Xavi Quotes

I like to control the ball and analyse the game.

Dominating the midfield is the most important thing in modern football. To succeed, you have to be good at everything.

I have to open the game from my position. It's really important to play with the ball.

That's the intelligence of football: to see when to be compact, when to counter-attack, or, if you see that you're in the opposite half, you try and win the ball.

I think you have to play your own game and sometimes people don't realise that the play-maker runs the most kilometres on the pitch!

I know what to do when they give me the ball. I know what to do to give this team a chance to win.

In international football, you need pace and you need your players up top to create things out of nothing and run at people.

When you play soccer, most of the time you got to get the ball moving, but once you get into that attacking third you gotta' be creative, you gotta' let your talent take over.

When you're a kid you just think about where you are going to be to put yourself in a position for the next scoring chance. But as you develop, you start to do things that may not catch the eye of the normal football watcher, the dropping back, the closing down.

Everybody thinks when I say a guy is a good game manager, that's a negative, but I think it's a real positive. You have the ball in your hand every time when you're a quarterback. Whether you're handing it off or throwing to somebody, I think that's extremely important.

Scottish football doesn't suit me perfectly, how I want to play football.

I'm a coach who likes to have the ball, but what I really think is, 'How can you be in charge of the game?' I think, but maybe I am the only one, that the defensive process can take care of the game. Why is that? Because teams wait to defend. If you create something where you go to defend, to steal the ball where you want, it's different.

Spalletti made a difference for me. He gives great importance to the details and, at minimum, wants the goalkeeper to know how to play with the ball at his feet.

The work is intense. You have to calculate a great deal very quickly which requires football intelligence and real concentration. Part of my role is to shuttle between the defense and the attacking lines to make sure that the ball circulates well and quickly.

If I have the ball in my hands, I'll make a play. If don't, I'll try to get in position to make a play. I think that's what it comes down to.

I like the Klopp mentality but at the same time, I like the Pep culture about football because always we need intensity with and without the ball.

I like to be in contact with the ball, have possession, to play.

Football is open; it is not only keeping possession of the ball and making more passes.

We have to cut out some of our mistakes, but the main thing in English football is controlling the second ball. Without that, you cannot survive.

When Messi has the ball centrally, with time, he has so many options to hurt you.

I spent the best part of 20 years trying to stop people like Chris Waddle from playing. Now I'm convinced that good touch and loads of movement are the way forward.

Cruyff defined a philosophy and a style of how we had to play: positional play, type of players, the profile of the coaches, even.

The most important thing is to help the team to come in front of the goal with one-two passes, I drop down, or I give them space, because for defenders, it's always difficult to have a false nine because they don't have a direct player against them, so they don't know exactly what to do.

We have four parts of our game: working against the ball; in possession; losing the ball; winning the ball. If you are good in all four parts, you have a good chance of winning.

I would say Pep Guardiola's No. 1 quality is that he sees the technical and tactical aspect of a game really fast.