49 Inspiring Football Quotes

Football is more than just a game; it's a source of inspiration, a testament to human perseverance, and a stage for incredible achievements. Whether it's the determination of a player coming back from injury, the strategic mind of a legendary coach, or the sheer joy of a last-minute goal, football offers a treasure trove of memorable moments and words of wisdom. In this blog post, we've curated a collection of the top 49 inspiring football quotes that encapsulate the essence of the sport. These quotes will not only resonate with football enthusiasts but also inspire anyone who appreciates the spirit of competition and the power of teamwork.

1. “Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.” - Vince Lombardi

2. “If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.” - Erma Bombeck

3. “Würde man Rooney als metrosexuell bezeichnen, würde er sich wohl zuerst verwundert am Quadratschädel kratzen und dann vorsichtshalber zuschlagen.” - Raphael Honigstein

4. “Football: A sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.” - Elbert Hubbard

5. “And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball.” - Eduardo Galeano

6. “no doubt, the early traumatic shocks that young hardy brown experienced had a permanent impact on his future development and capacity to deal with the real world.... the years with the mighty mites within the orphanage setting, a term that we seldom see in modern society, provided him with a safe and non-threatening enclave with which to develop. certainly, the competitive, action-oriented game of football, as meshed with positive team experiences, added to the supportive culture.” - jim dent

7. “When it's too hard for them it's just right for us!” - Marv Levy

8. “I like football. I find its an exciting strategic game. Its a great way to avoid conversation with your family at Thanksgiving.” - Craig Ferguson

9. “As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive. Family and friends know, after long years of wearying experience, that the fixture list always has the last word in any arrangement; they understand, or at least accept, that christenings or weddings or any gatherings, which in other families would take unquestioned precedence, can only be plotted after consultation. So football is regarded as a given disability that has to be worked around. If I were wheelchair-bound, nobody close to me would organise anything in a top-floor flat, so why would they plan anything for a winter Saturday afternoon.” - Nick Hornby

10. “I love seeing other channels counterprogram the Super Bowl. PBS: "DAMN RIGHT we're airing a new 'Masterpiece Classic'! Fuck off, sports!” - Tara Ariano

11. “football is like life - it requires perserverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.” - Vince Lombardi

12. “The thing about football - the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football.” - Terry Pratchett

13. “I used to believe, although I don't now, that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can choose to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently -during crises in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere- and one can ignore them or seize them.” - Nick Hornby

14. “Bobby Tom told me he’s not afraid of the Chargers’ defense.” “Bobby Tom’ll tell you he’s not afraid of nuclear war, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in his opinion.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

15. “wouldn't you like to make sure all those millions you give to Uncle Sam went to schools and hospitals instead of nuclear warheads?'As a matter of fact, he would. Playgrounds for big kids, preschool programs to little ones, and mandatory LASIK surgery for NFL refs.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

16. “Les hémorragies cérébrales sont moins fréquentes chez les amateurs et les joueurs de football que chez le reste de la population. Les cerveaux aussi.” - Pierre Desproges

17. “The Enemy of the best is the good. If you're always settling with what's good, you'll never be the best.” - Jerry Rice

18. “If teams keep playing us this way, it's going to be like this” - Peyton Manning

19. “Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” - George Will

20. “Football is the ballet of the masses.” - Dmitri Shostakovich

21. “When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening's Arsenal game/riot. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-class guys might as well have been a couple of Bubbas gearing up for the Alabama-Auburn game. They were, in a phrase, British rednecks. And this is who soccer fans are, everywhere in the world except among the college-educated American elite. In Rio or Rome, the soccer fan is a Regular José or a Regular Giuseppe. [...] By contrast, if an American is that kind of Regular Joe, he doesn't watch soccer. He watches the NFL or bass fishing tournaments or Ultimate Fighting. In an American context, avid soccer fandom is almost exclusively located among two groups of people (a) foreigners—God bless 'em—and (b) pretentious yuppie snobs. Which is to say, conservatives don't hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.” - Robert Stacy McCain

22. “[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.” - Terry Eagleton

23. “[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game's outcome.” - Slavoj Žižek

24. “Rob Green needed to get the long barrier out, didn't he?” - James Anderson

25. “What I needed more than anything was a place where unfocused unhappiness could thrive, where I could be still and worry and mope; I had the blues, and when I watched my team I could unwrap them and let them breathe a little.” - Nick Hornby

26. “It never rains in Autzen Stadium!” - Don Essig

27. “Today I will do what other's won't, so tomorrow I will do what others can't.” - Jerry Rice

28. “In the sweep of its appeal, its ability to touch every corner of humanity, football is the only game that needed to be invented.” - Bobby Charlton

