Association football

"Football is a simple game. 22 women chase a ball for ninety minutes and at the end, the United States win."

"It's the belly of the country. There are all kinds of footballers, I don't see them as angels or demons, but as professionals who believe in their dreams."

"Unlike the sports of basketball, badminton, or volleyball, soccer can't trace its roots back to a specific person, place, or time. In fact, it's completely likely that a variation of the sport was played in prehistoric times. Generally it's believed that a game like soccer was played around 400 B.C. in China, and there's evidence of a similar game that was played in A.D. 300 in Rome. These games, while similar to today's soccer in the sense that there were goal lines and passing, didn't have the hand restrictions that today's game has. During the Middle Ages, adults and children played a form of soccer in the streets of London, but the rules changed depending on who was playing, and so did the size of the game; entire towns participated. These games became so addictive and absorbing that in the 1300s the king of England actually tried to ban the sport because it was interfering with young men's military training."

"The most precious thing the writer owns is his pen and the most precious thing the footballer owns is his shoes."

"The ball is round and the game lasts for 90 minutes. (Der Ball ist rund und das Spiel dauert 90 Minuten.)"

"on 22 June 1941, the day the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, the decisive act of the entire conflict, ninety thousand spectators watched the German league final in Berlin. What were they thinking of?"

"Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for ninety minutes and at the end, the Germans win."

"Fussball ist wie Schach, nur ohne Würfel."

"We were playing for the glory of the USSR and for the love of football, not for the money."

"Someone said: "football is more important than life and death to you" and I said: "Listen, it's more important than that.""

"In the beginning there was chaos, and soccer was without form. Then came the Victorians, who codified it, and after them the theorists, who analyzed it. It wasn't until the late 1920s that tactics in anything resembling a modern sense came to be recognized or discussed, but as early as the 1870s there was an acknowledgment that the arrangement of players on the field made a significant difference to the way the game was played. In its earliest form, though, soccer knew nothing of such sophistication. Various cultures can point to games that involved kicking a ball, but, for all the claims of Rome, Greece, Egypt, the Caribbean, Mexico, China, or Japan to be the home of soccer, the modern sport has its roots in the mob game of medieval Britain. Rules-inasmuch as they existed at all-varied from place to place, but the game essentially involved two teams trying to force a roughly spherical object to a target at opposite ends of a notional field. It was violent, unruly, and anarchic, and it was repeatedly outlawed. Only in the early nineteenth century, when the public schools-their thinking shaped by advocates of muscular Christianity-decided that sports could be harnessed for the moral edification of their students, did anything approaching what we would today recognize as soccer emerge. Before there could be tactics, though, there had, first of all, to be a coherent set of rules."