Football Quotes

Basketball is my favorite sport, and I’m also a very passionate football fan.

If you look at old football pictures, the jerseys were hanging, the sleeves were dangling, but now everything is tucked and tailored.

I loved playing football. In this particular match the ball happened to hit my right eye, the only one which I could see light and colour with.

You see somebody on a football field make a great, athletic 70-yard run, but the athleticism is immeasurable. It’s undoubtedly athletic, but compared to somebody else who did something else, how do you compare it? That’s the great part of track and field. It’s a test, but with results that you can compare to others.

We used to play football on the levee, with no shirts on in the summer – August in New Orleans – and my skin would turn red. They’d call me Redskin, Red Apache, then it turned around to Apache Red.

I think if Tottenham are going to be top four side, the fans and the club will need to get away from the philosophy of ‘pretty football’, that’s got to go.

I hear people saying ‘the way the game should be played’. Rubbish. That’s the worst saying in football. You win the game, then worry about the way it should be played.

I had no plans once I finished my football career, which was a problem, so I had to go looking for work. Television was the one area that it was easier to get a job than anywhere else.

I don’t want to be throwing the football on the front yard when I’m 75. I mean, I’m not opposed to men doing that. But I don’t think it’s gonna work for me.

Sometimes in football you have to hold your hand up and say, yeah, they’re better than us.

You are responsible to each other because when you win a game of football, you only need eight players to perform well.

Well, football is a hard game there’s no denying it. It’s a game that can bring out the worst in you, at times.

I was recruited by every school in the country for football and basketball. And an incident happened in high school, and all that was taken away. No other teams, no other schools were recruiting me anymore.

I grew up in Europe, and soccer was the first organized game I played. When we moved back to the U.S. in the middle of 4th grade, I switched to American football and stopped playing competitively until college, when I played intramurals.

I’m definitely a football fan, so I try to stay up with how teams are doing, and you end up getting a lot of buddies that play on certain teams. I wouldn’t say I watch too much of other quarterbacks.

I like to play football, read some books, study.

I play fantasy basketball and fantasy football, soccer.

You can relax more when you’re playing a silly character than when you’re playing a really rigid character. But to be fair, I think George Clooney is a bigger teenager than any of the ‘Twilight’ cast. He’s the guy throwing a football at your head and then hiding around the corner, pretending it wasn’t him!

In life, as in football, you won’t go far unless you know where the goalposts are.

I don’t think God cares a whole lot about the outcome. He cares about the people involved, but I don’t think he’s a big football fan.

The majority of the time, they take air out of the football. I think that, for me, is a disadvantage.

I’ve got no interest in football. My brother’s a footballer, too, and I was dragged to the freezing pitch every week as a child. I don’t see much glamour in it.

Acting has never been a thing that me and my dad have talked about. It’s like footballers: when they get together, I bet the last thing they talk about is football.

You have different sorts of people in life, so why should it be any different in football?

We know, in Wales or in England – you simply can’t trust Labour on the NHS. In England, we are delivering for patients while Labour just use the NHS as a political football. We won’t let them we’ll always fight for the NHS.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there’s been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived… Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.

I have no ax to grind. I was lucky. I played. How many guys play high school, college football never play pro football?

I went to college to play football, not to study it.

I’m not like some guys who, if the Ravens lose, are ready to jump off the top of M&M Stadium. There are other things in life besides pro football.

As a kid, I thought movies were boring. My parents would hire VHS recorders for the weekend and watch Bollywood movies. I’d get bored and go out to Stoke Newington common to play football.

Once you get into the NFL, it doesn’t matter what draft pick you are, what round you are, if you’re undrafted or not. It’s football time again. The draft, all of that doesn’t matter anymore.

I’ve played this game since I was in second grade, and there’s nothing more important to me than playing football.

Being able to play basketball at a high level, adjusting to the ball in the air, quick feet, quick hands and all that stuff definitely translates to playing tight end in the National Football League.

I think that people that don’t really understand the game of football and are just fans that think people just show up on Saturday and go, I don’t think they understand the work that we put in here and what our schemes are and what we’re trying to do.

In Argentina, you do what your father does. If your father plays football, you play football. If your father plays polo, you play polo.

I didn’t watch cartoons, I was too busy playing football.

I’ve got a great life that I really enjoy. But there is something chewing at me inside: that adrenaline rush from football, I miss that.

I don’t think the physical part of English football would be a problem. When you get the ball, you need to be ready. The defenders here are very tough. I like that.

In football, nothing is certain, so it’s no problem to return to Corinthians.

With the club now in administration and concern about where the money for land sale has gone, I know there are huge commercial difficulties to be resolved, but I hope that football will once again become the most important issue.

My brother was the one who really gave me the desire to follow in his footsteps. Also, it was really Ronaldinho and Ronaldo, the two Brazilian players, who also inspired me to a future in football.

It’s true that the atmosphere here is quite different from the one in France. People live and breathe football here, and that’s what I like. Every footballer wants to play in the Premier League.

Football. It sounds simple, but it’s always been the case – I don’t see myself living without playing.

I was just a kid who had arrived in the world of professional football and thought he could do anything he wanted. But I have learned from my mistakes. I have done everything to change, both on and off the pitch.

I met Jack Bruce, one of my heroes, in a studio while doing some recording. England had just beat Scotland in a big football match and I saw Jack trying to break into this refrigerator in the lounge, drunk out of his brain, and I didn’t know what to say.

In hindsight, that time out of football gives you the hunger to want to get back to basics and play football.

When you’re a kid that’s all you want to do, go out and play football.

I understand football. I have always been a good footballer, and that gets overlooked by most people.

The decisions I’ve made have not always been the most popular, but when I look back, I want to know I’ve played for good football teams.

My construction business represents 10 or 20 times what I’ll ever invest in football. But from the moment I bought the Chargers, I would become forever known as the owner of that NFL franchise.

I’m a huge Rugby Union fan, which is a bit like American football – but tougher.

Each game we approach like a final. Today it was the opening game at home, we won and showed outstanding football qualities. We will be preparing for the next game the same way.

I am basically turning football players into sprinters for a while. When we first talked about it, I didn’t know how my expertise could be used.

We are making a little portion of their brains be sprinters they are 100 percent football players, but for these purposes, they must learn the proper way to run.

As a kid, I played my share of football in the street or in a vacant lot.

As a kid, I played my share of football in the street or in a vacant lot. When we were playing in the street, it was more touch football, so we didn’t hit each other into cars.

If we can take young people who excel at the highest levels, put them on the same kind of pedestal as the all-state basketball player and the all-state football player, and begin to get the same kind of recognition, it will have a profound effect, and we are finding that it does.

Trust in the great American ingenuity. We can derive more intelligent, more brain-friendly ways we can play football.

Actually, I’m for football. But I’m for intelligent football that enhances us rather than football that steals away who we are.

I grew up in Africa, in Nigeria. I never knew, I never had any reasonable encounter with football. I saw football on Sky News. I thought there were people dressed like extraterrestrials, you know, like they were going to Mars or something, headgears and shoulder pads. And I wondered why, as a child, why did they have to dress that way.

As a physician, I’m somewhat an advocate of patients. How come, before Mike Webster, no NFL player was told or knew that there was an intrinsic risk of brain damage from playing football?

A child who plays a game of football for one season without any documented concussion – several months after that season, if you subject his brain to sophisticated psychological testing and radiological testing, functional MRIs, there is evidence of brain damage.

I meet with retired football players. Some are well-dressed, some are well-spoken, but when you talk to them personally, they will admit to you that they are having problems. But they are managing their problems. They have impaired memory, they’re having mood problems. They are being treated by their psychiatrists.

My son is 6. I wouldn’t let my six-year-old son near any football field. And if any coach asks my son to play football, I’ll sue that coach, and I’ll sue the school.

Free agency screws everybody’s allegiances up. Whether it be football, baseball, hockey, basketball, whatever it may be. It’s really hard.

The Georgia Dome was my home field, brother. There’s no question about it. I played my first football game there as an Atlanta Falcon.

Lets be honest: I’m an athlete, not an entertainer as much. So as an athlete, I am a guy who likes the physical confrontation of the football field. I like playing nose-guard I like having two 350 pound guys trying to rip my head off.

Everybody who knows anything about me knows all I ever wanted to do is play pro football. But I didn’t have the talent, and I got hurt a lot. I’d do anything to be out on the field.

I have never, ever, received any taunts or any form of anti-Semitism. And I suppose being a Jewish football player with the Atlanta Falcons was no different than being a Baptist football player with the Atlanta Falcons. But in the back of your mind, you always expect something to happen.

None of us are claiming that the statistical analysts understand the game of football as well as the football coaches do, or that our analysis should take precedence over the informed opinions of experts. I’m not saying that at all.

I’ve always slightly worried the kids who play football around my house. They know I’m an actor, but felt sorry for me because they’d never seen anything I’ve done.

I think there are a lot of good people, a lot of good football guys in the NFL.

I had concussions as a kid playing football and basketball, and know what it feels like and to have someone say ‘Just rub some dirt on it, and get back in there.’

Anytime that the Arizona Cardinals play football, I scream at the top of my lungs at the television. And I have certain dances that I do.

I have been a fan all my life, but now I have been out of football for over 10 years, and out of baseball for a little over six years and I don’t go to games.

The truth is the Super Bowl long ago became more than just a football game. It’s part of our culture like turkey at Thanksgiving and lights at Christmas, and like those holidays beyond their meaning, a factor in our economy.

All my life, I’ve been right next to a football field. I never knew nothing else.

Football has always been a big part of my life. Almost from the day I was born, playing and coaching football were all I really ever wanted to do.

When I won the world championship, in 1972, the United States had an image of, you know, a football country, a baseball country, but nobody thought of it as an intellectual country.

When I’m on television, I think that I appeal to the everyday guy, ’cause that’s who I am. The guys who go to the football games on the weekends are my viewers, for sure.

If we want the best pitcher, let’s get Bobby Feller. If want the best football player, let’s get Jimmy Brown the best basketball player, let’s get Bill Russell. If we want the guy who can do the best job for the United States – let’s get Donald Trump.

I wasn’t interested in going to the school dances. I wasn’t interested in going to the football games. What I wanted was to be in my room painting my walls and doing weird stuff. That’s what I wanted and I got to do what I wanted, so that, to me, is my high school experience.

I may be a successful football player, but I feel like such a failure.

If you grew up in a household with a football coach who looks like a drill sergeant, you would think you would be tough.

But when you lose a family member or something tragic happens, that stays with you forever. You never get over it. Knowing that you have to deal with that for the rest of your life… Football is important, but not as important as you once thought it was.

In spite of reports about playing with various teams, I’m enjoying retirement with my family and have no plans to play football.

In this case, I realize that, unlike when I was 22 years old, I realize now that football will not go on forever, it is a small part of your life.

The town, the team, it’s a family. That has helped. For some people who have had to deal with some of the problems I have had to deal with don’t have football as an out.

I take my life and put it on the football field, and I take the football field and put it in my life.

If you’re going to play football, why not be the best at it that you can be and fulfill your potential?

Guys are playing fantasy football some guys I think even play fantasy baseball. I don’t get involved with it. I have five kids I just don’t have time. Not that anything’s wrong with the fantasy, but I just don’t have time for it with my lifestyle.

