The Ball is Round Quotes

“As George MacDonald Fraser put it in The General Danced at Dawn: ‘The native highlanders, the Englishmen, and the lowlanders played football on Saturday afternoons and talked about it on Saturday evenings, but the Glaswegians, men apart in this as in most things, played, slept, ate, drank and lived it seven days a week.”
― David Goldblatt, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer

“A law proclaimed in the name of Edward II in 1314 decried ‘a great uproar in the city, through certain tumults arising from great footballs in the fields of the public, from which many evils may arise’.10 An observer described its rural version as a game ‘in which young men, in country sport, propel a huge ball not by throwing it into the air, but by striking and rolling it along the ground, and that not with their hands but with their feet. A game I say abominable enough, and in my judgment at least, more common, undignified, and worthless than any other kind of game, rarely ending but with some loss, accident or disadvantage to the players themselves.”
― David Goldblatt, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer