World Cup Quotes

I'm not necessarily proud of the World Cups and the grand slams won or lost, the amount of points I scored, this record or that.

I would love to play for Real Madrid. And I want to win a World Cup for the U.S. so bad. When the women won it, everybody went crazy. I would love to be part of something like that.

I want to be top scorer in the Premier League, top scorer at the World Cup and, within five years, I want to be among the best strikers in the world. Trust me, it will happen. I look around at other players, I see my own ability and I can't see anything that tells me it won't happen, I'm sure people will think 'What is he talking about?' But as I have done before, and as I will do again, I will sit at the other end and laugh at those people when it is all done.

Success is not winning the World Cup. It may be a goal in your mind but success is having a team that is improving all the time.

If you run a country and want to put it on the global map you don't have so many choices. You can get the Olympics, the World Cup or a Formula One race. And the first two are only every four years - and you have them only once.

In fact, if you were interested in a global platform there are only three sporting events: probably the most powerful - or equally powerful [to F1] - are the World Cup and the Olympics, and then Formula One. And there it gets interesting.

While the World Cup is great every four years, I think people struggle to get themselves excited about qualifiers against the smaller nations. It will take some good performances from the national team to get the feel-good factor back, as far as the England team goes at least.

Everyone knows that England are a far better team than their World Cup performance suggests. It's vital that we play with confidence and take the strength and competition of the engage Super League in to the Four Nations.

The World Cup experience is more than just the game of soccer. It's an event. And it will fly by faster than you think. It will end and you'll be saying, 'Wow, it's over already?' You have to remember to take it all in and enjoy it.

Our performance during this World Cup has not been enough to progress further and both myself and all the players regret that and are hurt more than people realise.

Nobody likes being criticised, particularly by players who will be in Disneyland this summer on their holidays rather than the World Cup in Japan

We wanted to give back to the fans what they've given us, and that is unbelievable support thoughout the World Cup

I feel I have grown up. I am a man. It's important in my football too. When everything is good, I don't think you grow up fantastically, I think maybe you need a few problems to grow up. It is good if people in England have started to admire me. I think I have changed a little since the World Cup. I am stronger with my mentality and with my game as well.

I never thought I'd play soccer past high school, so to go from that team to actually being most-capped and three World Cups is pretty special.

We have a great sense of togetherness. It is our team spirit that has taken us to this World Cup.

It has been very good here, but the World Cup game was different. It had a different significance to it.

I still have many goals left, especially the Overall World Cup standings.

When I was a child, all I wanted was to enter the Austrian team and to compete on the World Cup tour. I had to fight hard to reach this. I wanted badly to win each race.

As a kid growing up in the back streets of Dublin I used to pretend I was playing in the World Cup with my mates out on the streets, and now I will be doing it for real.

Qualifying for the second stage would be a successful World Cup for us. I think we can do it.

The World Cup is a truly international event.

If I remain healthy, I can win more races, but I don't think so much about setting new records. I'm already proud to have become the leading Austrian World Cup racer.

Well, we've made huge strides since the 1990 World Cup, USA '94, and obviously since '98. Unfortunately, those strides only register with the public once every four years.

An artist in my eyes, is someone who can lighten up a dark room. I have never and will never find difference between the pass from Pele to Carlos Alberto in the final of the World Cup in 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud, who stretches cords from steeple to steeple and garlands from window to window. There is in each of these human manifestations an expression of beauty which touches us and gives us a feeling of eternity.

The whole kiss-and-tell thing is a negative approach that often happens in a World Cup. We will see negative stories about the players and it can affect their confidence and the overall performance of the national team on the pitch, let alone the bid to actually stage the competition.

I'm not prepared to make any comments on the World Cup in Qatar in 1922.

Only 38 per cent of players in the Premier League are English; that is a damning statistic. Soon, the England manager will have to go scouting for players in the Championship - and when I say 'soon' I mean the next four or five years, perhaps even for the next World Cup.