The amazing thing about a football team is we can disagree and fight like brothers, but then we come back together. We are able to be open and honest about things that may offend us.

Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.

What a great day for football, all we need is some green grass and a ball.

Football (soccer) is a matter of life and death, except more important.

I think one of the great things about a football season is that you see teams play in all types of environments, and if you can’t handle one of them, you probably don’t deserve to win anyway.

As long as we’re winning football games, I’m happy.

I have great respect for Greg Knapp, who was my quarterbacks coach in Denver for three years. He taught me so much about playing quarterback in the NFL and made me a better football player.

You can’t take a single day for granted in the National Football League. Every single day, you need to earn your spot on the roster.

I did enjoy football, but the injury factor for me, you know, I had so many issues. I don’t know how long my career would’ve been.

I’m glad that I just played baseball, because I’m sure I had a much longer baseball career than I would’ve had a football career. I did miss football, but I didn’t miss some of the injuries from football.

It was a horrible, terrible, atrocious, offensive football game.

In the summertime, I played Little League baseball football in the fall basketball in the winter.

I enjoy going on hikes, and I enjoy the occasional yoga. The one thing I’m good at athletically – and I don’t know if I’m good at it anymore because I haven’t done this in a while – I can throw a pretty good spiral in football, but I have no idea how to play.

Nobody is that thick-skinned that it doesn’t hurt you. Still, you always know what happens in football. I have got used to criticism, I suppose, having been high profile with England and Man U.

I learned the major difference between college and pro football. In the pros, you’re up against a top receiver almost every minute of time. In college, maybe one comes along every third game.

Because I was small, I was getting the hell kicked out of me playing football.

I am more mature now and know how to deal with certain situations in football. It’s not all about highs there are also lows, but I can deal with it. Football is a hard business.

Here I was, this good guy that played football I was gonna go play in college but I had a bad senior year. But I played guitar in assemblies whenever I could.

The books I used to love as a kid, I used to read football books – and by that I mean soccer books – stories about boys in school who started to play football and then became the captain. I’d read them cover to cover. I just got lost in them.

There’s something to be said for any boy growing up among lots of other boys who like to play basketball and football, while all I wanted to do was put on musicals. Mentally, I was always in my own world.

People ask me about my interests outside football, but I haven’t really got any.

Bavaro’s probably as tough of a – physically and mentally as tough a football player as I’ve ever coached. So, I would put him in the rare category there.

When I was playing football, I was getting up to 240 pounds, and they wanted me to get to 260.

Some of the money going to the rookies can now be spent on people who have proved their worth. After all, the average playing life of a pro football player is about eight years and it is only fitting that the veterans get something for their efforts.

I attribute my entire football career, as far as getting me started, getting me interested, keeping me that way was my father. He went to every game even though he was crippled and wasn’t real healthy.

If you can miss getting up in the morning and running into a wall, I miss playing football. I’ll never be a frustrated athlete.

I’m a big fan of Coach Dorrell. I watched UCLA football for many, many years. I’ve grown accustomed to the Pac-10 style.

At 13, I was a big, totally uncoordinated, hopeless football player. I responded to somebody else’s rules, and I stayed just good enough to get a scholarship to Columbia, which was looking for scholar-athletes.

We were younger. And it’s basically like looking at football classics. You see things that you did, you see things that you could’ve done better and you think about all the good relationships that you had with the cast.

I love baseball. And American Football, too. But not rugby.

I love sporting events and popcorn and pizza and being outside, like at a baseball or football game. I love amusement parks, going to ride roller coasters.

I’ve always negotiated the world very physically, from football to tussling at the playground to taking my clothes off.

I did all kinds of things as a young person to try to make money. I had a chicken operation – I sold chickens. I can remember going to high school football games as a ten-year-old and gathering Coca-Cola bottles, ’cause you’d turn them in and get a nickel. I wanted not to remain idle.

I remember my dad, who coached football, would buy some of his players football shoes when they couldn’t afford it.

As the youngest of six kids, I grew up spending summers on Martha’s Vineyard, and I was always topless. All the pictures are of me in jean shorts, no shirt – with my brothers, playing football.

I was an athlete growing up. I was a wrestler, I played football, so I can take a fall. I actually wanted to be a stuntman when I was kid, so I would practice falling down the stairs. It’s just something I like to do.

I hung out in the Baltimore area a lot. My biggest memory was playing football against Morgan. That was, like, ‘Forget about it,’ that was a really big thing. They used to kick our butts all the time.

If I got a football scholarship, I was going to be a football player.

Whether football’s here or not, I will be fine. I go out, I play to win.

When it comes down to it, you’re playing football regardless of what offense you’re in.

Without football, my life is worth nothing.

I grew up trying to be like my idols, and one of the main people in my life was my father. He played football, and when your father is telling stories about the game he played… Everybody wants to be like their father.

I see myself not only as a football player, but an entertainer and icon.

Football is football I don’t care if you’re doing it in Division II, NAIA, or in the SEC or anything in between.

Playing football in Fargo has a total big-time feel. Everyone says it’s FCS and it’s a smaller school, but in Fargo, North Dakota, and in the state of North Dakota, NDSU football is the real deal.

Even at North Dakota State, football is a big deal.

When you have a script, and you’re discussing what it can be, and who going to play what role, that’s a kind of like a fantasy football game. You can imagine these different dream teams interpreting these characters that only exist in your head.

Baseball is a slow, boring, complex, cerebral game that doesn’t lend itself to histrionics. You ‘take in’ a baseball game, something odd to say about a football or basketball game, with the clock running and the bodies flying.

I’m Joe Canada, who never went to high school. I’ve never even been to a football game.

When cars honk and hoot and drunks squeeze out of car windows and scream, you can be sure that football is in the air.

I was baptized Methodist, but I was mainly raised First Church of NFL, which is to say that my family, especially my father, was much more concerned with watching football on Sundays than attending services.

I grew up playing sports, football, basketball, baseball, everything, and acting was such a different environment and different world for me.

I used to play against a high school football team that always used to run the single wing. And eventually, other teams figured out that they ran the single wing. And so they prepared for it. The Democrats are stuck running the single wing.

I sail, scuba dive, play football, basketball.

I’ve always been like that. I was a tomboy when I was a kid, so I was always playing baseball and basketball and football and stuff as a kid with the boys.

I play American football every Saturday, which I find calming.

Sophomore year, I got hit in the stomach playing football, and I was out of school for four months. I was in the hospital for two and then out of school for two.

Most of the time I meet my trainer at the gym and we do a lot of everything: weights circuit with cardio, football drills, sprinting with weights on the treadmill.

Football is my base that’s where I learned to be tough. I was a strong safety, and that’s what I do: I hit people. The mentality is football, the wrestling is precision.

When you are happy and playing regular football, that can make life a lot easier.

Football’s all about opinions, all of them different, whether from a top analyst or a man in a bunnet, and some folk are just never going to like you.

I just love watching football. It doesn’t matter what level it is, whether it’s Fleetwood or Blackpool. I love to go and watch games.

When I was a kid growing up, my dad being a football coach, he asked the same question of all the assistants that he ever hired: ‘Is your goal to be a head football coach?’

I grew up in a football family, on the sideline. I was a waterboy. It was kinda something I was around my whole life.

We’ve got some talented people in my family in regards to football, and we do it the right way.

I have done well out of TV, but not well enough to buy football clubs. I’m not sure it’s ever a way to make money.

I play a lot of sports. I played football for 12 years, I like tennis, I surf, I snowboard, and I ski. I always like to do an activity.

I have played football all my life, and my dad went to see Manchester United in 2005. Since then, I have been a fan.

I do not know a lot about football. I guess I’m a Patriots fan because I’m from Boston? But I’m getting to know a lot more about it, and I’m finding it fascinating.

One of the more bizarre games I played as a kid was something called ‘kill the man.’ It was a cross between football and rugby, which found the person carrying the ball a target of some hungry tacklers. I still don’t know why we enjoyed the game because it was impossible to win.

I’m from a council estate myself, and the biggest release we had as kids was football. That’s where all the great players learn their trade – as kids having a kickabout.

I was a baseball guy. Mom wouldn’t let me play football when I was little because she was scared I’d get hurt. So, I finally convinced her to let me play in 7th grade.

It wasn’t really until the 10th or 11th grade when I started to play well, and football took the place of baseball, which was my love when I was five years old. I don’t know what happened baseball just got boring to me, I guess.

As someone who loves football, I will continue to speak out frankly about FIFA’s problems.

I majored in theater at San Diego State. My one eye was on football, and my other eye was on Hollywood.

Freshman year, I was 95 pounds and 4 feet 10 inches. So you can imagine what my football uniform looked like – my shoulder pads were bigger than my body!

I want to play for Arsenal. When you see football all around the world, you see very few teams who play the way that we play. I just enjoy it. I feel it is my home now.

My perfect first date? Maybe a concert or a football game. That would be my ideal first date, but would the girl like it? I don’t know.

Writing a song is like playing a series of downs in football: Lots of rules, timing is crucial, lots of boundaries, lots of protective gear, lots of stopping and starting.

I do like to just have football on, so I will TiVo, like, three or four games for the weekend, and I’ll just turn it on when there’s no live football on, just to have the background noise.

OK, the wonderful thing about soccer is, a football is a perfectly round object, and it doesn’t make mistakes. The player using it makes mistakes. And the more you use it, the less mistakes you make.

You know, I was crap. But I had the commitment, and I had the understanding, that the basis of football is skill on the ball, and if you spend the time with it, you’re gonna reap the rewards.

You know, a football coach is nothing more than a teacher. You teach them the same subject, and you have a group of new guys every year.

Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent.

With United, we’d all grown up together, we all wanted to win the biggest trophy in football. We did it togther.

My private life is perfect. If your private life and your life outside football is good, then it is good on the field for you.

I’ve felt a little tired, but I’m only 24. I love playing football. That’s my job and that’s what I love doing.

At the end of the day, I’m a footballer who has played at some of the biggest football clubs in the world and played with some of the best players in the world.

I’ve played under some of the biggest and best managers and achieved almost everything in football. Of course it hurts when people question it, but I’ve come to the end of my career and can look back and say I’ve achieved everything with every club that I’ve played for.

American football seems to resemble soccer in that one scores by putting the ball through the opponent’s goal but football, truly is about land. The Settlers want to move the line of scrimmage Westward, the Native Americans want to move it East.

My dream was to play for Alabama – football, basketball.

I like English football, always have. It’s just that people go on about the World Cup in 1986 and then I’m seen as the real bad boy.

Sure, luck means a lot in football. Not having a good quarterback is bad luck.

Our users are trapeze artists, high school football coaches – I got cornered by a couple of theoretical physicists who said Dropbox lets them collaborate across the world and share their experiments’ results. They were raving about how it’s driving their research.

Because, they’re only thinking about one team when that game’s over. Before the game, they’re talking about two football teams. When the game’s over, there’s only one winner.

I wanted to be a football player. Football is a sport that I love, but the more I started playing basketball, the more I started dreaming of playing in the NBA.

