Best Quotes from How Football Explains The World by Franklin Foer with Page Numbers

"Who do you hate most? A Croatian, a cop: it doesn’t make a difference. I’d kill them all."

"In the shadow of this championship season, in Red Star’s headquarters and stadium, the destruction of this Yugoslavia was being plotted."

"It’s hard to imagine that Ultra Bad Boys are typical figures. They seem a product of a war-torn country and its diseased ideology. But they’re really not such a homegrown oddity."

"We fans first trained without weapons . . . Since our first beginning I insisted on discipline."

"I made them cut their hair, shave regularly, stop drinking, and everything went on track."

"The media railed against the Croatian treatment of its Serb minority, a story that tugged at the heart strings of the nation."

"Fans make noise, they want to get drunk, fool around. I decided to stop all this with one blow; I made them cut their hair, shave regularly, stop drinking, and everything went on track."

"Young men slept in different apartments each night, hoping to evade the conscriptors."

"The teams called one another and said, ‘We can’t let this happen again.’"

"But for once, in Serbia, evil shed its coat of banality and could be identified as itself."

In the stadium, the intensity can be gauged without numbers.

The irony is obvious: Amoruso is a Catholic. For that matter, so are most of the Rangers players.

At the heart of the matter lies a historical legacy of intersecting loyalties and communal identities.

Celtic succeeded wildly. Because it played with something to prove, Celtic soon captured four of six league championships.

The story of Celtic and Rangers traces back to the sixteenth century.

Rangers send teams to Belfast for benefit matches, with proceeds going to Northern Irish chapters of the Orange Order.

Even with economic growth, the primal pull of identity remains potent.

Rangers don’t try too hard to discourage religious bigotry.

When Celtic supporters make their case, they invariably point to a string of incidents.

Soccer allows men to indulge their deepest political passions in a ritualistic context.

Hakoah had seemed chimerical to me.

We want to restore to the flabby Jewish body its lost tone, to make it vigorous and strong, nimble and powerful.

Muscular Judaism wasn’t an egghead’s pipe dream.

A victorious team trailed by a bandwagon of Jews.

Each Hakoah victory become another proof that the period of Jewish inferiority in physical activities had come to an end.

Hakoah would send ahead promoters to generate buzz for Muskeljudentum.

Before Hakoah, no continental team had beaten an English club on English soil.

Instead of denouncing the Jews as pollutants to the nation, chunks of the working class have identified themselves as Jewish.

The essence of anti-Semitism has been the treatment of the Jews as something alien, as dangerous interlopers, a state within the state.

It still means crossing a social barrier that even the most liberal, open-minded Hungarians don’t often traverse.

It’s better than sex. It lasts longer as well.

Fear is a drug.

There’s a very thin line between being hero and coward.

I was trained to fight and I couldn’t turn it off.

We feel a certain responsibility to the young guys. We want them to succeed.

They loved the football, to be sure, but they also liked to behave badly.

Even in posh West London, perhaps the most yuppie stretch in the whole of Britain, Chelsea still manages to draw a largely working-class crowd.

Nostalgia for a social market that never existed.

The police have nicked me twenty-one times . . . I’m addicted to violence . . . I’ve tried to stop, but I can’t.

It’s easy to understand how this argument would apply to English soccer in general and Chelsea in particular.

In Brazil, Miranda is a familiar figure: the populist.

His name is Eurico Miranda, a federal congressman and the president of Vasco da Gama. The billboard trumpets him as a 'symbol of resistance.'

Every year they concoct a different system for the league, a new calendar and formula for winning the championship.

Brazilians call their teams 'clubs,' because most are actually clubs.

Like Pelé, the dictatorship attracted rogues who robbed the national treasury.

It’s too essential a part of the national character.

A symbol of Brazil that has come up from the roots... that has triumphed.

You can’t do business with members of your family.

With his charisma, he quickly politicked his way up the Vasco hierarchy.

He may be a bastard, but he’s my bastard.

"To accomplish such a gargantuan task, they would have to imitate the approach of these clubs."

"His arrival in the Ukraine was a cross-cultural experiment."

