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.

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

I love soccer, love tennis… Roger Federer has been a favourite for a long, long time. The kind of consistency he has shown, 16 Grand Slam titles… The way he handles himself in pressure situations is admirable… He is so calm… In soccer, I’m a huge fan of Barcelona… I like watching Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and David Villa.

When I won the Golden Gloves in 1960, that made me realize I had a chance. And when I won at the Olympics, that sealed it: I was the champ.

When I signed up for BFC, then-coach Ashley Westwood wanted me to play on the left as an attacking midfielder. I was not sure initially but I believed in his vision. For the first six-seven games, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was like a headless chicken. But he kept backing me.

Boxing is a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up.

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.

There is a place in the net where the keeper cannot reach the ball.

I treated it like every day was my last day with a basketball.

When did I know I had talent? I think it started when I first started playing sports, organized sports.

Reading isn’t good for a ballplayer. Not good for his eyes. If my eyes went bad even a little bit I couldn’t hit home runs. So I gave up reading.

There is something special which rides on a game between Liverpool and United.

That’s what you live for as a sportsman. You have to put up a fight.

My game is really played above time. I don’t say that like I’m saying I’m ahead of my time. I’m saying, like, if I’m on the court and I throw a pass, the ball that I’ve thrown will lead my teammate right where he needs to go, before he even knows that that’s the right place to go to.

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.

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.

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

We want to play the AFC Cup every year.

Unless someone wants to look funny, I’ll not recommend anyone to copy my bowling action. But on a serious note, with the confidence that I have got from the amount of runs I have been scoring, when I’m thrown the ball to bowl, I am pretty sure of what I have to do. I may not be the most attractive to watch while bowling, but I can be effective.

Well, I mean, to me, I think my ultimate – my ultimate goal is winning championships and – and I understand that me going down as one of the greats will not happen until I, you know, win a championship.

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

Football is big business – you can’t get away from it. But you have to separate that side from the playing.

In my heart, I am always a Raider.

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

The day I think I’m not enjoying the game and contributing the way I would like to, I’ll hang up my boots.

All I can tell them is pick a good one and sock it. I get back to the dugout and they ask me what it was I hit and I tell them I don’t know except it looked good.

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

I love watching track and field – the 4×100 relay, the 100-(meter) dash, the 200-(meter) dash. To see what they’re able to do, I love watching that.

I am very happy playing and showing off my talent on the cricket field and have no plans to enter Bollywood.

Without football, my life is worth nothing.

Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don’t run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.

I am very happy to be signing for the best team in the world and especially proud to be the first Portuguese player to join United.

Shinji Kagawa is one of the best players in the world, and he now plays 20 minutes at Manchester United – on the left wing! My heart breaks. Really, I have tears in my eyes. Central midfield is Shinji’s best role.

When I was a kid, I never thought much about football. I thought about following in my family’s footsteps and going into professional wrestling.

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.

I focus on one thing and one thing only – that’s trying to win as many championships as I can.

I really want a movie made on Sachin Tendulkar’s life. That is something I’m looking forward to. There will be so much emotion to that movie.

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.

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.

I’ve played with IVs before, during and after games. I’ve played with a broken hand, a sprained ankle, a torn shoulder, a fractured tooth, a severed lip, and a knee the size of a softball. I don’t miss 15 games because of a toe injury that everybody knows wasn’t that serious in the first place.

Every time I get in the McLaren I feel more comfortable, my confidence increases and I feel more at home with the team.

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 see myself as the best footballer in the world. If you don’t believe you are the best, then you will never achieve all that you are capable of.

As a professional athlete a lot is going to be said about you – but I just try to move forward and try to achieve my goals.

I like sports, and I enjoy playing basketball and lifting weights.

I signed for Mohun Bagan and then I got the news that Bhaichung also joined the club. The first day he met me he told me that I have heard about you and you are doing well. I told everyone in my family and friends that Bhaichung told me that.

In Boston, they love their sports celebrities. And it’s great.

I was saluted by Alex Ferguson when I was subbed and that made me very happy.

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

I try to encourage all my teammates, and I sure hope that some day all athletes – my kids, high school kids – get the same level of care I get. Because you can play for a long period of time without having knee replacements, without having all the major head trauma that people are dealing with.

I plan on taking athletics as far as I can.

I was a naturally aggressive left-back, a cut-throat tackler.

All an agent is going to do is buy things for a player, damage his eligibility, and make the player dependent on them.

Football is all about fans.

I have to admit, I sometimes wonder how much more successful I would have been as a coach had it not been for my spending summers on the golf course. I could have watched more film, that’s for sure. One advantage Joe Paterno had over me was that he didn’t play golf.

Football is a contact sport. So, on the pitch, it isn’t possible to maintain distance like you can in an office job.

If Everton were playing down the bottom of my garden, I’d draw the curtains.

My superhero has always been Tendulkar, and it will be Tendulkar for life. He is someone who has inspired me immensely. Just watching him play for India, I used to dream of winning games for India, because he used to do it single handedly.

I was 19 or 20 when The Beatles were at their peak, and I was coming up to the peak of my career, too. I was also the first footballer to have long hair, and that’s how I got my nickname ‚the Fifth Beatle.‘

One reason I don’t want to play in England again is because we don’t have any personalities.