I wanted to show off – a simple impulse or drive in much the same way as some kids wanted to play football, I wanted to show off. Not complicated in that sense, very natural it just depends on how you want to show off.

I wouldn’t mind being like X-Men and having the claws. I mean, I don’t think they’d let me play football, but it would look cool.

The game of football is something I dearly love, and there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.

I am smarter because I stayed in school, and I am a better football player.

Things always change in football, and you can never predict anything.

The attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi has become a political football in the presidential campaign, with all the grandstanding and misinformation that entails.

I went out for the football team but, you know, I was too small. That’s how I wound up in drama.

And if I want to get involved in choosing sides, I usually pick hockey or football.

It is helpful to think of people as having two fundamental motivations: the desire to see ourselves as honest, good people, and the desire to gain the benefits that come from cheating – on our taxes or on the football field.

You know, I always wondered what it would have been like to just go to school, play football with the guys and go to the prom. Just like a ‘regular person.’

I grew up in Texas, obviously a huge football state.

Sammy Baugh embodied all we aspire to at the Washington Redskins. He was a competitor in everything he did and a winner. He was one of the greatest to ever play the game of football, and one of the greatest the Redskins ever had.

There’s two times of year for me: Football season, and waiting for football season.

During my freshman year at Cornell, I joined my dorm’s intramural football team. At the first practice, upper classmen pointed out I was tall, so I should try playing QB. Well half an hour later, it was abundantly clear that I should not be the QB.

You couldn’t take football away from me, you couldn’t take acting away from me.

With TV, it’s the same way as preparing for the game of football. To get better at football, you have to watch the film and watch those who came before you and played the game, and yes, the first year you come in as a rookie and you’re not gonna be as good as when you come in as a vet, and I applied that in the same way to ‘Ton of Cash.’

In the NFL, if you make the play or you don’t make the play, you’re just a football player who did or didn’t make the play. You don’t get more yards or less yards based on what you’re labeled as by society.

As a football team, we don’t have any backups. We don’t consider anybody a backup.

You can’t let injuries dictate the outcome of a football game. You have to persevere and keep fighting. That is how we are. If there is a blade of grass to defend or take, we do it.

I’m married to football, baseball is my girlfriend.

In football, you’re dealing with grown men. In gymnastics, you’re dealing with prepubescent teenage girls. There’s a huge difference. At that age, you’re not confident enough to have a voice.

There are so many things about playing football that seem to me uniquely American. Anybody can succeed, anybody can play, but you’ve got to work hard to do it.

But quite honestly I can’t help being a passionate football supporter. If that’s my sin, I’m guilty.

In football, the good thing is things can change in a second.

I played a little basketball, but basketball interfered with theater season. That’s when we did our term plays and did nutshell versions of Shakespeare for English classes. And, believe me, I got a fair amount of looks from the guys on the team. ‘You’re in theater but you can play football?’

Man, ‘Hill Street Blues’ was on when I was 12, and I remember feeling I’d never seen anything like it. It was that far ahead of its time, with dark characters you loved. I remember Ed Marinaro, the football star.

Actually, as that first association continued, we got a little more legitimate. In those days, they asked Boy Scout troops to act as ushers during the football games. So we signed up and I went to many games in full Boy Scout uniform as an usher.

English football has just had a transfer window imposed for the first time, so it will be interesting to see how managers cope with the squads they have until it re-opens.

By the time I could have played football, I was already into acting and that’s what I wanted to do.

I think the Canadian Football League is a great league, but it’s not the NFL, and I’m not Jerry Rice.

A college football star, by his senior year, is used to running out there with 110,000 people going nuts. They feel comfortable in that environment. To me, a set feels like that. The one thing that I do know is that, as long as I’m prepared, I know this environment and this world.

Everywhere I go now, people are like, ‘That’s the guy from ‘Dancing With the Stars!’ It’s pretty good that you’re not just a football player but you’re in the entertainment world.

The best thing about high school football in the state of Texas is the whole town shuts down, and there’s shoe polish all over businesses and stores. Everyone rallies around you.

My first two years in the CFL, all I thought of was getting back to the NFL – it was like ‘I’ll put my time in up here and go back.’ Then I went and signed a nice contract in Calgary and was like, ‘Hey, I can make a living up here, this is great football, and I’m having a blast.’

You know, it’s a different deal – throwing a football as opposed to throwing a baseball.

Football isn’t a contact sport, it’s a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.

You cannot just switch football on and off it’s intense. There were times when I probably shouldn’t have got involved in certain things and said certain things, but you feel that sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe. Maybe the supporters looked to me to stand up as well.

In Holland and Spain and France, where so many of us come from, people aren’t interested in the sex lives of their players. We don’t hear these stories – even in Italy where the media is right on top of football.

I love playing football, being out on the pitch with a ball, and I will be a little sad when that ends.

It’s fantastic for Arsenal, and for English football as well. You’ve got an English club with a lot of young English talent committing themselves to a club.

A lot of people say you always come back to what you are good at. Football has been 25 years of my life, so maybe I’ll come back to it in some sort of way.

Playing football was like being trapped in a rhythm, and my whole career was like that. You have very little time to switch off.

I’ve enjoyed my time in the game, whether it be managing Luton in the top flight, taking Spurs to Wembley or, as director of football, pinpointing players such as Jermain Defoe, Paul Robinson and Robbie Keane with real sell-on value.

When I played pro football, I never set out to hurt anyone deliberately – unless it was, you know, important, like a league game or something.

This ain’t a football game, we do this every day.

The more the technocrats programme it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, football continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible occurs: the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a scraggy, bow-legged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.

I played with Michy for Belgium. He is still young he can finish and is very good. He just needs to adapt to English football, and he will. He is intelligent and a good player.

I had feelings that I didn’t know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination.

It is hard to say no to PSG – as with all teams capable of winning the Champions League, There is always uncertainty in football.

That’s my mentality. Just because somebody has fouled me, there is no reason for me to be nasty to him. I try to respect football as much as possible, and when someone is injured, you put the ball out.

If you told me to choose between family and football, then it is no choice. I take family, of course, like everyone. But I prefer to keep it private, and that’s it. I just focus on the football.

It’s true that I’m even better than I could have imagined, both in football and in my private life!

A couple of games, I played up front when Diego Costa was not there. We know to create movement – not even to get the ball, but create space for others. Now I understand football is not always with the ball at my feet.

These days, I’m always trying to have lots of touches, to be involved, and to play my football for 90 minutes.

For a young player like me, it is good to play for a club that can get to the semi-finals because one of the reasons I play football is for these big games.

Individually, I am very happy because I can play in every game. I can be on the pitch and do what I like to do, which is play football.

I’ve learned that football sometimes was an outlet. It was a way for me to release anger, release frustration.

Often there are players who have only football as a way of expressing themselves and never develop other interests. And when they no longer play football, they no longer do anything they no longer exist, or rather they have the sensation of no longer existing.

Actually, I wanted to act even when I was still playing football.

This is a year and a few months after the transplant. Before I had it my doctors told me that it would be the biggest thing that I ever had to face and believe me, when they take your liver out of ya and put another one in it’s like replacing a football in your stomach.

Fraud is fraud. And consumers of any product – whether you want to buy a car, participate in fantasy football – our laws are very strong in New York and other states that you can’t commit fraud.

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.

There’s only one professional team in Columbus, the Blue Jackets, but Ohio State is a football state.

In playoff football, you’ve got to be physical. You’ve got to run the ball.

I’m going to go out there and do what I do and play football, and everything will work out.

Everything in life has a price on it – there ain’t a damn thing free in America, and football has got a price on it.

I did everything in high school – I played tennis, I played basketball, I was in chorus, I was in the band, I even did the mascot senior year… I went to the football games, and at half-time I went across the field, met all the cheerleaders and got their numbers! The same year, I won prom king!

For the longest time, I thought I was a boy. I really did. I wore boys’ clothes, played tag football.

I associate the metaphor of sport with war. The unrest in the former Yugoslavia, after all, started with a football match that then became charged in nationalist ways and ended in violence.

That’s the biggest shame there is, that L.A. doesn’t have a team. I was a big fan of the L.A. Rams, and when they left, I lost interest. Then there was the Raiders, and they left. How they can’t have a football team in the biggest market in the world is beyond me.

I was 15, and the years of hard swimming had packed muscle on my frame and made me very strong. Not as strong as a football player, but strong enough to inflict heavy damage.

I grew up wrestling and playing football where, at the end of the game, you have a score and you’re either the winner of loser. There’s no score in acting, but you qualify your level of success by the people that you work with and the amount of exposure that you have.

To most boys with growing limbs and swelling sinews, physical activity is a natural instinct, and there is no need to drive them into the football field or the fives court: they go there because they like it, and there is no need to make games compulsory for them.

All this cuddling and kissing on stage these days, well it’s all right in football when someone scores a goal, but not when you’re playing darts.

I don’t love football the way I once loved the game. I don’t look at it as fun anymore, and it definitely used to be fun. A lot of the fun has been taken away from it, I guess, because you go through so much on the field and off the field.

There’s more to life than football, right?

I was a wrestler. I played football, lacrosse. After high school, I got into jujitsu. I boxed my whole adult life.

Rugby is a different game. There is an interruption every two minutes also in American football. Our soccer is a moving game: play, play, play, move, move – you don’t interrupt.

If a Middle Eastern sheikh comes to buy Bayern Munich, he could buy 49 per cent. Fifty-one per cent must stay in Germany with the club. That law came about because of the developments of international football.

The trouble for today’s footballers is they have too many distractions. We used to get our old players coming to watch training with football magazines in their hands. Now, more often than not, they are checking the share prices.

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.

If football taught me anything about business, it is that you win the game one play at a time.

I remember playing football dressed in peculiar costumes with some friends in France and laughing so hard we couldn’t even stand up, let alone kick the ball.

The Premier League is very difficult football and very different to when you play in Europe, but the player has to have experience to adapt, and this is the key point.

I remember when I first came to Liverpool, Pepe Reina helped with everything, and he made it easy for me. When I was Atletico Madrid captain, I tried to help everyone. These are the basics in football: you need to create an atmosphere and try to create a group of friends. It’s not easy, and it doesn’t always happen, but you have to try.

My son is a Liverpool fan, and he was already kicking a ball before he was one. He was born in the football city he had no choice.

I didn’t realise how my life was changing. When I was 17, 18, 20, I didn’t realise how big football was and everything around football. How many people live for football and love football. I was a professional, but I was a supporter.

Football is a team sport and not an individual sport. We win as a team, and every individual is better if we are part of the team.

You have to know what club you are playing for, or you just play for yourself. Every time I put on a Liverpool shirt, I know it is more than just a football game.

Steven Adler and I played football in the street when we were 12. I remember rehearsing in my bedroom with my first band, and some kid climbed over the fence of my backyard and peeked his head in the window to see who was rocking. It was Slash.

I was always doing something physical. My brothers and I used to have handstand contests. We’d walk around the projects on our hands and see who could get the farthest. I was always playing football with them, basketball or racing in the street.

You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.

In international football, you need pace and you need your players up top to create things out of nothing and run at people.

People can talk about my age for as long as they like. There is nothing better in football than proving people wrong, and I’ll try to do that for as long as I can.

