Top 66 Roy Hodgson Quotes

The main problem with English players has always been the price.

I can get by quite well in Italian or German, though if the discussion got to a high level, I’d run out of vocabulary. I’m stronger in French and Swedish.

To be frank, you can’t compare the atmosphere and the way people behaved in the Olympic Stadium with the game I watched the day after, the Community Shield.

As far as I know, Fulham were never for sale during my time there. Mohamed Al Fayed never wanted to sell Fulham.

Hugh Grant is about the only actor I’ve met who has taken any proper interest in football, being a big Fulham supporter. But he’d be far too good-looking to play me in any film.

Talk is talk; action on the field is action on the field.

I am not only privileged to work for the FA and England: I have enjoyed working for the FA and England.

You are never quite sure how it will go, and even after a thousand games or so, that tense feeling is still there.

I don’t think any job is impossible.

It hasn’t always been a Premier League ride for Crystal Palace supporters. They’re there to support us through the hard times.

Everywhere I’ve managed, I’ve left a platform for my successor to build on, and this is a great satisfaction for me, even if I don’t necessarily get the recognition for it.

I don’t think there are many people out there – except, perhaps, the odd Twitter troll who knows no better – who believes that racially abusing people or threatening people is the right way to go.

There aren’t many English managers, I suppose, who’ve had the sort of career that I’ve had, outside the country. With the amount of money that is going around in the Premier League, not many people are tempted to move abroad.

I have been in football a long time, and Wayne Rooney has been in football a long time. He would regard me as someone who is very false if I ever said to him, ‘Your place is guaranteed.’ He would not expect it, and I would be very upset anyway if anyone asked me to give them a guarantee of a place.

I don’t think there are many jobs that would have tempted me away from Fulham, to be perfectly honest.

Most teams – whether they like it or not against Manchester City – you’re going to find yourself quite often penned in your own half.

In an ideal world, the season would end, and the players would have two to three weeks by the beach. You’d have four to five weeks of preparation, and then you’d play the tournament.

Often, in a tournament, the players that get injured or suffer a lack of form are the guys at the cutting edge, the guys who make the difference or score the goals.

I don’t like the way I see society going.

I think I like the artistry of the game. I still get a lot of pleasure watching the good-quality teams play, where the movements of the players are coordinated. It’s almost ballet-like, although ‘ballet-like’ is a bit of an exaggeration.

I have always promised myself and my wife that when I don’t enjoy it anymore, or I can’t handle the stress and the pressure that comes with having such a high-profile and top job – or my energy levels starts to fail me, or my enthusiasm starts to be dented – I won’t prolong my career longer than I feel I should.

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.

Getting that first foot on the rung of the ladder, that’s where you find it easier to shrug off those times when your foot slips off, and you have to get yourself going again.

There might be more meetings and situations where you’re required to represent the country in some way that wouldn’t necessarily happen to you if you’re a club manager, but other than that, I haven’t found any differences in my approach between running a club side and a national team.

Brazil is a fantastic football country.

The important thing is to take each game as it comes.

I enjoyed Wembley like all the managers before me, and I would hope that games would still be played there by the England national team.

All you can do when you are given a chance to play for England is to go out against whoever that opponent may be and do it very well. And if you do that, you get yourself in the forefront of the manager’s mind.

I quite liked Dostoyevsky when I was younger.

It wasn’t purely Alex Ferguson’s experience that made him a good manager, because he did it when he was inexperienced. But if you’ve got the qualities needed, and then you add experience to it, someone who’s been through it, well, that has to be advantageous. There’s no doubt about that.

I have been in football a long time.

I don’t have any regrets.

It’s very hard to be happy when you’ve lost.

The last thing you want as a striker is the opposing team putting all 10 players behind the ball.

I am both proud and excited at the prospect of working as the Liverpool manager.

All of the top managers I have come across during my career and befriend, they suffer as much with the defeats and when things don’t go their way late in life as they did early in life.

I was so fully involved in football and building a career that I didn’t spend nearly enough time with my son when he was growing up.

You can’t flirt with relegation every year.

Of course, any work you do as a sporting person, a football coach or any coach, if it is good work, you’ve got to have something – a championship – to show for it.

Maybe I see things too naively at times.

I like Philip Roth, John Updike, and Richard Yates.

We believe defending is very much a team job, and we can’t just rely on a back four and a goalkeeper.

You’re as old as you feel.

Anyone who watches football and watches Tottenham play would have to be an admirer of the way they play football and the way they go about their business.

I’ve worked for a long time and hope people have developed enough confidence in me that it will remain even in a period when we’re not winning many games.

For goal-scorers and centre-forwards, confidence does play a big part.

Luckily, my age doesn’t ever come into my thoughts.

It does get hot in England from time to time.

What you’ve got to do in any coaching job, whether it is moving to Sweden as a young man – where being English gave you a slight advantage – or something else, you’ve got to win the players’ respect.

If success is about winning the league, there will always be 19 disappointed clubs.

I think any manager who tells you, ‘I am very good at keeping my equilibrium. I’m always calm and reasoned, and results don’t affect me particularly. I can take the good with the bad, and I can put the wins and the losses in perspective,’ you will find a special person. I’ve never met one.

I have worked long and hard to reach the level I have reached.

New faces, maybe perking up the squad and giving you another arrow to your bow – that can be a help.

I don’t own photograph albums – the pictures that are important to me are etched in my mind.

It’s very flattering that those who have assessed my work over the years think that I have the qualities to be an England manager.

In football, however well you think you are doing, however well your life is going, there is always a mugger there lurking in the shadows to bash you over the head when you least expect it.

It’s an achievement I can be happy about – if you call getting old and still being in a job an achievement.

I think, increasingly, people will define success as staying in the League, being a stable Premier League club that treats its fans to good football every year.

I’ve got to be honest with you: I don’t regard 29 as old.

I try very hard not to look back.

People are entitled to say what they feel sometimes.

All managers have someone they lean on and take advice from.

As far as I’m concerned, if you’re only going to call managers who have won a trophy any good, then basically, you have four or five.

I’m a football manager, a football coach; I can’t be expected to pontificate on everything.

Why shouldn’t Harry Kane take corners? If he happens to be the best striker of a ball in the team and gives you the best delivery, why shouldn’t he do it?

When you have been lucky enough to move up the ladder, all you see, really, is the slide back down. You don’t see the further steps upwards.