Quotes About Football

Football combines two of the worst features of American life," wrote conservative baseball scholar George Will. "It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from everything, all the time, always.

If you can't empathize with Charlie Brown, you likely lack an ability to empathize with any fictional character. Here is a child continually humiliated for desiring nothing more than normalcy - the opportunity to kick a football, the aptitude to fly a kite, the freedom to walk down the sidewalk without having a random acquaintance compare his skull to a block of lumber.

Después de haber estado en el club de la lucha, ver partidos de fútbol americano por televisión es como ver películas porno cuando podrías estar follando a lo grande.

Jim Thorpe is someone I've always loved. He was an Olympic athlete, you know, and a football player from back in the day. I'd love to play him. And then there's a guy called Iceman who was a top hit man for the mob. I would love to play him. Actually, it's sort of in the works, so I hope it goes through.

A heaping tablespoon of ground-up zeolite had the surface area of a football field.

Pushing money was a natural for me, because I was already pushing football lottery tickets in the White Tower hamburger joints on my route for an Irish muscle guy and ex-boxer named Joey McGreal, who was a Teamster organizer out of my Local 107.

I was just saying to your colleague, the referee has got me the sack, thank him ever so much for that, won't you?

I think professional sports, football, to use it as an example, it's fundamentally a form of entertainment.

Los jugadores necesitan saber que no deben tener miedo a intentar cosas, ni a perder el balón, porque en eso consiste el fútbol. Messi sabe que siempre puede hacer jugadas porque sabe que tiene a diez compañeros detrás de él dispuestos a ayudarlo si es necesario. Cuando tanto el defensa como el delantero se sienten importantes y protegidos, tenemos a un equipo ganador.

Under Cruyff, dominating the ball became the first and most important rule. 'If you have the ball, the opposition doesn't have it and can't attack you,' Cruyff would repeat daily. So the job became finding the players who could keep possession and also doing a lot of positional work in training.

Pep had analysed Real Madrid in detail and, an hour and a half before the game, he got Messi, Xavi and Iniesta together: 'You three against Lass and Gago have got the game. If you do it right, three against two, we've beaten them.' Lass and Gago were going to find a third man to defend, Messi would position himself as a false striker in between the centre backs and those two.

Jerome Boateng spoke pre-season after the World Cup in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and described how Guardiola told him in every training session exactly what he had to do in different defensive situations.

With Pep's help and his own intuition, Messi started playing football with an accordion-like movement: the further the ball was away from him, the more distance he would put between himself and the ball. The closer it was to him, the closer he would move to get involved.

Before heading out on to the pitch, Johan Cruyff gave his players a simple instruction: 'Go out there and enjoy yourselves.' It was a statement that embodies an entire footballing philosophy and was central to Cruyff 's principles; yet for others, its simplicity, ahead of such a key game, might be considered an insult to the coaching profession.

Ramon Besa put it wonderfully: 'He is a bit of a Quixote. In an era of fast food, Pep wants degustation football, as if it were a wine.

In 1974 Laureano Ruíz became general coordinator for youth football and one of the first things he did was to tear down a notice next to the entrance of his new office that read: 'If you are coming to offer me a youngster who measures less than 1.80 metres, you can take him back.' 'Laureano prioritised the technical quality of a footballer, reaction times and, above other factors, intelligence, to learn and understand the game,

above all else, they had to learn to win. Instilling a fiercely competitive, winning spirit into a team, an academy already blessed with an abundance of talent, represented something of a watershed for grass-roots football at FC Barcelona.

there are few pure footballing training sessions and there is a lot of co-existence and it isn't easy. But the lucky thing in this team is having found people with important human values.

What you can't do is study the talks, learn them by heart. Two or three concepts are all you need . . . and then you have to put your heart into it. You can't deceive the players, they are too well prepared, intelligent, intuitive. I was a footballer and I know what I'm saying. In every talk, from that one in St Andrews to the last one, I have put my heart into them. And when I don't feel it, I don't speak, it's the best way.

There is not a single trainer, nor player, that can guarantee success at the start of a season,' Guardiola wrote a decade ago. 'Nor are there magic formulae. If there were, this game of football would be as easy as going to the "solutions shop" and buying them all.

The director of football went away and started doing some digging around, gathering second opinions about Pep's qualities as an actual coach.

Football was his passion, his obsession, the thing he knew best, and Serie A was considered the league that practised the most advanced defensive tactics since Sacchi. His Milan of the eighties were regarded as having set the benchmark in terms of work rate and defensive strategy over the previous two decades – and Pep was determined to learn as much as he could from his time in Italy.

He was given one more chance, invited back for a third day. The coach moved him into central midfield where, suddenly, Pep was a magnet for the ball, directing the forward play and dictating tempo. He'd done enough. Barcelona decided they wanted him to join them.