I’m a very private person, and you have a lot of people looking into your personal life, away from football. That’s the one thing that I don’t like, but I always remember how lucky we are that we’re playing football.

I didn’t want to be the rebel who was bottom of the class, so I worked hard. They wanted me to stay on for A-Levels, but football came calling – that was my real love.

As a kid, you obviously dream of being a professional footballer. I would watch players like Ronaldo of Brazil and pretend to be him in the playground. But I don’t think about trying to become one of the best in the world or anything like that. I just play football.

I probably prefer Spanish football to the others. It’s very technical, the way they play they keep the ball well, and whenever Spurs have played against Spanish teams in the past, they’ve always made it difficult for us.

I was never too much into school. I liked lunchtimes and breaks, but nah, I hated sitting at a desk. I was always looking out of the window, looking at my watch, thinking about when I could play football.

In my 20 years in football, I was fortunate enough never to have experienced relegation. And while there is the pressure of expectations at the top of the league, at the bottom it comes in fear and trepidation, which is almost worse.

As football gets more globalised, it’s probably more important than ever to have one or two players in your team who have grown up in the same streets or been to the same schools as the hard-core fans.

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.

I would have been about seven years old when the formative years of my competitive football education began. I was playing in the local leagues around Manchester, playing against lads from tough areas who had been taught they had to fight for everything.

If I can push myself up to the 2018 World Cup, then I’ll go on. After that, I’ll close the door and stop playing football.

I played basketball, baseball, and football. I never had much downtime. But I think playing multiple sports helped tremendously in my baseball career. I have the agility of all three combined into one.

I was a halfback on an American football team in Athens, Greece – the Kississia Colts – where I went to high school, and we took the Cup my senior year. The downside, and somewhat unfortunate piece of information I have to pass on, is there were only two teams in the league because of the limited amount of Americans.

It all went wrong with football, the thing I loved most of all, and from there, my life slowly fell apart.

The nice thing is that when people come up to me, it’s the football they remember, not all the other rubbish.

It’s a big compliment that so many people want to see me. For them, it’s all about football. That’s what they remember about me.

I just think to be a manager you’ve got to live and breathe and have this incredible enthusiasm for football, the whole thing. And while I love the game, and it’s been a large part of my life, it’s not the only thing in my life.

I was quite good at football once, although other than that my speciality would be maths. I’m great at sudokus and find all the spin-off games pretty easy too.

The train’s always full of football fans going up to see matches. Oh, they make sure I hear their points of view all right. They all want to have their say about their team, and make their opinions known.

Radicalism is as British as tea and cakes, as much a part of our make-up as monarchy and football. It will never have its own jubilees, palaces or honours system.

I played football for Leeds United under-18s, but at 17 my eyes started to go and I had to wear glasses. The football had to go – there were no contact lenses in 1957.

Football games are on TV, and it doesn’t affect stadium attendance at all. It’s the same with movies. People who really love movies and like to go out on a Saturday night will go to the movie theater.

One of London’s massive strengths is its sporting prowess, its great football teams.

I do get invitations all of the time to play actual fantasy football, by the way, but I get the feeling that I’d like it too much. I have enough demands on my time. My fans would kill me.

More and more these days what I find myself doing in my stories is making a representation of goodness and a representation of evil and then having those two run at each other full-speed, like a couple of PeeWee football players, to see what happens. Who stays standing? Whose helmet goes flying off?

The football playoffs feature one-off affairs, without bad feelings building from weekend to weekend. In addition, football uses platoons for offense and defense and kicking, so only the interior linemen have a chance to really get up close and personal with one another.

I had pro offers from the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers, who were pretty hard up for linemen in those days. If I had gone into professional football the name Jerry Ford might have been a household word today.

Why is playing football in Europe considered the pinnacle of our game, yet in other spheres of life, that same phrase – ‘being in Europe’ – is dismissed with suspicion?

There’s definitely football in the blood, but my body made my decision for me that I was going to be an Olympic athlete instead.

I was very into football in my early teens and spent six months with Aston Villa, but I never really got further than having trials. I’m also into ice hockey.

I didn’t want to leave Newcastle, but that’s football.

While American football is very structured and linear and static – where everyone lines up, and there’s a burst, and it happens – soccer is like the cosmos. It’s like constellations. It’s bodies moving in space. It’s a very spherical game.

Football shape is one thing, and then ‘futbol’ shape is a completely other thing. It’s a whole other level of fitness that you have to work to maintain.

I played football and ran track in junior high, but by high school I was getting serious about my studies.

If people feel 4-4-2 is the way forward in international football, they’ll have to wait until I’m out of a job.

I’ve been in football a long time and people have problems through debt, drugs, drink and family.

People think I’ve got a problem with the press. Actually I have no problem with the press, but just like in football there are a handful who cause problems because they’re disrespectful, they’re lazy, and above all – and this is what really gets to me – they haven’t worked hard to get there.

Do I miss football in Scotland? It keeps you really alive, that’s for sure. Your heartbeat fluctuates. I’m flatlining at the moment which is actually quite nice but you need to go up and down to stay alive.

The reason I became a manager was to have full control over training. If you are a coach, you are bound by what the manager wants you to coach. The other reason is that I just like the company of football people.

You don’t hear a film director saying ‘Money mustn’t go out of the industry’ to actors. You don’t hear a concert promoter saying ‘We must make sure that money doesn’t go out of our industry’ to Elton John. Some people in football seem to think, ‘Never mind the players, let’s get on with the game.’

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.

The whole object of the players’ association is to try and make sure that any individual is able to capitalise on his ability, particularly in football, which is a very short career.

From my point of view what I have to do now is appreciate and enjoy what football gave me, but now do something else with the same energy and enthusiasm I gave to football without expecting the same results.

Football is a game of skill, we kicked them a bit and they kicked us a bit.

In international football you have 10 games a season, with players from different clubs. There’s no time for proper coaching they’re just recovering from playing on the Saturday.

The biggest thing I’ve found since I left the game – and I’m glad I chose to leave rather than being sacked – is that so many people are in football for the wrong reasons. Not because they love the game, but because they smell money.

Football needs its roots, it needs its connection with the supporters. But those in charge seem to think they can do without them.

Arsenal were really interested in me for a long time, and I think that I fit into the football Arsenal play.

London is really nice, and I’m really happy here, but, of course, I’ve moved here to play football and not just to be in the city.

Maybe if I was born in Kosovo, I might not be where I am now, so I need to thank Switzerland, of course, because I went to school there, learnt to play football there, and started my career there.

I know that there are coaches in the Bundesliga that have said in team meetings, ‘Provoke Xhaka he will eventually go ballistic.’ I think that is sad. That, in my view, has nothing to do with football.

I’m working seven days a week in the fall. I couldn’t possibly keep that up. This is only for the fall. In the last couple of years I’ve tended to do most of my serious writing in the winter, when there’s nothing going on with football.

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

It was actually a very nice little book done by a gift book company. They illustrated it with pictures from 1920s football, before there were face guards.

I was just different. When the other kids gravitated to football or basketball, I went fishing and skating. I was into trapping animals, pheasants and squirrels. Not only was I trapper, I was a taxidermist.

It depends on how my football career goes, but when I am finished, I would love to go the NFL and be a kicker. Even if I got to play just one game, it is something I would like to do.

Watching all the football over the weekend – and having to wait until Monday night to play – gets you ready, gets you firing.

In football, you have to grow up quickly, and you’re generally more mature than other people your age.

A lot of people say second seasons are harder than the first because people are now expecting you to do stuff, so yes, that’s down to me to work hard and try and improve and, like I say, just letting my football do the talking.

It was definitely not the salary that made me join Manchester United I went for football reasons – for the history of the club, the league, the fans, and the coach because he is one of the best in the world.

If you play football, you have to try to do the maximum, so I’m always doing the maximum for myself because, after my football career, I want to sit down and think I did something good.

I always wanted to become a football player, and I thank my parents, as they helped me so much to realise this dream. They always supported me on my path.

The most dangerous area is the centre, which has to be either attacked or defended in football, and it’s the same in chess.

You know that if you play football, you have to try to do the maximum, so I’m always doing the maximum for myself because when I retire from football, I want to sit down and think I did something good – I won this title, and I won this title. People will talk about what you have won, and that is the most important thing in football.

Literally thousands of lawsuits have been filed against the NFL by retired players, many of whom say that information on brain injury in football was withheld from them.

Football is at least as ‘gay’ as rugby, Greco-Roman wrestling and the film ‘300.’

My father was raised with brothers, he was a football player and a boxer, he was a chief petty officer in the Navy, he was a man of his times.

Since they all broke up the greatest conference in football, which was the Southwest Conference, I’ve had little interest in them any more. I thought that was a disaster and a disgrace when they did that, but they did it anyway. So I’ve lost interest them and I don’t care what they do anymore.

There is always room for losers in the football business. They are the mother’s milk of gambling, and why not? Somebody has to do it, or there won’t be any winners.

I think the concept of seeking fame and fortune in women’s football in the States is a bit idyllic. Look at all the teams in America that have folded, and the leagues.

When the Olympics and World Cups come around, that’s when you see the real outpouring of support that there really is for female football.

Nixon was a crook, of course, but he was also a rabid football fan – and he knew the game, which still astounds me, but I have always had a soft spot for him because of it.

Nixon was a bad loser. He hated losing worse than death, and that is why I enjoyed him. We were both football fans, both addicts and on some days, nothing else mattered.

February is always a bad month for TV sports. Football is gone, basketball is plodding along in the annual midseason doldrums, and baseball is not even mentioned.

Honestly, I was only rested in rugby football all my friends were boys, and I definitely didn’t want to go on stage, but I just did it to keep everyone happy. I did some singing, dancing like they liked, but it wasn’t my thing at all.

Football has always been violent. In the early days of the game, they didn’t wear hard helmets. They wore soft helmets, which were just designed to protect the ears. In the ’40s and ’50s they began to introduce hard helmets, which provided much more protection against things like skull fractures.

But I would much prefer students going to college to learn and be prepared for the rigors of the new economic order, rather than dumping fees on them to subsidize football programs that, far from enhancing the academic mission instead make a mockery of it.

My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace where nobody could get at me – nobody, like the football coach.

I’m really into football, gadgets, adventurous activities, and cooking new, creative recipes right now – but you’ll never catch me being boring.

Yes, I applied a lot of what I did in football to golf.

The positions I played in football, being a quarterback and a defensive back, you had to kind of have a little independent thinking.

When it’s football season, I’m all football.

In football, like in life, you must learn to play within the rules of the game.

I never dreamed about being an actor, because that was out of reach. Coming from a small town that was big in farming, and also big in clothing factories, you don’t dream about being a professional football player or an actor.

Without a doubt in my mind, I should be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. You look at my stats without my USFL stats, and I don’t know how you can argue with that. Look at my combined yards. I’m not one to make excuses, so I’ll play by their rules and not even count the USFL stats.

In high school I was the manager of the football team, so being around boys is natural to me!

No, I’m not a lager lout either. I think you have to be a massive football fan to be a lager lout.

There are a lot of famous comedians from Liverpool, then obviously the Beatles, and the football club. That’s what people in Liverpool are passionate about.

