The Football Man Quotes

“But a more likely suggestion is that a domestic Premier League may hive off from the English Football League to confine top-quality football to perhaps a dozen of the country’s major areas of population. This is a perfectly rational idea, and one which is known to find favour among a number of men in influential positions in football.”
― Arthur Hopcraft, The Football Man: People & Passions in Soccer

“Suggestions like these are not unknown to the clubs. It is deeply disappointing, to say the least of it, that so few clubs have chosen to act positively on them. They have prevaricated on the grounds of expense, of the difficulty of organization, of taking mountainous measures to cart away molehills. But the real reasons for their reluctance to act in such ways are nearer to cowardice than to a sense of proportion. They fear the fickleness of supporters; they fear that disgruntlement over the inevitably harsh treatment of some innocents, to say nothing of the guilty, might reduce public affection for the team; they fear that there might be reprisals by the excluded. On a more general, emotional plane, they wonder whether too much tampering with the tumult of football following might diminish it substantially in the public concern.”
― Arthur Hopcraft, The Football Man: People & Passions in Soccer

“I am not going to be popular in some quarters by saying here that I believe more people than are prepared to admit it take a surreptitious pleasure in this display of oafish anarchy on the football terraces.”
― Arthur Hopcraft, The Football Man: People & Passions in Soccer

“I’ve got a maxim in life. If ever someone beats me in a battle, I don’t blame them. I blame myself for letting them do it. Then I say, “Where have I gone wrong?”
― Arthur Hopcraft, The Football Man: People & Passions in Soccer

“Again the point was that where the special talents were high enough they chose themselves; not because they happened to fit but because they helped to decide the fit.”
― Arthur Hopcraft, The Football Man: People & Passions in Soccer

“A dirty player, for example, means a dirty-playing club to them; an outstandingly brilliant forward makes them see his club in a brighter, more glamorous light. More damage to the game can be done by individual acts of vindictiveness than the guilty realize, or the game deserves.”
― Arthur Hopcraft, The Football Man: People & Passions in Soccer

“Cliff Lloyd said to me in 1967, four years after the historic court case, that he was convinced no other events in football had done more to lift the general standard of play to its present high level than these two. What is more, he said that he always maintained England could win the 1966 World Cup (as she did) if her players were liberated from the restrictions binding them so unreasonably, and in so much resentment, to clubs and low rewards. He said, with cold and telling perception, that without this liberation football would have gradually dwindled to the same sad status that county cricket has in England – ‘a jolly day out, take-it-or-leave-it sort of thing’. I, for one, could not bear my football to look like that.”
― Arthur Hopcraft, The Football Man: People & Passions in Soccer

“George Eastham, the player concerned, had found himself in a position common to many footballers. He was a brilliantly gifted forward, of the thoughtful kind whom the game calls a ‘schemer’; he was an England international.”
― Arthur Hopcraft, The Football Man: People & Passions in Soccer

“To go to the match was to escape from the dark of despondency into the light of combat. Here, by association with the home team, positive identity could be claimed by muscle and in goals. To win was personal success, to lose another clout from life. Football was not so much an opiate of the people as a flag run up against the gaffer bolting his gates and the landlord armed with his bailiffs.”
― Arthur Hopcraft, The Football Man: People & Passions in Soccer

“What happens on the football field matters, not in the way that food matters but as poetry does to some people and alcohol does to others: it engages the personality. It has conflict and beauty, and when those two qualities are present together in something offered for public appraisal they represent much of what I understand to be art.”
― Arthur Hopcraft, The Football Man: People & Passions in Soccer

“What happens on the football field matters, not in the way that food matters but as poetry does to some people and alcohol does to others: it engages the personality.”
― Arthur Hopcraft, The Football Man: People & Passions in Soccer