English Football Quotes

What United have got that Chelsea haven't is Paul Scholes. I think he is different to anything else in English football. ~ Kevin Keegan

Is this good for English football? In the short run, Chelsea's rise has broken up what was turning into an irritating Arsenal-Manchester United duopoly. But football leagues (look at Scotland, look at Spain) can get along OK with duopolies. A monopoly, however, is a disaster. Everyone else in the Premiership has to operate on some kind of business footing, and the terror stalking Highbury and Old Trafford is that Chelsea will be immune from financial discipline forever. ~ Matthew Engel

There are lots of concerns facing English football but for me the major one is the way in which football clubs are run by owners, whether they are growing organically and sustainably and how that is being policed by the football authorities. ~ Gary Neville

The Football Association have always acted more as a referee than a governor. And the FA, aware the Premier League provide players for the England team, have always had too gentle a hand on the tiller. The result is that the Premier League are the tigers in the English football jungle everybody's scared of. ~ Gordon Taylor

However good an English team is, they will always have an additional advantage. It is that European players know that their English opponents will come at them in the belief they will win, and they can always be guaranteed never to stop fighting. They have a natural aggression that they are born with. If it ever goes, English football will lose its most valuable dimension. ~ Johan Cruijff

Sometimes English football takes pride in having the lowest yellow-card count in Europe, but of course it will have if you can take someone's leg off and still not be booked. ~ Luis Suarez

In my first season I was learning about English football in a new team. I scored 13 which isn't bad, but I think I can do better. ~ Luis Garcia

It was the proudest moment of my career to lead my team out at the home of English football. I never, ever dreamt that would happen! ~ Casey Stoney

The chairmen of the largest companies in the world can cancel an appointment or move a board meeting; a manager cannot change the date of a game. In the combined 42 years that Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger have managed in English football, I can only remember one occasion when Sir Alex did not attend a Manchester United game. ~ Howard Wilkinson

If we had a starting XI that no one could argue about it wouldn't say a lot for English football. We'd probably be on a downward spiral. It's good that people have different ideas about who should play. ~ Rio Ferdinand

You see how Spanish, Italians, Portuguese play football. I don't say they are perfect, I say English football has a few things to learn from them in the same way they have a lot of things to learn from English football. ~ Jose Mourinho

German football is like English football. The Germans and the English do not play like a Brazilian side. They have to improve, bring up their young players, who have character. ~ Franz Beckenbauer

I'm sure sex wouldn't be so rewarding as this World Cup. It's not that sex isn't good but the World Cup is every four years and sex is not. ~ Ronaldo

English football is in a bad way because the foreign players here are so good, so dominant. ~ Kevin Keegan

When I'm in town on Sundays, I sometimes go down to the Central Bar in the East Village to watch English football. But my natural inclination now is to get in the car with my wife and kids and get out of town. ~ Joe Scarborough

I feel I have a lot to learn from English football and I am completely open to good influences in my way of thinking football. But I also have things to give them. ~ Jose Mourinho

English football is so physical and fast that when you see a space, you have to go into it with all your speed. ~ Yaya Toure

So, what did you want to watch?'

'Thought we might play a game instead,' he said, holding up a familiar dark green box. 'Found this on the bottom shelf of your DVD cupboard … if you tilt the glass, the champagne won't froth like that.'

Neve finished pouring champagne into the 50p champagne flutes she'd got from the discount store and waited until Max had drunk a good half of his in two swift swallows. 'The thing is, you might find it hard to believe but I can be very competitive and I have an astonishing vocabulary from years spent having no life and reading a lot – and well, if you play Scrabble with me, I'll totally kick your arse.'

Max was about to eat his first bite of molten mug cake but he paused with the spoon halfway to his mouth. 'You're gonna kick my arse?'

'Until it's black and blue and you won't be able to sit down for a week.' That sounded very arrogant. 'Really, Max, Mum stopped me from playing when I was thirteen after I got a score of four hundred and twenty-seven, and when I was at Oxford, I used to play with two Linguistics post-grads and an English don.'

'Well, my little pancake girlfriend, I played Scrabble against Carol Vorderman for a Guardian feature and I kicked her arse because Scrabble has got nothing to do with vocabulary; it's logic and tactics,' Max informed her loftily, taking a huge bite of the cake.

For a second, Neve hoped that it was as foul-tasting as she suspected just to get ~ Sarra Manning

BLANK-VERSE, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters - the most difficult kind of English verse to write acceptably; a kind, therefore, much affected by those who cannot acceptably write any kind. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it. ~ Maurice Druon

Their renewed cheers startled her. Alec thought she might be a little intimidated. She looked overwhelmed by all the attention. "What did you say to them, Alec?" she whispered, knowing full well what he'd said. As soon as he answered her, she thought to tell him that he really should expound upon his introduction. She never got the chance to enlighten him, however. "I told them you were English," Alec lied. He threw his arm around her shoulders again and, as was his disturbing habit, literally hauled her up against his side. God's truth, he treated her just like a satchel. "And that, of course, is the reason they're cheering," Jamie countered. "Because I'm English." "Nay, wife. 'Tis the reason they're screaming. ~ Julie Garwood

In football, I don't have a lot of friends. The people who I really trust, there are not many ... Most of the time, I'm alone. ~ Cristiano Ronaldo