I’ve done my coaching badges, I’ve got my Pro Licence, but I enjoy what I’m doing now. I’m also the elite performance director of the Welsh FA. The main thing for me was always Liverpool Football Club and my country, Wales – and I’m lucky enough to still be involved with both of them.

People say you should go out at the top but I was enjoying my football so much. Robbie Fowler’s exactly the same: he’s not playing for money any more, he’s playing for enjoyment. Why go out at the top if it’s going to make you miserable? I just wanted to play as long as I could.

Whether we’re stuffing our faces with Kogi tacos or playing a pickup game of football outside the stages, there’s never a shortage of fun behind the scenes on ‘Murder In The First.’

Because I was big, I didn’t have to listen to anyone doubting me. I was just considered good at football or whatever, there were no questions about it.

When I talk football with my friends, I don’t talk about Tom Brady’s hair. I talk about how he handles the blitz, or how he runs his offense. I talk as a fan. I don’t want pink jerseys, and I don’t want dumbed-down content. I want to be treated as a real fan – because I am proud to be one.

At Random’ ran on Saturday nights for as long as the conversation was still lively. Sometimes, I’d finish way after midnight, then hop a plane for whatever city I was working a football game that Sunday.

Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.

It wasn’t like I ever said, ‘I want to be an actor.’ I was in the right place at the right time. I went to a local drama group because I found football on the weekends too cold – which is highly ironic because I’ve had some of the coldest experiences of my life filming ‘Game of Thrones.’

You know, I stopped being competitive after I played football.

I played football, honestly, to get a scholarship.

Few would deny that blacks have become very dominant in athletics: football, basketball, track, now dominant in tennis and dominant in golf.

Nobody I ever broke bread with, and I see players all the time, talked about using their head running the football.

The social issues outside of football are not as defined as they were earlier, when integration took place and certain rights were legislated. The Civil Rights movement is over. Individuals can buy homes wherever they want, travel first class wherever they want, eat wherever they want.

When you go out on a football field, you are responsible for taking care of yourself. The more rules you get, the less players truly take care of themselves.

NASCAR stepped up their safety concepts, and I think the drivers feel NASCAR is doing everything that can be done. So we are a little behind NASCAR in that respect. Someone in NASCAR realized there were certain things that could be done to make it safer. The same thing has to happen in football.

I don’t want football to not be played, but I would like the sophistication brought forth to take care of those who need to be taken care of and to take the precaution, at the sacrifice of winning, to take care of people.

Nobody I ever broke bread with – and I see players all the time – talked about using their head running the football. I’ve seen Barry Sanders and Eric Dickerson and Marcus Allen and Franco Harris, and we’ve all been together – we were all together at the Super Bowl – and no one talked about using their head.

Ultimately, if you look at the game and there are two minutes left, and you have to ensure your victory, you don’t want to throw the damn football. You want a runner who can run the clock out.

Ben Schwartzwalder was a decent guy, but he was from another era. He was like a Marine, with a real army attitude. He thought there was only one way to play football, and that was the rough way.

When my first semester grades came out, my mom and dad told me I wouldn’t be playing football.

Politics is like football if you see daylight, go through the hole.

Thursday night football is here to stay. So we’re looking at ways to make it safer. Now they’re playing division games, so you limit travel. Now the question is, should you play Sunday night before a Thursday night?

We need the quarterbacks. It’s a passing league and a quarterback-driven league. We need the Peyton Mannings in football uniforms out there playing – the Tom Bradys, the Drew Breeses, the Philip Riverses – we need those guys instead of them standing on the sideline.

When I got out of coaching, I had taught a class at the University of California, an extension class on football for fans. I was looking for tools. I was showing them films. I was going to write a textbook. Trip Hawkins came to me about making it a game for computers.

To me, discipline in football occurs on the field, not off it.

Having been in football all my life as a player and a coach and having been on the sideline, I think the closer we can get to bringing people what it’s like standing and watching the game on the sideline, with a better view, would be the perfect situation for television football.

I’ve got five grandkids. They play baseball, they play football, they play basketball. I go to all the games. You always have that urge to say something when you’re watching them. But I’ve learned to keep it to myself. I’ve blurted out some things and embarrassed myself.

Both of my sons used to coach high school football. When they started, I’d say things I shouldn’t have. So I learned my lesson.

Nothing jazzes me up like football. I’ve acquired more passion of the years, not less. Not to love it wouldn’t make sense.

Nobody, not even the head coach, would do anything to the football unilaterally, such as adjust the amount of pressure in a ball, without the quarterback not knowing. It would have to be the quarterback’s idea.

Football isn’t nuclear physics, but it’s not so simple that you can make it simple. It takes some explaining to get it across.

When people watch football, they’re looking for fun things.

A consulting position might work in another profession, but not in pro football. There’s no such thing. They give a guy a parking spot and put his name up as a consultant, and in six months, they erase the name.

I don’t actually go to a lot of games because I think football on TV is better. Even though I’m pretty busy, I watch 90 percent of Ohio State’s games.

I don’t like going to football games. I like watching them on television. When you go to a game, it’s hard to focus. There’s so much going on, and it’s cold. I’d rather sit and watch it and get replays and commentary.

When I came on the tour, I thought, ‘Why don’t they treat tennis players the same way they look at football players?’ Because I’ve got news for you: when they are on the pitch, they are not saying, ‘Hello, how are you?’ out there.

In my neighborhood in Springfield, Ohio, there were a lot of young kids. We all played tackle football after school, but I knew very early on that I was not an athlete.

When you just work tactically, in pure football sessions, you can see the way they can think football.

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.

When my kids were young, we could move and experience different countries and, in my case, different clubs and different football, but there is a moment when they need some stability.

I don’t know where football will take me because in football, you never know, but for sure, as a family, our home will be in London.

In football, I’m not so old. At 52, maybe I have 20 years in front of me to coach. But I feel myself as… you might say an ‘old fox.’ Nothing scares me nothing worries me too much. It looks like nothing new can happen for me.

Once, players came to football expecting to be wealthy when they retired. Now, they expect to be wealthy before they’ve played their first game!

Arsenal have won that advantage, nobody gave it to them. By playing fantastic football and by winning matches and by winning trophies, they won that respect that the opponent has for them.

So I know all about the ups and downs of football, I know that one day I will be sacked.

And I think because of the passion of every English player and every English supporter, and every English journalist for the game, most of the game is played with passion, love for football and instinct, but in football you also have to think.

Prior to high school, I played a lot of neighborhood football.

Pro football gave me a good sense of perspective to enter politics: I’d already been booed, cheered, cut, sold, traded and hung in effigy.

When I was at drama school, I was totally broke, and a lot of my mates had jobs and were financially very good to me, so if, for example, I take them away on a trip to a football match in Europe, it means that I can pay them back a bit.

My early ambitions were the same as they are now – to play for Manchester United. I was, and still am, football mad.

Women will not talk about football unless one of them is in love with a football player, and then suddenly you discover that they know everything that is to be known about it.

My real name is Bob Davis, but for some reason, I got the name Jasper while playing football at the local rec when I was nine years old, and it just stuck. Years later, when someone asked ‘Jasper who?’ I just said ‘Carrott’ – but I have no idea why I came out with that particular word.

As the National Football League and other pro sports increasingly reckon with the early dementia, mental health issues, suicides and even criminal behavior of former players, the risk of what’s known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), is becoming clear.

Scarily, football helmets, which do a fine job of protecting against scalp laceration and skull fracture, do little to prevent concussions and may even exacerbate them, since even as the brain is rattling around inside the skull, the head is rattling around inside the helmet.

To me it was never about what I accomplished on the football field, it was about the way I played the game.

Montana and I had a chemistry that was unbelievable. When I first came into the league he told me I added five years to his career, and I just think we complimented each other very well and were able to do some amazing things out on the football field.

I’ve grown over the years and I know how to adapt to situations, where I can go into a situation where there’s a crowd of people and just take over. But pretty much I’m off to myself. And I’m totally committed to the game of football. That’s why I’ve had so much success.

I’m used to performing under pressure, but that’s playing football.

I wish I had some strapping football player husband. It would be such a dream to be ‘normal’ like that, but I’m just not.

Football is such a team sport, so no one individual does it. No one coach or no one assistant coach or no one player, it’s a great team sport, so I don’t get carried away with a bunch of accolades.

Especially in football, it is not a QB’s game… even though the media likes to make it into that – it takes the whole team.

I mean the game is just, everybody talks about baseball but I really think football probably has a little bit more American feeling than anything.

The game is just, everybody talks about baseball, but I really think football probably has a little bit more American feeling than anything.

I think I could have become an outstanding professional baseball player, but I don’t think I could have reached the heights that I have in football – being one of the very top players in the game, being a world champion.

As a football coach, everything in your life comes after your football schedule. I just could not make that commitment.

I deal with football from a realistic, logical point of view.

There’s an old saying amongst players in football talking about your general manger and coaches, they speak with a forked tongue.

I am a football fan, yeah.

Football is about having the best offensive play possible. I always like to play offensive football, and nobody will convince me otherwise.

My foundation now has some 120 football pitches laid out for children, a lot of them immigrants. We live in a multicultural society.

I played football in the ninth and 10th grade. I looked a lot like Joe Namath, so I think my looks got me there more than my abilities.

For me, I skate as masculine as I can. I’m not a big strong guy. I’m not interested in fighting or throwing punches or balling my hands in fists all day. I’m not interested in guns, I’m not interested in football or stereotypically masculine things, so I’m going to skate in a fashion that is manly for Johnny Weir.

Corporate documents, like football game plans, are not easily drafted in a stadium, with thousands of very interested fans participating, each with their own red pencil, trying to reach a consensus on every word.

Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.

I played softball and basketball growing up. I really wanted to play football but both parents said no. I was mad for a second, then got over it. Now, just because I’m tall doesn’t mean I can play basketball. I was waaaaay better at swinging a bat.

Although I hardly ever turn on the TV set unless it’s football season, I do watch a lot of TV on my iPad – perfect for long airplane journeys.

When I got heartbroken at 20, it just felt like someone had spiraled a football right into my skull. At 40, it feels like someone had driven a 757 right through me.

I want to coach high school football, and that’s always what I’ve wanted to do.

I feel like, growing up, I watched football, obviously, and you see great players, and as a fan, you want to watch the best you can possibly watch, and you want to see what’s capable of being made.

I know that I’m going out there, and I know that I am going to get hit in the head. I know that’s part of football. That’s like a firefighter knowing he is going to go into a fire at some point. You know you are going to be put in danger’s way, and you accept that risk, and you do it.

The way I look at it is that somebody in the world, no matter what your field is – teacher, violinist, football player – has to be the best. Why not me?

The number of fighters that are ISIS fighters wouldn’t fill up most American football stadiums. This is not a large group of individuals, but they’re tenacious, and they rule with absolute terror.

I’m very proud of ‘Gavin and Stacey,’ but I think I have to write something else even to start to consider myself a writer. Just because you do something once, it doesn’t mean that’s who you are. I played football last night it doesn’t mean I’m a footballer.

Louis Tomlinson, who is a member of One Direction, his mum was a chaperone on ‘Fat Friends.’ So Louis used to come to the set with his mum, and since I was the only sort of young person around, we would kick a football around, things like that.

