Professional football is something like war. Whoever behaves too properly, is lost.

Football, bloody hell!

Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.

The Premier League is in danger of becoming one of the most boring, but great, leagues in the world.

There are much worse games to play.

There can be raw pain and bleeding where so many thousands see the inevitable ups and downs of only a game.

Football is a cruel sport that no one can predict the outcome.

It is not my sport. I don’t like winning with 80% [possession]. Sorry that is not enough for me. Fighting football, not serenity football, that is what I like. What we call in German ‘English’ — rainy day, heavy pitch, 5-5, everybody is dirty in the face and goes home and cannot play for weeks after.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

Look it, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.

war is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds.

War is hell. War is unpredictable, difficult, dangerous—and usually (though not always) worse than its initiators expect when conflict begins. War has features that remain fairly similar from century to century, once you take a reflective perspective and look back on things.

I am against a League war in present circumstances, because the anti-League powers are strong. The analogy is not King v. Barons, but the War of the Roses. If the League were strong enough I should favour sanctions, because the effect would suffice, or the war would be short and small. The whole question is quantitative.

But I will tell you this, the most difficult player I ever played against is David Beckham. You know why? You don’t even need to go close to him, all he needs to do is control and cross.