“Whereas fanatic is usually a pejorative word, a Fan is someone who has roots somewhere.”

“You don't have to be charming to be a fan among fans.”

“Football is not merely a small business, it's also a bad one. Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business.”

“The club is not a business. It's a populist democracy.”

“Other than sports, only war and catastrophe can create this sort of national unity.”

“It seems that soccer tournaments create those relationships: people gathered together in pubs and living rooms, a whole country suddenly caring about the same event. A World Cup is the sort of common project that otherwise barely exists in modern societies.”

“Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.”