Johan Cruyff Quotes

As a scouting department, with the confidence we have in our player development, if a guy has the potential that we think they have and the makeup and they stay healthy, we think they will be a productive Major Leaguer. We take a lot of pride in that.

Perception is a big thing in football and people need to be more careful about how they choose to perceive young players in the first instance.

I was very fortunate that I had a great scouting staff at Everton from the academy, because it was those people who got the likes of Ross Barkley and Wayne Rooney when they were young.

We had a work session [in "Moneyball"] where about 30 scouts came in and we're all riffing. And after it, [director] Bennett Miller said: Look at these faces and this is what we have to got to do. We got to get these guys in the scene.

Alfredo Morelos is going to be a star for us. When you look at attitude he has and commitment he shows, he's ready to get to the top. He could be a big player for Colombia for years to come.

Ultimately, good players need to play and they don't always at a young age in England.

You pick guys in the first round - whenever you pick guys - you pick them for a reason.

With Ajax and Liverpool, you win about 80 per cent of matches.

People have assumed that I have to run the ball before I can throw it most all of my career, all the way back before high school. It's a stereotype put on me for a long time because I'm African-American and I'm a dual-threat quarterback. I don't know why that stereotype is still around. It's about talent and the ability to throw the ball, not the color of your skin or your ability to also be a dangerous runner.

Why couldn't you beat a richer club? I've never seen a bag of money score a goal.

There is only one ball, so you need to have it.

Kenny was actually here at Melwood as a 15-year-old schoolboy. He came on trial and he went home afterwards. It was only later that Bill Shankly realised that Dalglish was here as a boy and he went mad! He said 'how did we miss him?' Kenny just had the football brain. He was born with it and you can't give that to people. He had that natural born talent.

As part of the process, there are a lot of different ways to evaluate players. There are a number of different companies and things out there that do different things; that have different ways of evaluating and those types of tests and so forth.

If I wanted you to understand it, I would have explained it better.

When you play a match, it is statistically proven that players actually have the ball 3 minutes on average ... So, the most important thing is: what do you do during those 87 minutes when you do not have the ball. That is what determines wether you're a good player or not.

We must make sure their worst players get the ball the most. You'll get it back in no time.

If you have the ball, you must make the field as big as possible, and if you don't have the ball, you must make it as small as possible.

Every professional golfer has a seperate coach for his drives, for approaches, for putting. In football we have one coach for 15 players. This is absurd.

With music, you could stick someone with a musical instrument or even not a musical instrument, get them to showcase their talent, and within 30 seconds you could tell whether they were good or not, but with acting you have to give them the right part.

The cold-audition process is not a science, so I ignore that.

In my teams, the goalie is the first attacker, and the striker the first defender.

Players today can only shoot with their laces. I could shoot with the inside, laces, and outside of both feet. In other words, I was six times better than today's players.

It's all about the climate. I had a long discussion about it when I went to Scotland to see Andy Roxburgh. I worked with a Scottish youth side and had them do the same drills I would do in Italy. I realised that, between the wind, the rain and the cold, there was no way they could do it. How can you possibly teach anybody anything in those conditions? To me, it's pretty obvious and it explains why Brazilians are more technical than Europeans and, in Italy, the further south you go the more technical they are.

What is speed? The sports press often confuses speed with insight. See, if I start running slightly earlier than someone else, I seem faster.

There are very few players who know what to do when they're not marked. So sometimes you tell a player: that attacker is very good, but don't mark him.