World Soccer Quotes

#1. The philosophy of FIFA is to expand world soccer space, to spread out the world football space.

Vladimir Putin

#2. We won the European Championship last September and now the world title. That is some year for French beach soccer! Now comes the hard part. We have to keep improving and that's difficult because it's tough to do better than winning a world title.

Eric Cantona

#3. The growth of women's soccer and women's sports all around the world has been slow.

Abby Wambach

#4. One day the UN Secretary General proposes that, in the interest of global peace and harmony, the world's soccer players should come together and form one United Nations global soccer team.

"Great idea," says his deputy. "Er, but who would we play?"

"Israel, of course.

Mark Steyn

#5. I will be the one lifting that trophy, not Paolo Maldini. Imagine me hoisting the trophy. It is an image I have in my mind and I want to make it a reality. We have world-class players and, believe me, they are in the mood to do it. The atmosphere around the club at the moment is just top-class.

Steven Gerrard

#6. You've got to believe you're going to win, and I believe we'll win the World Cup until the final whistle blows and we're knocked out.

Peter Shilton

#7. Whichever country you are, if you lose games you are criticised. It's only when it's England it's like a new world war.

Sven-Goran Eriksson

#8. We have demonstrated that we are the best, I'm also happy because everyone seems to enjoy our football, whether or not they are Barca fans. All over the world, I've heard people saying that they have been enchanted by us. This type of football deserves to be rewarded with titles.

Lionel Messi

#9. Soccer must play a socio-cultural role. We reach 1.6 billion people, thanks to the positive emotions that soccer triggers, FIFA is more influential than any country on Earth and any religion. We move masses. We want to use that to create more peace, justice and health in the world.

Pope Francis

#10. He's got great credentials by winning the World Cup but he did it with Brazil - my granny could probably have managed Brazil to World Cup success.

Gary Lineker

#11. When they looked in the mirror, the American and Chinese women had begun to see each other's reflection. To reach the World Cup final, the Americans had become tightly connected by the ligaments of teamwork, while the Chinese had realized the necessary freedom of individual expression.

Jere Longman

#12. We'll call ourselves Victorious Secret and our motto will be 'We Live to Spank You.' Duuude. Yes! I'm basically the smartest person in the world. Ever. You in? Of course you're in. Practice begins tomorrow.

Gena Showalter

#13. 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.

Simon Kuper

#14. England can end the millenium as it started - as the greatest football nation in the world.

Kevin Keegan

#15. A message to the best football supporters in the world. We need a 12th man here. Where are you? Where are you? Let's be having you. Come on!

Delia Smith

#16. Soccer is my first love. I've been playing since I was 4 years old. I traveled the world doing it. I broke my leg when I was 16 or 17, and acting kind of filled the void.

Kyle Schmid

#17. You have to put all the criticism of this club down to jealousy. United have produced more players who have played for their country, more world-class players and more players who have won European Footballer of the Year than any other team in this country, so we must be doing something right.

Alex Ferguson

#18. It's a lot tougher to play soccer and make it look believable. But in boxing, it was easier for me. I got injured a lot more in the soccer world. In soccer, I pulled muscles. I thought boxing was going to be tougher.

Kuno Becker

#19. Red Bull is committed to providing not only quality domestic soccer, but also quality international soccer. You can't get much better than Barcelona. Our entire organization is excited about the opportunity to play one of the premier teams in the world.

Alexi Lalas

#20. Facebook revealed that Ebola was the most popular Facebook topic in the U.S. this year, with the World Cup coming in sixth. So welcome to America, where even Ebola is more popular than soccer.

Jimmy Fallon

#21. You know me, I'm not that kind of person that cares to unveil all of my personal things to the world because frankly, in terms of my soccer, it doesn't matter.

Abby Wambach

#22. You look at boxing being an international, world-famous sport, right up there next with soccer, and there's only two fighters the people want to see fight. Two little fellows, Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather.

Emanuel Steward

#23. Getting a chance to practice six months against my own teammates, who I consider the best soccer players in the world, there's no way I couldn't improve.

Lorrie Fair

#24. I never thought I'd play soccer past high school, so to go from that team to actually being most-capped and three World Cups is pretty special.

Cobi Jones

#25. The fiesta of soccer, a feast for the legs that play and the eyes that watch, is much more than a big business run by overlords from Switzerland. The most popular sport in the world wants to serve the people who embrace it.

Eduardo Galeano

#26. When I got injured, I think I was starting to sense that there was more to the world than just sports. This dream of playing professional soccer probably wasn't the best track for me.

Eric Swalwell

#27. Pele called me the greatest footballer in the world. That is the ultimate salute to my life.

George Best

#28. For me soccer provides so many emotions, a different feeling every day. I've had the good fortune to take part in major competitions like the Olympics, and winning the World Cup was also unforgettable. We lost in the Olympics and won in the World Cup, and I'll never forget either feeling.

Ronaldinho

#29. There's more chance of me flying Concorde to the moon blindfolded than there is of you taking Wales to the World Cup.

