I idolised IM Vijayan and Krisanu Dey when I started watching football. After that, it was Bhaichung Bhutia in India and Brazilian Ronaldo abroad.

In England, you have stadiums in the middle of the city.

Fighting football, not serenity football – that is what I like.

Players who are not from the U.K. have to get used to the winds. I have to adapt my style as a result as well. Often, you are forced to keep things simple.

In my heart, I am always a Raider.

A lot of football success is in the mind. You must believe you are the best and then make sure that you are.

I used to rush home to see ‚Match Of The Day.‘ Whatever I was doing, I wouldn’t miss it.

I don’t think there’s been anything in the game of football in my lifetime that has changed college football more than redshirting.

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.

Liverpool is a club with a big, big, big history, and all the clubs in the world have a big history if the present is not too successful. If you have never had success, then nobody knows how it is, but in Liverpool, everybody knows how it was.

I have really been disillusioned with soccer in England.

I was the one who took football off the back pages and put it on to page one.

When I was playing, there were always lots of teams in contention for the league – Arsenal, Manchester City, Liverpool, Leeds. Every week was a big game and a big battle.

I can remember earning £5,000 a game playing for Hibs at the end of the Seventies. They let me commute from London, train on the Friday and play on Saturday. That lasted until my friends at the Inland Revenue decided to take two-thirds. That wasn’t very entertaining for me.

I was a good football player, and I had a chance to play with some great players.

He is really something. I love him. He is Sir Arsene Wenger.

As Dortmund manager, I lived in a street, and my two neighbours were Schalke fans. They showed it every day, flying flags!

Nothing surprises me anymore in the NFL.

What the ISL has done is create the hype and buzz around football that it very badly needs.

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.

Football is all about fans.

Just like every person who works for Dortmund is a fan of the club, it was the same at Mainz. When I was a player there, we had 800 supporters on rainy Saturday afternoons, and if we died, no one would notice or come to our funeral. But we loved the club, and we have this same feeling at Dortmund.

One rule that will work if it is used everywhere, is that when you have a free-kick, the referee puts the mark on the floor to make sure the defenders keep their distance.

All the top players in the world play 45-50-60 games. You need that many games, even the strikers need that many games.

I don’t really care how the Patriots are perceived, truthfully. I really don’t. I really don’t. Look, if you’re a fan of our team, you root for us, you believe in our team, and you believe in what we’re trying to accomplish. If you’re not a fan of us, you have a different opinion.

I’m just glad I play for Coach Belichick.

The English game is not faster than the German game. Perhaps there are a few more sprints. But there is a different style of football here, partially due to the weather.

We murdered them 0-0.

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

You can’t score if you’re turning it over. It’s like a punt. If you go out and you punt 12 times, you’re not scoring points. That’s not good. So, when you turn the ball over and throw interceptions, you’re giving the other team more opportunities and your team less opportunities.

In India, people are really glued to the Premier League and La Liga.

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

To share the dressing room of club and country with Bhai was an amazing experience. I learnt a lot from him and other senior players like Renedy Singh.

Fortunately for a quarterback, you can play for a long time because you don’t get hit very often.

My job is to play quarterback, and I’m going to do that the best way I know how, because I owe that to my teammates regardless of who is out there on the field with me.

I make impact plays. I make game-changing plays.

Lots of young players have triumphed at United, so why can’t it happen to me? I’m not worried I’m young – it’s an incentive to do the best I can.

The influence of Bhaichung is immense. I remember when I was in the ninth or 10th standard we went to watch the Durand Cup in Delhi. Bhaichung was there. We just wanted to touch them.

I’m always hungry to score.

The Premier League is one of the most difficult in the world. There’s five, six, or seven clubs that can be the champions. Only one can win, and all the others are disappointed and live in the middle of disaster.

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

Football coaches don’t have real problems.

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.

As long as I am playing competitive football I am happy.

I used to dream about taking the ball ‚round the keeper, stopping it on the line, and then getting on my hands and knees and heading it into the net. When I scored against Benfica in the 1968 European Cup final, I nearly did it. I left the keeper for dead, but then I chickened out.

I’ve met some Evertonians in the street, and they’ve been friendly. I’ve had taxi drivers who have been Everton fans. They’ve been really nice.

In football, it’s the job of the player to play, the coach to coach, the official to officiate. Each guy is charged with upholding his end, nothing more. In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life – or at least the way life should be.

Would I swap what I have achieved as a cook if I could have been as successful as a footballer? Definitely.

I was a very average player and became a trainer in Germany with a special club.

The best football is always about expression of emotion. Always.

At the end of the day, we started playing football because we loved it.

People have to understand one thing: at the age of 18, I arrived at a dream club like Manchester United. It was a dream come true. But, even at that moment, I was thinking about playing in England for some years and then going to play in Spain. Even at that time I was thinking that way, and I always gave 100% everything.

My first assistant-coaching job in football was at William & Mary in 1961. The pay wasn’t much, so to get $300 more per year, I agreed to coach the golf team. I didn’t even know how to keep score, and really, my main job was not to wreck the van on the way to tournaments.

Football is a game you cannot play without making mistakes.

Football changed my life and it gave me a platform to get out my aggression and it gave me a sense of value.

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

You’re not going to see my sense of humor on the football field. That’s not a place for me to joke around.

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

I don’t know about the 2026 World Cup. But I would love to see Anirudh Thapa sending a cross to Jhingan and I would love to watch it from the stands.

The next MVP of the Super Bowl is just as likely to have been a full-time grocery store bagger last year as a Heisman Trophy winner.

I noticed that when I touched the ball on the field, you could hear this shrill noise in the crowd with all the birds screaming like at a Beatles concert.