Quotes About Football

Football, if I can say, is an everlasting new beginning. You always question yourself, but you have to be ready not just mentally but physically as well. You have to be fit and take care of your body.

Football is always going to be a means to an end. The physicality of the game - your body can't hold up. There's life after football, and I do worry. I don't want to put myself in jeopardy. I probably need to be more cautious, but this is me. It still isn't going to change the way I play.

As a young lad it's been your dream to play football and you get injuries and you've got to respond well to them and work really hard, because it's your dream to be on the pitch.

For me, it's always fun. You're playing football and living out your dream.

As I and the rest of my Pittsburgh Steelers teammates prepared that week in late December 1974, we knew one thing: The road to the Super Bowl in the AFC went through Oakland. To achieve your dreams as a team, you had to slay the Oakland Raiders. They were the barometer of what it took to be a championship team.

This is a message to all footballers and others around the world that you should believe in your dreams and fight to make them come true.

I learned how to take other people's mechanisms of promoting their stuff through me as opposed to promoting my own stuff, as far as getting Snoop DeVilles, SnoopDeGrills, Snoop Doggy Dogg biscuits, Snoop Dogg record label, Snoop Dogg bubble gum, Snoop Youth Football League.

I played for Middlesbrough's youth team. At the age of 16, I went into a shed at the training ground and was told that they weren't signing me on, so that was the end of that dream. Football was my life. I played football when I got to school, football every break and football as soon as I got home.

When I was playing in the Ajax youth teams - when I was, say, 14, 15 - you started to get all those international youth tournaments. All those English teams came. Well, the English were much further than we were.

Football's about the young players, bringing youth team players through to the first team and hopefully getting the best out of them so they can go on to play for their country.

I played youth football through the fifth grade and really enjoyed it, but Tampa Prep doesn't have a football program. Wrestling was the only hard physical contact sport there, so I tried it.

But we had a fantastic coach, Simon Clifford, who runs a British football youth game which teaches Brazilian techniques - which is what we wanted to incorporate into the film. And some of those things we eventually got in.

Football was a wonderful experience for me. It was a means of, oh, I don't know, sustaining for much of my youth. In times of trouble, I've always had football. I always knew I was a football player. And that was a comfort on many occasions.

I was born in Dortmund and grew up here, so you become automatically a black and yellow. I played here for many years in the youth ranks, but at first I did not have the chance to become a professional football player at BVB and to realize my dream.

To be honest, I started playing for Belgium in the youth team stages. As a kid, Belgium was all I knew. We played football with my schoolmates as well as at the academy.

I spent most of my youth in Manchester, in clubs and football grounds and the Manchester Apollo.

Manchester City didn't pay all that money for me because they saw me once on YouTube. They saw me scoring good goals. And I haven't forgotten how to score goals.

For me posting videos on YouTube and interacting with people on Twitter is a great release from the stresses of football.

My dad got sent off for punching Roberto Mancini in the face. It was in the European Cup-Winners' Cup quarter-final in 1991, and if you look on YouTube, you will have confirmation. It's a very clear punch. He just went straight through him. I can't wait to play against Mancini now. Maybe he will remember.

I watched Pablo Zabaleta countless times on YouTube and clips, because I think his timing of runs into the box is fantastic.

Ronaldinho was a big influence on me, watching him on YouTube, he used to do things that other people didn't really used to do.

I snuck an hour to watch Bielsa on YouTube, I love that guy. I watched a video of him talking about tactics and formations against Brazil and I absolutely loved it.

Fans of football and fans of nationhood have a similar zeal. Read the fanzines: their contributors could find a needle-sized diss in a haystack of compliments, and their passions are fundamentalist.

We've conflated football games with patriotic zeal. I don't think attending a football game is any more patriotic than walking down the street to my local library. It's just another activity we all enjoy.