Quotations

"For a shilling United offered you conflict and art."
Priestley, JB

"To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink."
Priestley, JB

" A football team represents a way of being, a culture."
Platini, Michel

"If you want to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at the moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Yugolslavs."
Orwell, George

"There is always more spirit in attack than in defence."
Livy

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

"Running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue."
Orwell, George

"You play to win and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win."
Orwell, George

"Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners."
Orwell, George

"There's quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roar of infuriated spectators."
Orwell, George