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Football Quotes

“Quite honestly I never had a desire to be an actor. I tell people, I did not choose acting; acting chose me. I never grew up wanting to be an actor. I wanted to play football. In about 9th grade an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school so I did on a whim. I got accepted.”

“Liverpool's grand opera also gave us some light comedy - on hearing the news that the house of goalkeeper Pepe Reina was burgled, and his Porsche stolen, while he was heroically saving penalties at Anfield, fans took a typically witty line: police were said to be interviewing a man from the West London area, a certain Frank Lampard, whose whereabouts on Tuesday between 7.45pm and 10.15pm are unknown. Indeed.”

“You don't look for jobs. You don't phone up 10 clubs and say, Here I am. You are offered the job. I was in Benfica many years ago. I was leaving the training ground and I had a car after me. It went on for 10 minutes. Anyhow, he stopped and I stopped and he said, I'm from the Italian embassy. Ah yes, and what do you want? I want your phone number because Roma wants you as a manager next season. Three months later I was sitting on the bench in Roma. I don't think the rest of working society works like football.”

“It never changes. Football is a game of repetition, mental and physical. You may try to articulate it a little different, but it's the same thing: Get better players, make fewer mistakes, and drill the fundamentals into your players' heads. The rest of it is a joke. Teams aren't winning because of what they had for breakfast of what some coach said in the locker room.”

“I know for myself my big, long friendships they don't have the same problems any more, but they also-when you get together you often times just have a drink and watch football together. You're not really talking about everything so much the same way. You just need to be around each other, and yet you can look at each other and so much is said just between those minutiae- it's totally subtle is really what it is. I felt like that, you know, a life that's been so totally dramatic then becomes beauty in the fact that it's just so small.”

“When I was writing the script, I knew didn't want to make a sports movie. I was very clear that I wanted to make a sibling rivalry story. So when I was writing the script, the football was getting in the way of the drama. One day, I saw Michael Haneke's Funny Games, which is probably the most violent film I've ever seen - but the violence is off camera. When I finished watching the film, I said, 'Hey, that's what I have to do.' Haneke gave me this solution.”

“When I was in Dutch and Italian football, a lot of people looked at Manchester United, and when they were asked who was the best player, a lot of them said Paul Scholes. Much of what he did looked simple, but actually it was quite hard. Invariably he controlled the ball instantly and passed it straight on, keeping the game moving. He made inch-perfect passes across the pitch; he saw the gaps and could play the ball through them. So it didn't surprise me that so many top-class international footballers recognized his quality.”

“If every university president said, 'The revenue producing sports: basketball, football - potentially revenue producing at most universities - maybe in a few cases women's basketball, if every one of them had a monitor that reported directly to the university president and no 'student-athlete' ever gets into this college or university who could not plausibly be admitted if we did not have a football or basketball team, end of problem. It won't happen because it's like unilaterally disarming. You know your opponent won't do it and then you'll get crushed in every game, but it's a simple thing.”

“Once people couldn't trust the college game, some checked out the pro game, but that was in big trouble, too. We had no clock and a lot of faults. People looked at the slow pace and at big guys like George Mikan and said pro basketball was just for overgrown pituitary cases. Baseball and football were numbers one and two and pro basketball wasn't even in the same universe.”

“Kenny was actually here at Melwood as a 15-year-old schoolboy. He came on trial and he went home afterwards. It was only later that Bill Shankly realised that Dalglish was here as a boy and he went mad! He said 'how did we miss him?' Kenny just had the football brain. He was born with it and you can't give that to people. He had that natural born talent.”

“I was so mad I wasn't sitting at the stadium watching it [Prince' 2007 Super Bowl performance] in person. So when Prince came back to the box where I would have been after he performed, he said to my makeup artist, "Where's Stevie?" She said, "She's sick, and she was told by our manager that she would have to walk across the football field when the game was over in the mud and try to find a limo, so she made the decision that she couldn't do that." He was not happy that I wasn't there, and now today I'm not happy about it because I should have gone and I should have walked in that mud for him.”

“Obama said, basically, "I wouldn't let any son of mine play football, though I do watch." And that struck me as remarkable! It's like he's saying, yeah, let some other set of parents or guardians put their boys up for that kind of punishment (and for my amusement). But not mine! It's just abject hypocrisy from a guy who should know better.”

“Just imagine what would happen if Obama grew a pair and in his last year in office just said, "Forget it. Football is just too violent and too damaging to the economically vulnerable communities in this country. And it normalizes violence and fosters intolerance, etc." I mean: that would be awesome.”

“I was in Athens for a football match when 9/11 went down, and it was quite spectacular - we went into this bar and tried to find out what happened, and the bartender said "it's only the American and the Arabs. They're not big football nations." So the feeling was, what's it got to do with us? Why are football games being cancelled in Europe? The intelligentsia in the West feel like they have to figure out the significance of it all, whereas people have other pressing concerns, related to basic needs.”

“When I was nine years, growing up on the south side of Chicago, in the ghetto. The Robert Taylor Projects. I came home from school, I showed my mother a picture and said "Momma, that's you in the rocking chair. There's daddy over there." I said, "Momma, one of these days, I'm gonna be big and strong. I'm gonna be a football player. I'm gonna be a boxer. I'm gonna buy you a beautiful house and I'm gonna buy you pretty dresses." That's all I want to do in life.”

“Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase "at the end of the day"--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamentals.”