Branch Rickey Quotes

What you don't want to do is to hang on to the aging superstar past his prime and take resources away you can otherwise use to build a better overall team.

When you've got money to spend, it's very easy to buy someone worth £50m rather than say, 'I'm going to play this 20-year-old English player.' It's easier to buy someone when you have the money to do it. But at the same time, if you give somebody an opportunity, you never know. You can only roll the dice and see how they perform.

Who wants to lose or sell a player? Nobody does.

Sometimes you have to manage, and you have to sell two or three players who aren't playing many games.

World Cups aren't moments to invest in players.

Captain Huston and myself have spent over $200,000 in strengthening the Yankees since we purchased the club. We paid $37,500 for Frank Baker; we paid $25,000 for Lee Magee, and we have got rid of a young fortune on other players who couldn't deliver the goods. And we have had some of the most frightful luck I ever heard of.

Life teaches you that you need to make decisions in the right time - not too early, not too late.

If a better player comes along, I will try to persuade the club to get him in. Sometimes, you can do your business and all of a sudden something appears that you never expected to appear.

A good player is a good player, it's just that we cannot afford signings that do not work.

Managers can make themselves look strong by selling or dropping players, but if the move doesn't work, the choice looks flawed.

You have expectations always when you buy players. Mostly, you have positive expectations.

Whether it's drafting or player development, the ultimate is putting a team together.

Football today means players stay less now than ever before and you have to accept that. As a manager, a big part of your business is doing far too much business that you don't want to do really.

It is not always about signing star forwards and midfielders.

It is not always possible, but the best plan is always to keep hold of your best players.

You cannot buy players and know, for sure, that they can deliver. You cannot know because football is a team sport.

Bad performances can happen and are not that serious - even with new players. You can't, say, sell him, get a new one.

Why couldn't it have been done 2 years ago, and why will 2 years in the future be too late?

Change almost never fails because it's too early. It almost always fails because it's too late.

Being a part of a trade doesn't always mean you're not a good player. It means they want to do something different for their organization.

If you buy too many bad players, you don't last in this game.

If I was to become a manager, I would not want someone else to be signing the players for the team that my job depended on.

I always believe that there are players that are hard to replace.

How do you recruit a player if you don't really know what it is that you are trying to do? How do you convince a player of the way you want to play if you don't have clarity yourself over why you want to do it?

If you want to win in this league, you need quality depth management, in the age of the salary cap.