Soccer Is My Life Quotes

At a football club, there’s a holy trinity – the players, the manager and the supporters. Directors don’t come into it. They are only there to sign the checks.

My private life is perfect. If your private life and your life outside football is good, then it is good on the field for you.

Italians can’t win the game against you, but you can lose the game against the Italians.

In 1969 I gave up women and alcohol – it was the worst 20 minutes of my life.

You can have the top stars to bring the attention, you can have the best stadium, you can have the best facilities, you can have the most beautiful project in terms of marketing and all this kind of thing. But if you don’t win… All the work these people are doing is forgotten.

Every kid around the world who plays soccer wants to be Pele. I have a great responsibility to show them not just how to be like a soccer player, but how to be like a man.

Without football, my life is worth nothing.

Whatever happens, there are always things you could have done better. You score two goals and you usually feel you could have done better. You score two goals and you usually feel you could have scored a third. That’s perfectionism. That’s what makes you progress in life.

Every single day I wake up and commit to myself to becoming a better player.

I loathed the game, and since I could see no pleasure or usefulness in it, it was very difficult for me to show courage at it. Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about, but is a species of fighting.

If you are first you are first. If you are second, you are nothing.

The rules of soccer are very simple: if it moves, kick it. If it doesn’t move, kick it until it does.

Soccer is simple, but it is difficult to play simple.

Pele called me the greatest footballer in the world. That is the ultimate salute to my life.

Every time I went away I was deceiving my mum. I’d tell her I was going to school but I’d be out on the street playing football. I always had a ball on my feet.

The team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion.

The person that said winning isn’t everything, never won anything.