Soccer Inspiration Quotes

Once I started playing as a striker, I'd say I looked up to Julie Fleeting and Thierry Henry.

As a young Scottish footballer growing up - I always used to follow Scotland and watch the games - Kenny Dalglish, Graeme Souness, and Joe Jordan were players I looked up to.

Zico was my idol. He was a very good player from Flamengo, and I was a Flamengo supporter from Rio de Janeiro. I was always looking for him and saying I want to be like him. He's my big hero.

I'm being told I've become an inspiration to a lot of young soccer players in Edmonton and to me, that's just awesome.

When the U.S. team went on its historic run to the World Cup quarter-finals in 2002, I was thirteen years old. Each game in that run - the astonishing victory against Portugal, the resilient win over Mexico, even the gutsy but unlucky effort against the Germans - propelled me to push my other athletic interests aside and focus only on soccer.

Scoring goals is nice, but I'm nowhere near Platini. I hope I can get closer to him.

I have grown up as a player watching many champions like Pirlo and Xavi. I have watched them and tried to learn from how they do things.

I grew up loving Brazilian soccer. What made me think soccer was cool was these guys making soccer look like fun and easy, and they would just destroy people. It was an art. I loved that. And that's the way I learned the game and mimicked a style. It's just so beautiful.

When I first joined the team, I was playing with the likes of Mia Hamm, Shannon MacMillan, Tiffeny Milbrett - all those big-time players. It was very intimidating. I had some of these players' posters on my wall growing up, and now I was able to play with them.

Whenever we are en route to a game on the bus I am always watching the goals of Ronaldo, Adriano, and Neymar to get some inspiration. Then, when I am on the pitch, I try to replicate what they do.

Every kid around the world who plays soccer wants to be Pele. I have a great responsibility to show them not just how to be like a soccer player, but how to be like a man.

When I look in the mirror, I don't see a person who's made the kind of impact that Mia Hamm made on the game. She's still my idol, the greatest player and the greatest teammate. She achieved so much in so many different ways. What she did for women's soccer can't be measured.

I had a lot of idols like Fernando Torres, Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher, and Xabi Alonso - all of them. I really looked up to them.

The transition from soccer to fashion was an organic one.

I think what we really want to do is to create a real soccer nation. We want to have kids really wanting to play the sport.

In the past, I had my idols but today I enjoy learning from all the soccer I watch.

If I can inspire kids to do what I do - want to become professional soccer players - then I think that that's everything I want to do.

When I was younger, I had two players: Luke Shaw and Gareth Bale. When Shaw was at Southampton, he was a left-back, and I loved watching him bomb up and down the wing, create goals, score goals, so I think I try to emulate that. Gareth Bale - same thing, really.

Iniesta is my ideal player. I've watched him throughout my career and hoped to be like him. It's fun to watch him play and that's the kind of football I'd like to play.

I always modeled myself on Ronaldinho. He was one of my favourites who I followed a lot - his magic made us want to imitate him and his football. Is my goal celebration a tribute to him? Yes, of course. I like him a lot.

I always liked watching Ronaldo and Ronaldinho; they were the players who I dreamt about meeting. They inspired me a lot in my own style of play.

You often see him Ronaldo topless and his physique is awesome. It drives everyone on and we all want to have a body like his.

As a kid, I used to go and wait at the gates of Melwood or look through the cracks in the wall just see if I could see any of the people I was looking up to, who we all wanted to aspire to become, when we were in the Champions League, the likes of Gerrard, Carragher and Alonso.

During the holidays, professional players would come and say hello to us in the academy and that really made you want to be a professional. When you saw what great conditions they lived in, it gave you even more desire.

Ndamukong started out playing soccer, like his sister before him. She excelled at it, played for Mississippi State, made the Cameroon national team.