When cars honk and hoot and drunks squeeze out of car windows and scream, you can be sure that football is in the air.
I've played football with George Best, the greatest footballer that ever lived. That doesn't make me a footballer. And I've sung a duet with Pavarotti. That doesn't make me an opera singer. I can write and I have a story to tell, but I'm not going to make a career out of it.
Leaving college early to play pro football was the best thing that happened to me. I got to drop the most boring poetry class. Dumbest thing I did was being in that class.
At 17, I went to Stanford University to study engineering. My time was occupied with the required reading and the extracurricular duties of managing the baseball and football teams and earning my way.
The more the technocrats programme it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, football continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible occurs: the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a scraggy, bow-legged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.
Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I was a college football junkie. My mom attended the University of Iowa and so I can remember I used to run around the backyard in a number 6, Tim Dwight Iowa jersey when I was very little.
I wasn't like other boys. At any rate, I wasn't like my three elder brothers: they excelled at football and they were like other boys, going up to bed each night hugging annuals filled with stories about the glories of Pele and Danny McGrain.
When I'm in town on Sundays, I sometimes go down to the Central Bar in the East Village to watch English football. But my natural inclination now is to get in the car with my wife and kids and get out of town.
I want to be the best player in the history of Egyptian football.
I didn't start playing football a lot until I was in high school. I played it in seventh and eighth grade, but I didn't play Pop Warner or anything.
I know other people who have started their kids in tackle football for, like, four- and five-year-olds. So I think it's up to each individual's parents, but for me personally, no I wouldn't. But would I be OK with him playing in seventh or eighth grade? Yes.
My seventh-grade year, I played football. I was, like, 15 pounds overweight, so I had to lose a ton of weight. They put me at left tackle; they put me on the defensive line. I absolutely hated football. I didn't want to play again. Eighth grade year, I didn't play.
If I hadn't made it as a footballer I would have been an electrician. I studied to be an electrician even though I was progressing at football because you never know at that stage if you are going to be there for sure.
In football as in watchmaking, talent and elegance mean nothing without rigour and precision.
Football is a fertility festival. Eleven sperm trying to get into the egg. I feel sorry for the goalkeeper.
Kids are learning to play. That's why we're seeing an emergence. That's why we're seeing the Under-17s and Under-20s doing better in international football.
I come from a family that has always emphasized and enjoyed sports - golf, tennis, football, baseball and the rest.
If the be-all and end-all of your ability is, 'Have you got a trophy to your name,' I find that hard to understand. It's so naive in terms of what the job of being a football coach is all about.
The level of football in England is the top. English football is the leader in the world.
The romance of English football is fantastic, but it has lost its identity under the influence of other cultures.