Football is very masculine and, to me, a metaphor for war.

If it’s football season, all things sort of stop. I’m from Seattle, so I’ll watch the Seahawks and whatever other game that day is worthy.

Football, basketball, and the Olympic sports all have their problems with banned substances.

Back in East St. Louis, tennis wasn’t the real thing. If you weren’t playing baseball, basketball, football, you were kind of on the outside.

And we have not found any generational gap at all. If he wants to go a football game, he goes. If I want to go to a fashion show, I go. We don’t have to do everything together. But we like doing most things together.

We believe that African football is among the best in the world and very much characterized the Puma brand mentality, which is to win.

I love Halloween, trick or treating and decorating the house. And I love Thanksgiving, because of the football and the fall weather. And of course, I love Christmas – that’s my favorite of all!

There will soon be streams of data coming from all manner of products – appliances, clothing, sporting goods, you name it. Wouldn’t you rather live in a world where you can export the data from your son’s football helmet to a new app that monitors force and impact against a cohort of high school players around the country?

I love football and the intensity of football in Liverpool, this is what is very good for me.

I always thought about working in England because of the kind of football, the intensity of football. Liverpool was first choice.

We should play free football, defend lively with a passion, and have the best understanding in offence.

In England, football is a big thing to talk about, but Liverpool, it’s a special place. You feel it when you make your first step.

Yes, it is one of my ultimate aims – it is the ultimate sense of football: to make the people happy, to let them live some emotions that you usually can’t get.

The best thing I can say is professional football is a business. When they are recruiting football players, they are not recruiting model citizens. Everybody has to be aware of this. What’s being selected for the NFL is the ability to play and perform on Sunday afternoons. Everything else is secondary.

I could be 30 pounds heavier if I played football. But I play baseball, and I do Pilates.

Confidence is sky high, but we’re also all very grounded. We know, in football, nothing can be taken for granted.

My life has changed, but I’m not money-motivated at all that’s the last thing on my mind. I just want to play football, and that’s how I’ve always been.

There is only one thing I want to do here, and that is play football to the best of my ability. If I let things start distracting me, I’m not going to be able to do that, which will jeopardise the team as well.

There is no free speech in football. Information is parsed by monosyllabic head coaches, who dictate who gets to speak to whom and when.

In 1927, my father descended the heights and took his place as the newly appointed water boy for his beloved New York football Giants.

I don’t think I could ever describe myself as unlucky because people would look at me, playing football for a living, and say: ‘Are you winding me up?’

There is always going to be competition. When you play for a top club, you’re going to attract top players. It’s part and parcel of football.

People know what they’re getting with me. It’s part and parcel of football that people want to see new faces, but all I can do is play games, score goals and prove I can do it. My record is there for everyone to see.

It doesn’t matter who you are, football’s a business. At some stage you’re going to have to leave a football club that’s just normal.

It was easy to get wrapped up in some of the negative stuff, but obviously I chose not to. I didn’t want to get in trouble and end up in prison where I can’t play football. It was as simple as that.

This quarterback Weeden can drive the ball down field. He’s a thing of beauty on throwing a football. His passing motion and his arm, frankly, you won’t see a more gifted passer, power, accuracy, the entire aspect of it.

Many people, many girls have tried to teach me the rules to football. And you would think that it would get in my head that way, but I just don’t understand it.

And it’s the President of the United States who said he wasn’t going to spike the football and all this, we shouldn’t gloat about it, running campaign ads, gloating about it and saying the other guy isn’t good enough to do the tough things that I did, which I think is, one reprehensible.

I don’t think people can watch University of Texas basketball or football games with me – really, anything Texas is playing – without wanting to punch me in the face. I’m as big a Longhorn fan as you’ll find.

The caliber of play suffered and attendance declined year by year. Interest in college football was exploding, and there was this new game called basketball.

Up until the age of 16, I was very focused on sport – I played a lot of football. Then I tore my ACL and had to stop playing.

What the people say on TV means nothing to me, and it means nothing to anybody that’s actually playing football. It’s for the fans to watch and enjoy.

You take your shots when you have them, and I threw a lot of touchdowns, but I’m always going to take care of the football in the red zone.

I’m playing quarterback, I’m playing football, and I don’t try to make it more than that.

I’m a football guy at heart maybe I should have played football for a living instead, because I play a lot of football videogames I’m really into them.

More than anything tough, I play ‘Madden’. I’m a football guy at heart maybe I should have played football for a living instead, because I play a lot of football videogames. I’m really into them.

On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner’s office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player.

Football is in a guy’s DNA. A primal thing. You should play it so you can talk about the glory days when you get older and drink Bud with the guys from the office. Get it done when you’re young, while you have the chance.

I actually ran in junior high school a little bit, you know, like most kids do in track and things. Then I got out of it and just trained for football and played ball for so many years – high school, college and the NFL.

As we say from time to time, it’s hard to win in the National Football League.

We’re gonna play fast, we’re gonna play physical, we’re gonna play furious, and we’re gonna play contact football.

Prize-Fighting is not the aim of boxing. This noble exercise ought not to be judged by the dishonesty or the low lives of too many of its professional followers. Let it stand alone, an athletic practice, on the same footing as boating or football.

A lot of things look good on an academic’s blackboard in terms of the actions that need to be taken. It’s almost like a football coach, when you draw the X’s and O’s: Every play that is chalked on that board goes for a touchdown. Well, there are a lot of yards to be made between the line of scrimmage and the touchdown.

When I first started playing football, a headache was called a ‘headache.’ And now it’s called ‘a concussion.’

I was a quarterback in pee-wee football. I always wanted to be quarterback. They’re the leaders, they make the calls. It didn’t work out because I didn’t have the arm. I also played wide receiver my senior year in high school.

Playing football and rugby is the Samoan sport. It’s part of the conversation at church. It’s part of the conversation in their barbershops, in the grocery stores. It’s what everyone is aware of and familiar with. They take a lot of pride in the beating you can take in the course of that sport.

Football is a chess game to me. If you move your pawn against my bishop, I’ll counter that move to beat you. Football is the same way. I study so much film that I know exactly what teams are going to do. I love knowing what a offense is going to run and stuffing that play.

Being a part of the National Football League for so long, I’ve come across so many trainers and equipment managers who’ve allowed me to be who I am today.

In the normal process of evaluating the end of the season, I meet with key executives for thorough discussions and evaluations of all aspects of football operations.

I started surfing when I was working on ‘The Hunger Games,’ out on the north shore of Oahu, so about four years ago. I used to skateboard as a kid, kind of religiously, until I broke my leg riding in a pool when I was about 14 and I couldn’t play football that fall.

It was a very exciting time for me to play professional football, finally.

I do play football no-holds-barred. Any edge I can get, I’ll take. I’d grab a face mask only in a fit of anger. Uncontrolled anger is damn near insane.

For a football coach, there’s nothing that matches the pain of a team not playing up to its capabilities.

If you’re talking about nuclear physics, I have to defer to the next guy. But if you’re talking about football, I don’t have to take a back seat to anyone.

The scary thing is that players have a one-upsmanship about money they sign a contract and they like it until someone signs a bigger one and now they don’t like it. I don’t like that. I don’t begrudge anyone money, but it disrupts the football team.

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.

I went to Alabama, so I’m still very devoted to Alabama football and the SEC.

For a kid who’s lost his mom and all the rage and grief that no one was able to talk out of me, football was a very therapeutic sport. Very.

Not every kid plays football, basketball. Running can be a source to vent and let things out.

If you’re going to play high school football, you do it in Texas or Florida or Georgia for the simple fact it’s such a big deal.

My favorite football team is the Bears because my favorite player is on there, Devin Hester. I love the whole team, though. But that’s just my favorite player.

We South Africans are also crazy about football, so the World Cup can be nothing but successful.

There is a broad cultural current that conveys the idea that a film is like a football team, it represents a nation, it is illustrated literature, filmed radio. These are outdated concepts, totally out of touch with today’s realities.

It’s something you dream about as a kid. Like when you play all those NCAA video games as a kid and you create your own player and win the Heisman with a bunch of crazy numbers. It’s the biggest, most prestigious award in college football, so it’d definitely be a dream come true.

Some of football’s gaudiest displays of manliness are purely aesthetic. It’s not what players do, it’s how they look doing it.

Basketball’s eras are defined by teams – Celtics, Lakers, Bulls – and baseball’s epochs are defined by players – Ruth, Robinson, Mantle – but with football, it’s the sideline strategists, the nutty professors and top coated Lears.

Baseball, boxing, handball – sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper.

Before I was 12 years old, I had no interest in music I was just into football. Then I heard Don McLean’s ‘Vincent’ come on at the end of an episode of ‘The Simpsons.’ You know when you hear something and you don’t understand why you like it, you just do? That’s how I felt. I just thought, ‘I want to be able to write songs like that.’

That’s what we really mean by being feared on the football field. And not actually the player that fears him, it’s the offensive coordinator that fears him or the running backs coach.

I play a lot of football, watch a lot of football, and think about football.

I secretly liked acting, but I wanted to play football. It was an enormous dream.

I used to play football for Real Madrid, and to be on stage for two hours, I can tell you it takes the same amount of strength.

Fantasy football is not only a good thing, but a great thing.

Unfortunately, there are no mulligans when it comes to pro football contracts.

For me, I’m lucky to have a lot of close friends – through football or through my family.

Everything to me is about team football, and if we keep winning Super Bowl trophies, I’ll be fine.

As long as I own this football team and long after I’m gone, they will always be the Washington Redskins.

I sing the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ so I can get into football, basketball and baseball games for free.

My little brothers loved baseball. I’m not as big on that as basketball or football, but I understand the game.

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

The beauties of the game may be lost on some of us sometimes, but many children will read about football when they will read nothing else, not for realism or glamour but for romance.

In the game of football, you can never be too sure of anything.

When I started, there weren’t any arenas. There was football fields, but they would only hold three or four or five hundred people at the most… We played a lot of high school auditoriums and things like that – a lot of churches… but boy, it has changed.

It’s grossly unfair to judge Walter Payton solely on the yards he gains. He is a complete football player, better than Jim Brown, better than O.J. Simpson.

I’m really into basketball, baseball, football and working out – but you’ll never catch me in a public sauna.

If I liken the Pacific War to a football match, I can say to you that the first half is over, we have kicked off after the interval, and we are going to carry the ball into enemy territory for a smashing victory.

Gentlemen, it is better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football.

Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.

Now let me say that Matt Busby was a great manager and Manchester United wouldn’t be where they are without him. He was a god at the club, but he wasn’t a god to me. Football is like that sometimes.

It’s so funny I grew up in the Midwest, I have two older brothers, and you’re just as competitive playing football as you are eating pickled eggs, or trying to kill zombies. As long as you don’t take it too far, I think it’s a good way for people to relate.

The game of life is a lot like football. You have to tackle your problems, block your fears, and score your points when you get the opportunity.

In football as in watchmaking, talent and elegance mean nothing without rigour and precision.

It seems like people want to blame me for everything. Whenever any issue arises, I’m said to have been involved even if I’ve had nothing to do with it. That’s why I always focus on what I know, which is playing football, and try to be very careful with what I say because people always try and twist things.