29. “The eccentric passion of Shankly was underlined for me by my England team-mate Roger Hunt's version of the classic tale of the Liverpool manager's pre-game talk before playing Manchester United. The story has probably been told a thousand times in and out of football, and each time you hear it there are different details, but when Roger told it the occasion was still fresh in his mind and I've always believed it to be the definitive account. It was later on the same day, as Roger and I travelled together to report for England duty, after we had played our bruising match at Anfield. Ian St John had scored the winner, then squared up to Denis Law, with Nobby finally sealing the mood of the afternoon by giving the Kop the 'V' sign. After settling down in our railway carriage, Roger said, 'You may have lost today, but you would have been pleased with yourself before the game. Shanks mentioned you in the team talk. When he says anything positive about the opposition, normally he never singles out players.' According to Roger, Shankly burst into the dressing room in his usual aggressive style and said, 'We're playing Manchester United this afternoon, and really it's an insult that we have to let them on to our field because we are superior to them in every department, but they are in the league so I suppose we have to play them. In goal Dunne is hopeless- he never knows where he is going. At right back Brennan is a straw- any wind will blow him over. Foulkes the centre half kicks the ball anywhere. On the left Tony Dunne is fast but he only has one foot. Crerand couldn't beat a tortoise. It's true David Herd has got a fantastic shot, but if Ronnie Yeats can point him in the right direction he's likely to score for us. So there you are, Manchester United, useless...'Apparently it was at this point the Liverpool winger Ian Callaghan, who was never known to whisper a single word on such occasions, asked, 'What about Best, Law and Charlton, boss?'Shankly paused, narrowed his eyes, and said, 'What are you saying to me, Callaghan? I hope you're not saying we cannot play three men.” - Bobby Charlton

30. “Things that aren't important, that have nothing to do with winning and losing, don't have to be a rule.” - Peter Richmond

31. “You get hit the hardest when trying to run or hide from a problem. Like the defense on a football field, putting all focus on evading only one defender is asking to be blindsided.” - Criss Jami

32. “Neither my sexuality or my efforts or lack of effort on the football field make up the whole sum of me.” - Sean Kennedy

33. “The same boys who got detention in elementary school for beating the crap out of people are now rewarded for it. They call it football.” - Laurie Halse Anderson

34. “We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat cornflakes and sleep for a while, and then they want to have sex with another woman, and another, until they die. Women,’ and I thought I’d better pick my words carefully when describing a gender I didn’t belong to, ‘want a relationship. They may not get it, or they may sleep with a lot of men before they do get it, but ultimately that’s what they want. That’s the goal. Men do not have goals. Natural ones. So they invent them, and put them at either end of a football pitch. And then they invent football. Or they pick fights, or try and get rich, or start wars, or come up with any number of daft bloody things to make up for the fact that they have no real goals.’‘Bollocks,’ said Ronnie.‘That, of course, is the other main difference.” - Hugh Laurie

35. “If you have not seen it, FOOTBALL is a game in which men shove one another back and forth for no reason. They do not choose how, when, or whom they shove. All that has been decided for them in advance. All they need to do is follow the orders given to them before the game, showing them where to run and how to violently deploy the meat of their bodies against the meat that is running at them. They are doing this in order to please one angry old man on the sidelines. This old man is called the "coach" or "yelling surrogate dad who will never be happy.” - John Hodgman

36. “The only thing they valued higher than ammunition were Man United footballs.” - Tahir Shah

37. “There definitely needs to be water on the sidelines for these players, but I also had some Gatorade just in case they were allergic to the water or vice versa.” - john madden

38. “You're the only one that can put pressure on yourself... No one else can put pressure on you. It's self-inflicted. For me, I just want to go out and play football.” - Maurice Jones-Drew

39. “Is it or is it not a matter of importance that a young man starts out in life with an ability to shut his jaw hard and say "I will," or "I will not," and mean it?” - John William Heisman

40. “Where else but America could football flourish, America with its millions of fertile acres of corn, soy, and wheat, its lakes of dairy, its year-round gushers of fruits and vegetables, and such meats, that extraordinary pipline of beef, poultry, seafood, and pork, feedlot gorged, vitamin enriched, and hypodermically immunized, humming factories of high-velocity protein production, all of which culminate after several generations of epic nutrition in this strain of industrial-sized humans? Only America could produce such giants.” - Ben Fountain

41. “In keeping with the Laws of the Prophet Bubba and the Code of the UIL, as set forth in the Book of First Downs, as the sun sets on Friday nights the rites of the Texas state religion are celebrated: high school, smash-mouth football. ‘And lo, the children of Jim Bob do take to the roads in caravans and they do go up unto the stadium by tribes, the Indians of Groveton, the Panthers of Lufkin, the Mustangs of Overton, and the very Wildcats of Palestine, and who shall withstand the traffic jams thereof?’ Thus is it written, and so it is and shall be.” - Markham Shaw Pyle

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

43. “If you're ashamed to stand by your colours, you better seek for another flag.” - Mokhtar Dahari

44. “Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts!” - Daniel Gilbert

45. “I wanted to beat the heck out of the JV guys for that, except I wouldn't know what to do in a fistfight without a manual.” - Carrie Harris

46. “I'm a minicamp body in 102-degree heat getting screamed at by the only other man my size: a middle-aged receivers coach they call Bow Wow.” - Christopher Harris

47. “I learned a long time ago that there is something worse than missing the goal, and that's not pulling the trigger.” - Mia Hamm

48. “Will we ever see his like again? It is doubtful. But at least for a brief moment in time we were lucky to have him as one of our own: an English lionheart who was the terror of the continent, who earned the love and respect of everyone who had the privilege to see him in action and above all was a thoroughly decent hero of whom we can be proud. Rest in peace 'Big Dunc'. Your feats will echo in eternity.” - James Leighton

49. “The Greatest” is a bite-your-tongue-book. Ultimately a tragic tale it is also immensely uplifting and easily the best footballer biography I have ever read.” - Mike Parry