David de Gea Quotes

I started out as a football player. I liked to inflict pain. In basketball, it was the same thing.

I used to play rugby, which requires a lot of physical strength. The game requires you to get aggressive.

It is a violent sport that we choose as men, and that we as parents allow our children to play.

We play a violent sport.

Technique is everything and we play a contact sport.

I played rugby from the age of 10 until my late twenties; an unlikely player - small, quiet, long-haired and 'wiry.'

I don't think the physical part of English football would be a problem. When you get the ball, you need to be ready. The defenders here are very tough. I like that.

Any football game, you can be hit one way or another. It's not the safest sport that we play; it's a beautifully violent game, and that's what, in part, I love about it.

I always say football is very unnatural sport. Nobody loves to just ram into people.

We play a contact sport, and it's aggressive, and you have to be aggressive in everything you do.

Sometimes you'll have 30, 40 touches in the game, and you'll feel better than if you had 22. It depends on where you get hit and how you get hit.

This is a virile sport in which physical contact is allowed.

You can't tap somebody in the helmet and say, 'Go be physical.' If you're not physical, you can't play physical, and that's a big part of what we believe in.

Some of my best tackles were the most dangerous!

If you don't like to be hit, you're in the wrong sport.

I've always been someone who said that football is a contact sport.

Soccer is an uncomfortable sport. You're running; you're getting tackled.

People think of rugby players as being tough but it's another thing to stand in front of someone and get kicked, punched, taken down. In rugby you have two contact sessions a week and you play a game on the weekend.

It's a physical game, and it's honestly a fight out there every play.

I prefer rugby to soccer. I enjoy the violence in rugby, except when they start biting each other's ears off.

The only way to get to the other end of the pitch is to belt it and then belt it again.

I like playing inside. I just love the physicalness of being in the box with the bigger guys. That's just something that's part of my game.

As a kid, I loved contact sports, especially American football and boxing.

Nobody likes it when people dribble past them, me included, but I can't tackle.

Liverpool midfielder Xabi Alonso was always bemused by our enthusiasm for tackling, because he saw it as the last resort.