I’m comfortable with my femininity, and I don’t try to change what I look like just because I’m reporting on football at the end of the night.

So my dad raised me, and he’s a huge football fan.

If Tiger Woods had played football, he would have been a quarterback.

If you made me the national commissioner of football, I’d tell you one thing that I would mandate. The second Saturday in September, we’re going to have conference day. Everybody from the SEC plays a Big 12 team. Everybody from the Big Ten is going to play the ACC. Everybody from the Big East is going to play the Pac-10.

I look at athletes in all sports and try to picture what kind of football player they’d be, what position they’d play and so on.

As football players, our bodies know exactly what time of year it is and what we need to be doing.

A lot of people may know my face and know that I’m a good player on the football field, but they probably don’t really know me as a person.

I’ve always thought about my legacy – more so, though, my impact off the field and how I’m helping my community and solidifying and strengthening the lives of others around me. And also, I just want to be a dominant football player, too. So it encompasses everything.

If you play football, there’s going to be a 100 percent injury rate. Something is going to be bothering you. So I just try to focus on the things that I can do to help my team.

Chess is a lot of fun for me. Football is a physical game, and in chess you can just beat someone mentally – you outwit somebody, outmaneuver them, think ahead of them.

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.

In football, you can always maim a person if you wanted to.

People get hurt all the time in the game of football, it’s part of what we do.

Taking them out of the picture, so to speak, what football really is, the savagery, the core root of football, it doesn’t change. It really puts the real in football.

As for football in L.A., it’s going to take a loooong time before another team comes here.

Before British title fights, I’ve played football on a Saturday before it’s silly as it is.

If I can run, I’m not going to sit out any game. I’m here to play football, not to watch and collect a check.

In football, you’re hitting, so you might as well hit in practice.

I always say to my people, ‘If you don’t sell a Ferrari to a football player, you make a big present to me.’ Really. Because they buy to just show off. I don’t like.

I write first drafts by hand. Never do I open an umbrella inside the house. I don’t predict wins or losses. I used to stand on a certain piece of rug if my brothers and husband were watching football and their team got in trouble – but now the luck went out of that rug. If a circle is involved, I try to go clockwise.

By the way, you won’t put that thing in about me wanting to have sex on a football pitch, will you?

Even though I support the blue side of Manchester’s football heritage, I don’t really mind that wherever I go in the world it’s not Manchester City that starts the conversation. ‘Ah, yes, Manchester United,’ is the response when I say where I come from. It’s commonplace everywhere – in Europe, Africa, Asia and even the U.S.

Even when I was young, playing college football, and I injured my knee, I bounced right back.

Opera is credible drama now, and it costs less than going to a football match. What have you got to lose?

Many sports, not just football, have kind of the macho meathead mentality where innovation is almost frowned upon.

I studied philosophy and ended on sociology. For some reason, all the advanced courses in philosophy were offered 4:30 to 6:30, so I could never go because of football, so I had to switch.

I feel that World Cup cricket should be played like football in which all the 160 countries take part. If only a handful of countries are going to keep on playing in the World Cup without making the game popular, I will be a sad man.

I, as a cricketer, would like to see 100 counties playing top-flight cricket, just like tennis and football. If I am alive to see that, I will be very happy.

I used to play football with a load of lads, and I would be like a secret agent going out with a hat on so they wouldn’t see my hair in a bun.

If you saw pictures of me as a kid, you’d laugh because I was always in football kit.

I played a lot of football, and I was a goalkeeper, but I didn’t really like playing in goal.

Playing football helped me a lot. Just reading the quarterback’s eyes and reading receivers, figuring out what they want to do.

I learned as a mascot that rules don’t really apply to you. As long as you don’t go crazy with that. You want to go be the 12th man on a football play, they might have an objection, but otherwise, if you stay out of the way of the game, you can do most anything.

You’re convincing these big, tough football players to wear what was essentially women’s lingerie. There was a little bit of a Jedi mind trick that needed to take place. The product really spoke for itself once guys felt it and touched it.

Football is a game played with arms, legs and shoulders but mostly from the neck up.

The essence of football was blocking, tackling, and execution based on timing, rhythm and deception.

I was never big or fast, but I got to play football and box.

Only a handful of professional football athletes have had a signature shoe, unlike in basketball where there have been a number of guys.

For me, the amazing thing was entering into this amazing world of ‘Sesame Street.’ We’d be in the kids’ room, and there was a door into the soundstage that said ‘1-2-3 Open Sesame.’ I remember pushing that door open and going into this incredible magical world of make-believe. In one episode, I was playing football with Joe Namath.

I’ve been very fortunate to be with Coach Saban this long, learned a lot of football from him. It’s been kind of the key to my personal success out of the places that I’ve coached.

Every kid I’ve been around as a football player, they want their coaches to make them better as men and as players.

They should just open lots of YouTube schools… as well as, like, a games school, where you can play all types of games. Like, if you want to play racing games, you go there and become a pro at that. Same for football or a shoot ’em up.

The majority of my family is Auburn fans, and I grew up watching Auburn football, and that’s always who I’ve cheered for.

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

In the late-’80s, there was a big push to make American football big in Scotland. The Super Bowl was on TV, but it didn’t really catch on. When I was a kid, though, I became a big Miami Dolphins fan. I don’t really know why – I just liked the logo, I guess. I didn’t really know what was going on.

I don’t really pretend to know what’s going on, but I’ve been immersed in the excitement of watching sports, particularly football. I like baseball, probably more than football.

While I’m more of a soccer and tennis fan myself, I still enjoying catching some football games when I get the chance.

For many sports fans, the onset of fall only means one thing: It’s football season!

Although I may not know a lot about football, I do know a lot about food! As a result, not many people ask me to join their fantasy leagues, but they will come to me for suggestions on what to serve for guests for a weekly Sunday get-together.

I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.

Sometimes in football you deserve to win but lose. Other times you deserve to lose or draw but you win. That is the game, and it’s why I’ve always said you should never try to predict anything in football, especially in Europe.

When I wasn’t famous, I had a lot of friends, almost all of them Italian. The racism only started when I started to play football.

Sometimes I dream to be alone and that nobody would talk to me. But I understand that football is really important and that everybody watches it. When you’re famous, you have to do photos or autographs, especially for the kids.

Clearly, those of us women who play football wish that there was more coverage.

Football in Brazil is seen as a masculine sport, even with a lot of people accepting the female sport.

Clearly, those of us women who play football wish that there was more coverage. But it’s one of those things that happens. Every year the level is getting higher, and I think we surprise a lot of people when the world focuses its attention on the World Cup or the Olympics final.

When I started playing, there were no teams and no structure, so I had to play with the boys. I get very emotional when I think about the humiliation that I’ve suffered playing football.

As a lad growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, I played both Gaelic football and soccer and loved them both.

I watch HGTV like a maniac, and when it’s bad, it’s like some crazy college guy watching a football game.

To me, having 500 rolls of fabric around is the most calming thing in the world. I think it’s what football is to some guys.

That’s another thing, we made up games. We didn’t have equipment. When it snowed, we would play slow motion tackle football. We would play hockey, but we wouldn’t skate. We just made things up. I loved doing that.

When I went to high school, an all-boys’ school, a Catholic school, I tried out for football, and I didn’t make it. It was the first time, athletically, that I was knocked down.

I am not a movie star or a football player, I just do my thing.

I’d say I was a tomboy… I took wood shop in high school and I was very into volleyball and football, and was very unaware of anything girly for a long time.

Where the costs of entry are minimal, there is a wide avenue of opportunity for those with little or nothing, which is why football is just about the most democratic sport of all: African and Brazilian footballers compete on a level playing field with their rich white European counterparts.

I love to play games. I really like football, and I also like to ride horses.

In football, I need full concentration even though I really enjoy it.

My ultimate goal is for that next generation coming up, who didn’t see me play, go, ‘Oh, he used to play football?’

We’re sympathetic, but once you step on the field, football’s football.

When I finish playing football, I would like to work with kids and sleep!

All I know is, I was trying to win the football game. And the bottom line is, you have to do what you think is right. You have to go with your gut. And if you don’t do that, then I think you regret a lot of things later on.

As a child, I was very active. I was a gymnast, I played touch football, netball and basketball. When I was 16 years old, I started yoga. I started working out at an early age.

My father, Tommy, who was a trained draughtsman, played for Preston North End in the Finney era. He liked football but did not love it as I do.

People sometimes ask me to name the greatest coach in NFL history. George Halas may have set the standard, but Don Shula has won more games than anyone, and he has done it in the most competitive era. He had an incomparable ability to evaluate players, to motivate them, and to teach them the game of football.

I was always a little insecure. I had brothers that played football, so I was just a straight-up tomboy for a minute. I didn’t know makeup and hair stuff. My friends had to tell me what a straightener was. I didn’t know fashion or any of that until the label gave me a stylist.

It is like football with coaches, like, ‘We’re only going to think about the next game.’ It is really true, all you think is, ‘Okay, we have to make a good next episode.’

Football is controlled violence, but it is violence, which people have loved to watch since the gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome.

Rather than opera, football is more like ballet or a chess game. You can really see it in a team like Arsenal, especially when Dennis Bergkamp was playing. He seemed to be able to read the game like a chessboard and knew where a player would be several seconds later and put the ball there for him.

If you look at football over the last 50 years there has been a gradual decrease in goals, you don’t see too many 10-nils these days, but two, three or four goals per game is a good spectacle.

When you’re a kid you just think about where you are going to be to put yourself in a position for the next scoring chance. But as you develop, you start to do things that may not catch the eye of the normal football watcher, the dropping back, the closing down.

Horses will never be my career. It’s just a big passion of mine, and one that will always be there in the background, but football is my main passion and everyone knows that.

I am a great football player. I had my own club when I was 14 years old. Football is in my blood, and I have been a fan of Fulham for the last 30 years.

If you own a football club, you have to be really involved and committed.

I have always been an outstanding football player, I have always had uncanny abilities, great arm strength, an immense ability to play the game from a quarterback standpoint. The problem was that I wasn’t given the liberty to do certain things when I was young.

The good thing is I don’t put the ball in my right hand and I’m predominantly left-handed when I’m running the ball. I just have to take care of the football and even if I have two hands that are 100 percent, I still can’t turn the ball over. It’s just something I have to mentally prepare for, and I think I’m strong enough to do that.

Never played football, but I’m an athlete. I’m a competitor.

For me, football is just a game, not a drama.

I’m a lucky boy. Never wanted for anything new tracksuit, new pair of football boots. I had a happy childhood.

I wanted to play football all my life, and when I got accepted to Florida State, it was academically – it wasn’t for any kind of scholarship. I kind of sat down and said, ‘I’m not going to make it to the NFL. I’m not the size nor the skill.’

I love playing football. So I go out to play football, and I don’t really feel pressure. Of course, there are some days when things just don’t work out as well as they do on other days, but that doesn’t have anything to do with pressure.

Of course the Premier League is the most difficult league in the world because it’s so even. I think you can’t really compare other leagues with the Premier League. In the Premier League, every team can beat every team, and in football, that’s something where you can have surprises.

