. Whatever attitudes, prejudices, stereotypical ideas that are in front of me, I will break them. But the only way I can break them is by getting a job, and if I need to start in the gutter, I will start in the gutter and work my way up. Money isn't an issue.

People like to put people in little boxes and if you don't fit you're odd. But they don't really know anything about me.

At the time, when I was growing up,my habits were misconstrued as laziness, not caring. But when I got out onto the pitch I actually did care about football, I just showed it in a different way.

For too long executive officials, businesspeople and hangers-on have enjoyed this private casino, using the payments into Fifa's account to fund their lavish lifestyles.

I love managing characters. Characters make teams and I believe I can deal with all sorts. The most important thing is being able to pass my knowledge on to others and allowing them to flourish as individuals and as part of a team with a specific strategy.