"You see, everyone knows me. We’ve got no problems. They like me so much."

"Karpaty never had political power; it never will have more money than the clubs in Kiev or Donetsk. But it has had a sense of spirit that has helped make up for these disadvantages."

"If the oligarchs wanted the Ukraine to become a great soccer nation again, why not invest the money spent on Edward into the development of young Ukrainian talent?"

"The paradigms ruling Nigerian soccer treat the game less as science than art. Nigeria is the Brazil of Africa—clever, undisciplined, and stylish."

"It's hard for the African players to adapt, especially when you have training sessions at minus 25. It's hard enough for us continental people. I can't imagine for them."

"They were not allowed to think."

"A sense of spirit that has helped make up for these disadvantages."

"I don’t understand why the coach and the general director want to weigh me. They don’t weigh anyone else. Why do they have a problem with me?"

"To understand the importance of refereeing requires a brief word on the paradox of Italian soccer."

"Players must do whatever they can to gain the upper hand."

"The media can either turn away from or expose the preferential treatment that referees give to Juventus and Milan."

"One cannot remain indifferent when confronted with certain coincidences that are so singular, and, let’s say ‘nutritious.’"

"In the globalized economy, the media has so much more power."

"Berlusconi’s glamour players and championship trophies have produced a national following that may soon eclipse Juventus’s broad base."

"The manipulation hinges on pressure exerted on referees."

"Winning is about style and entertainment, too. Milan represents a major break with the long Italian history of defensive-minded catenaccio."

"The current breed of mogul has a harder time obscuring wealth and influence."

"Under the monopolistic rule of the Christian Democratic Party, bribery was a regularized feature of Italian business."

"Barça became my team in 1994 on a winter trip through the city."

"The transcendent enthusiasm for a bunch of artifacts and sepia photos moved me."

"It’s a beautiful picture, but not at all realistic."

"To deny this craving is to deny human nature and human dignity."

"There’s no reason that nationalism should inherently culminate in these ugly feelings."

"I love Barça because it invites a passion that doesn’t culminate in violence."

"Barça doesn’t just redeem the game from its critics; it redeems the concept of nationalism."

"To become Catalan, one must simply learn the Catalan language, disparage Castilian Spain, and love Barça."

"Cured of their rauxa by Barça, they retrace their steps to the building where they had suffered for so long."

"We hate him so much, because we love Barça so much. It hurts."

"Risking severe punishment, Tehran’s women have been unable to let go of the Azadi."

"Their joy led them to dispense with the official morality."

"Aren’t we part of this nation? We want to celebrate too. We aren’t ants."

"The football revolution holds the key to the future of the Middle East."

"This future could be discerned in the waving of the pre-Islamic national flag."

"When they revolt, they might fleetingly plead for American help, but they’ll mostly rise up in the name of their nation."

"It is more than an event. The football revolution holds the key to the future of the Middle East."

"Like the Boston Tea Party, it will go down as the moment when the people first realized that they could challenge their tyrannical rulers."

"We want to glare at our leaders as we dance in the streets."

"The burgeoning youth population of Iran looked West and toward soccer for inspiration."

Soccer came to represent the fundamental tenets of yuppie parenting, the spirit of Sesame Street and Dr. Benjamin Spock.

The idea that soccer could alleviate shyness was not an idiosyncratic parenting theory.

Soccer represented something very different. It was a tabula rasa, a sport onto which a generation of parents could project their values.

For all the talk of freedom, the sixties parenting style had a far less laissez-faire side, too.

Maybe other countries can’t afford football, basketball and baseball leagues: maybe if they could afford these other sports, they’d enjoy them even more.

The anti-soccer lobby really articulates the same fears as a phobia of globalization.

The Americans are such suckers when it comes to something with a European label.

Soccer isn’t exactly pernicious, but it’s a symbol of the U.S. junking its tradition to 'get with the rest of the world’s program.'

In Washington, more or less half the stadium wore the blue-and-white Honduran jersey.

Just as much as they have changed the tastes and economies of other countries, they have tried to change the tastes and economy of the United States.