The movie, ‘Remember the Titans,’ is my favorite movie, staring Denzel Washington. I love the way in this movie the game of football brings those boys together, it unites those boys on that football field. It unites a whole town, black, white, old, young, rich and poor.

I’m taking T.O., every day… He gives me the whole football field.

I’m active – I like playing football, but I’m not very good. I like running, but I’m not really fast.

Really, I learned a long time ago that in the National Football League, paper doesn’t mean anything. Football teams are created on the football field.

When I was seven we moved to Orpington, and in my new school, I was kept in for extra lessons to learn ‘joined-up’ writing instead of playing football. I still think that my poor handwriting and lack of soccer skills date from that period.

Baseball is what we were, and football is what we have become.

Preseason game plans are always about fundamentals and playing football. You’re not trying to out-scheme anybody, you’re just trying to beat people and out-execute people. That’s what’s fun to me.

The vast majority of fantasy football fans, myself included, revel in the absurdity of it all.

I don’t follow football, but I always watch the Superbowl.

If you’re dating the quarterback and then you go out with the hockey player, you just go to the hockey games. I don’t think I’ll still go to the football games.

Nobody really doubted me playing football, making it to the NFL. I was like, ‘I know I can do that.’

I ran track for my school. I played football, but I didn’t play for my high school I played for a little league team.

I love basketball, but I miss football every time I watch it.

You don’t have to be the biggest, tallest, strongest guy to do whatever you want to do. You can do anything. There’s tall doctors, short doctors. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be the tallest guy to play the sport of basketball, football or whatever you want to play.

I do enjoy playing some sports, even though none of them are organized. I enjoy football most of all.

As a kid, there are some things you looked forward to. You looked forward to Charlie Brown during Halloween and you looked forward to Monday Night Football.

We played a lot of sandlot ball, so we were used to tackling each other, or falling on the concrete, things of that nature. And nine times out of 10, our flag games turned into tackle anyway. So when I got to high school, tackle football was kind of natural.

I think any football is a guy that is able to one, be able to be humble and hungry off the field, but at the same time on the football field understand what they have to get done and be a little bit ferocious.

Growing up, I always thought of Detroit as a basketball town because of the Pistons, but everyone says it’s really, at its core, a football town.

Football is a violent sport. Somebody’s going to get hurt. It’s the game. Just hopefully, you’re on the good side of it.

The game of football, especially in the NFL, is all about situations, and coming out on the big end of that stick.

I played football I was a running back, and I took a hit, and I had a hairline fracture in my leg which no one spotted, and I was playing basketball all winter and it got worse. And then I was long jumping, about 20 feet, and I landed one time and there was this big crack, and all the bones were jutting out of my leg.

Athletes at all ages are bigger and stronger than ever before. And they are being encouraged – sometimes even incentivized, as we recently learned was the case on at least one National Football League team – to play to injure.

I think I’m pretty misunderstood, because I’m not just about football.

College football is the only game in the country, of any kind, that the college game is longer than the pro game.

Soccer is a continuous game, rugby is a continuous game, but for the physical elements that are involved in playing a football game and the number of plays that you play, I don’t know that it was ever intended to be a continuous game.

As a coach, when it comes to football players, we’re trying to change their behavior and make them better. As people, we’re trying to change their behavior and make them better.

I remember the ’70s constantly being winter in Manchester and the Irish community in Manchester closing ranks because of the IRA bombings in Birmingham and Manchester, and you know the bin-workers’ strike, all wrapped up in it… They were violent times. Violence at home and violence at football matches.

Once you become an owner of a team, you get so much more into the sport and you can’t help it. So I really love NFL football now to the degree of following it much more than I did previously.

The real Pogba is the one you see every time. You know, when I’m on the pitch, I cannot act. I’m not an actor. So when I’m in the pitch, I like to joke and laugh, and outside the pitch, I’m the same. For me, I’m normal. I come and play football. I do what I love.

They teach you some things, but football is instinct sometimes. You just get the ball, and sometimes you dribble past three players and pass it other times, you can shoot from far away. It’s just instinct. If you feel something, just do it. I am free to do that.

I wasn’t really interested in girls. Only football. I was just enjoying football all the time. There was a five-a-side next to the flat, and I used to play there all the time. It was all about football. I wanted to be a professional. That was my goal. I didn’t want to be anything other than a footballer.

If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes really good, then you did it. That’s all it takes to get people to win football games for you.

Brazil eats, sleeps and drinks football. It lives football!

We try to play football don’t forget it, right. My teams always in my career try to play football. I cannot control the other circumstances.

We all feel that hunger in football. With Cruyff, it was different. He deepened and changed the hunger so you became conscious of why you are getting better.

When you train a massive club or little third division outfit, when you go out to play football in any situation, it is always about winning.

It doesn’t mean my footballing ideas are special, different, better than the others. I am not saying it’s my football, my ideas, and the other coaches are nothing. It’s the way I believe. I’m not special.

I started playing football young, and my career was on the pitch.

Once you’re a football player, you’re a football player for life. You always think of yourself in terms of that. We all do. It’s hard to get rid of when you can’t play anymore.

There is a growing feeling that perhaps Texas is really another country, a place where the skies, the disasters, the diamonds, the politicians, the women, the fortunes, the football players and the murders are all bigger than anywhere else.

I never gave up as a player, and I won’t give up as someone who wants to go to the Hall of Fame, because it’s the ultimate goal for a baseball player or a football player or a basketball player.

Believe it or not, one teacher used to call me a giant spastic for not being able to play football.

I didn’t play organized football until I was in the seventh grade. Up until that point, I only played at recess and in the backyard.

When you take a year off from football, you come back for all the enjoyable moments. When you’re not playing, you miss out on all the highs, but you also miss these disappointments. But I would rather be in the arena to be excited or be disappointed than not have a chance at all. That’s football. That’s why everybody plays it.

You can play pickup basketball, but you can’t really re-create football.

Some people have this impression of me: ‘Boy, he’s always so serious on the field. Football. Football. Football.’

I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes, stumbles, and losses in football.

A single Dallas Cowboys football game uses up as much electricity as the entire nation of Liberia in those same three hours – one reason the globe, if looked at from a certain height, is a cluster of lights surrounded by enormous patches of dark.

No, I didn’t quite know to what extent the football might be, but it was quite a bonus for me to try to learn new skills and to keep fit at the same time.

In London there was an article about all these girls bending it like Beckham, and in India there’s this big wave of girls playing football. Wow! I can’t believe a movie’s done this!

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.

And of course in America you’ve got American football and baseball and all those other ball games, soccer has become a little niche that the women have kind of filled.

A poet is never one of the people. He is detached, remote, and the life of small-time dances and talk about football would not be for him. He might take part but could not belong.

I just didn’t want to walk away from football without knowing what it meant to be a manager, or even wondering what it was like to be sacked.

I somewhere along the way became fascinated with exploring characters who are willing to put themselves into violent situations, whether it’s football, hockey, boxing, being a cop, being a soldier. There’s not a lot of people who are willing to put themselves into those situations.

Young kids should probably not play tackle football. I know this intellectually, but emotionally, I’m conflicted. I love this sport. I grew up playing and adoring football. I love the brotherhood, teamwork, athletic grace that borders on superhuman, grit, pressure and, yes, contact. I love the contact.

We will play football. We will box and play lacrosse and ice hockey and snowboard and surf and drive fast cars, climb trees, and do dozens of things that we know are potentially concussive. We will do this because we are human and animals, and we like speed and contact and aggressive maneuvering and all such things.

I’d followed the strange deaths of pro football players for years, sensing something odd going on.

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

Pro football was taking off when I became commissioner, and when a sport’s successful and you’re its chief executive officer, much of the credit flows to you and you develop a good track record.

People are interested in pro football because it provides them with an emotional oasis they don’t want football to get involved in the same types of court cases, racial problems and legislative issues they encounter in the rest of American life.

America pays its bills. It always has. It always will. The fact that Washington is now debating whether to honor its debts and obligations, then, should come as a surprise. But playing political football with a necessary vote to raise the nation’s debt ceiling has become as predictable as a Twitter rant from Charlie Sheen.

In football, there were drinks available everywhere you looked. On a golf tournament, you could find one free anywhere you wanted it. In tennis and NBA basketball, everybody had a hospitality suite, and so you could go there and load up if you wanted to.

I know I had been successful in football. I had been successful in broadcasting. I didn’t think that anything could touch me. I thought, I can beat anything.

If I could play football, I’d play football. But not women’s football – real football. Or I’d just date a quarterback.

I actually was the captain of the football team. I went to Catalina Foothills High School, and I played football all four years. I started on Varsity my sophomore year, and senior year I was captain.

Then you get into it, especially if you start talking about football, fighting and Muhammad Ali. Then the ladies get very bored and start delivering ultimatums.

I could dunk a volleyball in high school. I didn’t play football because I knew they were going to put me at a fat-guy position, and I didn’t want to do that. I am athletic.

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.

I know my football. And I adore football players. The crashing noise of a tackle, the huddle grunting, and the roar of the crowd are music to my ears.

The president is just the coach of a football team. You need the right support, the right stadium, the right players, the right staff. An excellent coach is not going to win games.

Los Angeles, which is where I live, happens to be a great place for junk. People have a lot of it, and they sell it and trade it: At these big swap meets, many, many hundreds of dealers of junk will descend upon a football field on a Saturday and sell all their stuff.

Three coaches at Notre Dame made a big difference in my life, not that I played any football when I attended Notre Dame. But Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian, and Lou Holtz – they all made a difference to me, and I respected them for their attitudes about life and how they handled loss.

By high school, I was already tall – 5-foot-8 – and one day I made the mistake of wearing green tights. The football players all started calling me the Jolly Green Giant.

Instead of being like the other kids going to soccer or football practice, I was wrestling every day.

Almost any football play, even an off-tackle slant by a running back, offers the balletic beauty of athletic skill and the punishing drama of physical collision.

Football has end zones and goal posts basketball has the hoop, and hockey the goal cage. Baseball is the only game with an imaginary box: the strike zone, which the umpire determines at his own discretion.

The draft is one of my favorite events because it is about football. People are focused on how their teams improve. It’s a celebration of football. And most importantly, it represents a very important time in the lives of these men who are entering the NFL, and their families.

Well, I’ve learned a lot from Bill Belichick. I’ve said time and time again, before I got to New England, I thought I knew a lot about football. But I think he taught me a lot from A to Z. I still carry it to this day.

I love the game so much. I’ve been penalized. I’ve been fined. I have some regrets in my career. But for those four hours on Sunday, you can be free and just let it all go. Retiring had nothing to do with football it had to do with my family.

Honestly, being a 5’11 quarterback, not too many people think that you can play in the National Football League. And so for me, you know, I knew that my height doesn’t define my skill set, you know? I believed in my talent. I believed in what God gave me. I believed in the knowledge that I have of the game.

My thing is, and I’ve always been this way – to get to know as many people as I possibly can on a personal level, so that way, when you get on the football field, you’ve got your buddy right beside you, and you’re ready to go.

You know, I want to be the uncommon one. I think it’s pretty cool that I’m only 5’11, you know, and playing in the National Football League.

Since I was in high school, I wanted to play professional football and professional baseball, be a two-sport star.