Robbie Savage

#30. This is a game between players from 12 national sides, a game that if you have a friend in China, in Brazil, in Qatar ... in half the world he wants to watch. I was thinking of this game when I signed for Chelsea.

Luiz Felipe Scolari

#31. Every kid around the world who plays soccer wants to be Pele. I have a great responsibility to show them not just how to be like a soccer player, but how to be like a man.

Pele

#32. When I thought I was retired, I wanted to travel around the world and watch soccer games.

Drew Carey

#33. The World Cup experience is more than just the game of soccer. It's an event. And it will fly by faster than you think. It will end and you'll be saying, 'Wow, it's over already?' You have to remember to take it all in and enjoy it.

Cobi Jones

#34. Ibiza is a popular vacation place for a lot of the players in Spain. If you go in the summer, there are some of the world's most famous movie and music stars, so nobody cares about soccer players.

Xavi

#35. Four wins in four matches. It could not be better ... the world is fantastic.

Jose Mourinho

#36. In July 2011, U.S. Soccer announced that they'd fired Bob Bradley and hired Jurgen Klinsmann as head coach. Jurgen had once been a world-class German striker; now he was regarded as a successful, if controversial, coach.

Tim Howard

#37. You know the marathon in my country is just exceptional. It's like soccer in England. If England win the world cup and Ethiopia win the marathon - it's the same.

Haile Gebrselassie

#38. Vladimir Putin bribed a soccer official with a Picasso painting so he would support Russia's bid to host the 2018 World Cup. Putin was like, 'It wasn't Picasso, just picture of what his face would look like if he said no.' (Nose over here, eye up here, ear in forehead.)

Jimmy Fallon

#39. I think I'm being conservative when I say there are more people playing soccer in the United States than in 90% of the world's other countries, probably 95%.

Rabih Alameddine

#40. I've never met anybody who says they don't like the World Cup. If you're a soccer fan or not, everybody loves watching it, and I think it could be the same for other sports.

Landon Donovan

#41. Officials from the soccer organization FIFA, which decides which cities get to host the World Cup, are accused of accepting bribes when making their decision. Of course the toughest part for the soccer officials was taking bribes without using their hands.

Jimmy Fallon

#42. The first World Cup I remember was in the 1950 when I was 9 or 10 years old. My father was a soccer player, and there was a big party, and when Brazil lost to Uruguay, I saw my father crying.

Pele

#43. I think it's insane, absolutely insane for a person to have one of the highest and most important jobs in the entire world to be saying that he has to be at his children's soccer practice.

Charles Payne

#44. I'm a little skeptical of foreign coaches in our league and in U.S. Soccer just because of how different our league is and our players are than other players around the world.

Landon Donovan

#45. Also, she had been secretary to the soccer coach, an office pretty much without laurels in our own time, but apparently the post for a young girl to hold in Jersey City during the First World War.

Philip Roth

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

Ronaldo

#47. When I was playing, they said soccer was a man's world and women should remain on the sidelines, all I can say is I'm glad I never had to go up against Mia Hamm

Pele

#48. Many people say I'm the best women's soccer player in the world. I don't think so. And because of that, someday I just might be.

Mia Hamm

#49. Quite frankly, I can't get enough of soccer. I tell my jingoistic friends in the United States there's a reason why it is the world's No. 1 sport. The rest of the planet can't be wrong.

Billy Beane

#50. 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

#51. If this can be termed the century of the common man, then soccer, of all sports, is surely his game ... In a world haunted by the hydrogen and napalm bomb, the football field is a place where sanity and hope are still left unmolested.

Stanley Rous

#52. And the world around me was nothing if not an infinity of distractions: cute girls, novels and comic books, my budding record collection, neighborhood boys whistling from the playground under my window, beckoning me to a soccer game.

Aleksandar Hemon

#53. I was gay before I began to play soccer over 40 years ago. It's been 28 years since a friend and I organized one of the first gay soccer teams in the world.

Rabih Alameddine

#54. When people say 'American soccer,' they think of the U.S. national team. But American soccer also includes Major League Soccer, and until we have a league that produces players at the rate other leagues around the world do, I don't believe we'll ever get to where we want to be.

Landon Donovan

#55. The only subject fewer authentic Americans cared about than the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo was World Cup Soccer. America is an epic global battle with ruthless savages who seek our destruction, and liberals are feeling sorry for the terrorists.

Ann Coulter

#56. After all these years, I'm finally into soccer. The World Cup is on, and my band is an international group - they're all around me, cheering in the hotel bars.

Art Garfunkel

#57. Soccer is a great game, and the rich variety of styles and passions that come with being truly global makes the World Cup a nonpareil event in the universe of competitive sport.

Serge Schmemann

#58. I've written about superheroes. I've written about talking ferrets and math geniuses being chased by madmen. I've written about spies and demon-hunting soccer moms. I've created an entire world that centers around a paranormal judicial system.

Julie Kenner