Nikita Parris Quotes

What happens is once you start to understand football, you realise that it's not just about the physical side of the game and chasing after a ball. It's a strategic sport which requires a lot of intelligence. It's a very mental game.

I don't know if you could take a whole 90 minutes and say that was the best game we ever played.

There were probably a few games I played where I should not have played, because of some nagging injuries or something. I used to always talk the managers into playing me, because I wanted to play so badly.

I don't love football the way I once loved the game. I don't look at it as fun anymore, and it definitely used to be fun. A lot of the fun has been taken away from it, I guess, because you go through so much on the field and off the field.

In front of the world, all of a sudden I'm a great athlete and I'm put into an environment with 25 other women and I'm expected to go to team meals, team functions.

If you are enjoying your football, you see it on the pitch.

Always, at a big team, there's very hard competition.

You're only out there for 90 minutes, and you have to give it everything you've got. It's a game of football, at the end of the day.

Tempers flare at times. That's what good teams do: they react to things and go out there and leave it all on the field.

If you are just a drag-flicker, you may some time be out of the team because you're not performing well.

How can I be a great football player when you're not happy with yourself?

When you play for a club like Madrid, you always have to stay in the present, because everything is so intense: the sprints, the headers, the tackles, the training sessions, the away trips, the hotels. The victories and the defeats.

I always try to perform, and not because you have players on the bench or on the pitch that can play in your position.

I never enjoyed being the star-man because as soon as you become the focal point of the team, you assume an extra burden of responsibility.

I am enjoying playing English football. It is very beautiful. With every game I play, I feel more comfortable.

The best kind of accountability on a team is peer-to-peer. Peer pressure is more efficient and effective than going to the leader, anonymously complaining, and having them stop what they are doing to intervene.

We pick players on their profiles. Over the years, I've learned that, if you have one cog that's not quite right in the system, that flow of how you want to play can't work.

People think that football is all glamour and money but trust me all footballers go through the same boring and annoying things as everybody else.

Soccer was probably the most fun game I've played because I never walked away feeling like I had a bad game. If you play a position in soccer where you can out-hustle or out-work or out-prepare somebody, it is a lot easier to walk away from the game and say, I gave it my all. I could always try. I could always hustle.

As a footballer, you just have to try to learn what you've done bad and what I could do good.

Being a player for a big team like Barca, you have to be very strong.

I'm just like the rest of the guys. I'm a little different in a lot of ways, but I'm still a player with a number on his back and if I'm unable to produce, they'll find somebody else to fill my spot.

If he is having a bad game, a team-mate might feel Paul Scholes is not quite on his game, but a spectator wouldn't notice. Scholes, of all the players I have played with, has the highest bottom level.

When you are a footballer, you will not always play 90 minutes. Sometimes you are not happy, but this is not important for me.

Whenever something in the system changes, you have to prove yourself again. But wherever you go, you have to prove that you're better than whoever else is on the team. At a team like Arsenal, that's always going to be hard so I always have to be on it in training and matches.