At the Cardiff World Cup I really would like to make the final. The favorites are still Peter, Daniele or Vavra, but I will try to do my best in order to be closest as possible to these athletes.

The water here in Cardiff is much easier than in London, so for us it is more relaxing paddling here. This race is for us a continuation of our training, we will compete in only this World cup. We don't want to travel too much before the Olympic Games and we want to focus on the Games.

I've been through the process qualifying for the World Cup, which is an amazing, two-year process. It was an honor to represent the U.S. and to represent the city of Los Angeles and California.

I scored in a World Cup and I want that buzz again.

I remember being in buses, hotel lobbies and bars leading up to the 1994 World Cup talking with guys about how great it would be to have a legitimate league of our own, so getting on the plane in Italy to return and be part of the first year of MLS was one of the proudest moments of my life.

If you spend 10,000 hours on the bunny slope, you're never going to win the World Cup. You've got to challenge yourself, ski the double blacks, go out when it's blowin' and snowin' as well as when it's sunny and smooth.

He's got great credentials by winning the World Cup, but he did it with Brazil - my granny could probably have managed Brazil to World Cup success.

The first World Cup I remember was in the 1950 when I was 9 or 10 years old. My father was a soccer player, and there was a big party, and when Brazil lost to Uruguay, I saw my father crying.

Brazil goes into every World Cup expecting to win - so when it is in Brazil it is expected even more. You can't understand what the World Cup means to our country.

As a boy, I wanted to be the Peruvian Diego Maradona. Sadly, Peru hasnt made the World Cup since 1982, so I guess I did well to choose something different.

The reason why Indian bowling has done exceptionally well in this World Cup is MS Dhoni. When we wrote them off, he kept supporting them. When they were struggling, only he was standing by his bowlers.

[Wayne Rooney] best tournament was the 2004 European Championships, when he played alongside me and made such a big impact, but it hasn't happened for him at the World Cup for one reason or another.

The Indian team does not need any best wishes - they are going to win anyway. I have been close to Sourav Ganguly, and I hope he does well in the World Cup.

I can't believe so much media attention is being paid to Fernando Torres and his loss of form, when the answer is staring us all in the face. It's his hair. His moping and ineffectual performances began just in time for the World Cup, which took place just after he substituted his dodgy blonde locks for a more serious brunette do

England did nothing in that World Cup, so why were they bringing books out? 'We got beat in the quarter-finals. I played like s**t. Here's my book.'

Right through to the end of the last World Cup game, I still couldnt bear the thought of not being perfect or letting people down.

I'm half-Italian and my name is Portuguese. Michael Young is half-Mexican. There are players from the United States that have heritage elsewhere and it's a great thing to have a world cup to celebrate the whole world. It shows the world that baseball is important and how great the game is.

Consequently, I won just about everything I set out to win, everything bar the World Cup, of course. But even now, I don't regret that, because I was part of a team which twice reached the semi-finals.

The crowd is wonderful. There is always a superb atmosphere in the finish area. It's good for the World Cup. I missed it a lot when I had to rest and it's so nice to be back here.

Those who believe in this type of thing [Paul the Octopus, who ‘predicted’ the result of World Cup matches] cannot be the leaders of the global nations that aspire, like Iran, to human perfection, basing themselves in the love of all sacred values.

You have to show up in the World Cup, and in the World Cup anything can happen.

Baseball and American football and hockey are all ahead because they have a history. The MLS is kind of new. So hopefully, in time, and with players coming and trying to develop the game, and the U.S. team also doing well - at the last World Cup, they finished above England and created some buzz.

The biggest thing right now is to know that I just didn't give up. It would have been the easiest thing for me to just go ahead and pull out of the tournament with what has been going on over the last week - just to be up there with my mum and support her. But I really wanted to come down here and play with Adam (Scott) and really try to win the World Cup and we achieved that which was great.