They had lived to see their simple patriotism derided, their morality despised, their savings devalued. They caused no trouble. Millions of pounds of public money wasn't regularly siphoned into their neighbourhoods in the hope of bribing, cajoling or coercing them into civic virtue. If they protested that their cities had become alien, their children taught in overcrowded schools where 90 per cent of the children spoke no English, they were lectured about the cardinal sin of racism by those more expensively and comfortably circumstanced. Unprotected by accountants, they were the milch-cows of the rapacious Revenue. No lucrative industry of social concern and psychological analysis had grown up to analyse and condone their inadequacies on the grounds of deprivation or poverty. ~ P.D. James

Roppongi is now virtually a foreign neighborhood. Africans-I don't mean African-Americans-who don't speak English are there doing who knows what. This is leading to new forms of crime such as car theft. We should be letting in people who are intelligent. ~ Shintaro Ishihara

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. ~ Mark Twain

Something I miss terribly from the '60s - the most important phrase in the English language was, 'I got hung up.' Somebody says they got hung up, it's unassailable, you know? You don't go near that. Whoa! I know what that can be like. ~ Alan Arkin

Why should I learn English? I'm never going to England. Shah, pffff, ur, doy. ~ Christopher Titus

The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Life has a way of kicking one along like a football, or so I've found. Fate had never dealt me personally a particularly easy time, but that was OK, that was normal. Most people, it seemed to me, took their turn to be football. Most survived. Some didn't. ~ Dick Francis

As a practical matter, every immigrant needs to master English to be a full participating citizen and to have full economic opportunity. ~ Richard Lugar

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The Founding Fathers were nothing more than a bunch of snobby English shits. ~ Donald Freed

Football is an absolutely idiotic pastime by any rational standards. You're running into other people as hard as you can, you get frequent muscle strains and ligament tears, and the protective padding really doesn't do all that much to absorb the blunt trauma. ~ Chris Kluwe

Just because I'm undersized and under-this and under-that, I've still been a good football player since I was little. ~ Wes Welker

I had a dream about you. We were playing football (soccer), and I just needed to score one goal to win. Of course, one goal was one more than I'd scored so far, so it might be next to impossible. One is certainly next to nothing, but it might also be next to everything. In love, one is also next to nothing - and next to everything, as two is all you need to make eternity. ~ Jarod Kintz

I really like acting in French. It's actually quite different for me, from acting in English. It's fun acting in a foreign language. You're liberated or freed from preconceptions. ~ Kristin Scott Thomas

an 'old English lady'. Henry, though, had other ~ Thomas Penn

We can't run. We can't pass. We can't stop the run. We can't stop the pass. We can't kick. Other than that, we're just not a very good football team right now. ~ Bruce Coslet

It is actually a rather sorry tale. In the late nineteenth century most English economists thought that economics was about happiness. They thought of a persons happiness as in principle measurable, like temperature, and they thought we could compare one persons happiness with anothers. They also assumed that extra income brought less and less extra happiness as a person got richer. ~ Richard Layard

I have fun like a child in the street. When the day comes when I'm not enjoying it, I will leave football. ~ Lionel Messi

I mean no disrespect to Scottish football, but the Premier League is the biggest stage and highest profile league of all. ~ Peter Shilton

Almost all of the stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan are told in the first person, yet, depending on the angle and distance of the narrator, they exert different effects. The best are those in which the speaker never poses as an objective outsider. ( ... ) Other stories are damaged by the urge to distance the narrator. ~ Yiyun Li

old-fashioned flowers, it looked like an English garden. ~ Melanie Benjamin

I remember my late father, who was the biggest football fan I have ever known, used to stress when I was younger that, win or lose, you always have to compete with honor. ~ Adam Richman

Time will solve all the problems Chinese school graduates face. In our bilingual society, there are no more Chinese school graduates, only English school graduates who can speak Mandarin. These English school graduates probably can also read and write Chinese, but they did not go to a Chinese school, and they act and think differently from us. Drawing a line between us, they would never say they graduated from a Chinese school, because former Chinese school graduates, that is, the vanishing group of people that includes us, are second-class citizens. They, on the other hand, belong to the first class, the Chinese elite, English school graduates who are fluent in Chinese. ~ Yeng Pway Ngon

As long as I can run fast, track will always be an option. But right now I'm focused on football because the NFL is knocking on my door and I'm not going to slam it in its face. ~ Robert Griffin III

I love to read, but all through school I hated it when books were pulled apart and analyzed. Winnie-the-pooh as a political allegory, that sort of thing. It never really worked for me. There's a line in The Barretts of Wimpole Street - you know, the play - where Elizabeth Barrett is trying to work out the meaning of one of Robert Browning's poems, and she shows it to him, and he reads it and he tells her that when he wrote that poem, only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant and now only God knows. And that's how I feel about studying English. Who knows what the writer was thinking, and why should it matter? I'd rather just read for enjoyment."

'The Winter Sea ~ Susanna Kearsley

When no one was going to pay for the public schools anymore and they were all like filled with guns and drugs and English teachers who were really pimps and stuff, some of the big media congloms got together and gave all this money and bought the schools so that all of them could have computers and pizza for lunch and stuff, which they gave for free, and now we do stuff in classes about how to work technology and how to find bargains and what's the best way to get a job and how to decorate our bedroom. ~ M T Anderson