Eric Cantona Football Quotations

I don't think the world of football is so serious. It's important to have distance about things and about yourself. If we believe we are kings or gods, we become crazy. We all know it's a game and we all enjoy it together.

I would like to compare football and cinema. I think it's very similar. It's two games... different games. You have to work very hard and find the confidence to enjoy it on the pitch or in the film.

Being on stage isn't so tough compared to the football pitch.

Even as a footballer, I was always being creative.

When you arrive in England for football it's a paradise.

Football lost its excitement for me.

I started beach football in Monte Carlo when I retired from football in 1997. I liked the game very much.

If you have only one passion in life - football - and you pursue it to the exclusion of everything else, it becomes very dangerous. When you stop doing this activity it is as though you are dying. The death of that activity is a death in itself.

In football you have an adversary; in cinema that adversary is yourself.

When I was a child I had a dream to become a football player. I always played as I played when I was a child. I tried to improve. I never dreamt of becoming a professional football player, I dreamed just to play with the best players in the best team. I never dreamed to be paid to play. I would have paid to play an FA Cup Final in front of 80,000 people in Wembley. I just tried to play the wonderful game that football is. So, I hope young players will still have this dream.

Often there are players who have only football as a way of expressing themselves and never develop other interests. And when they no longer play football, they no longer do anything; they no longer exist, or rather they have the sensation of no longer existing.

Actually, I wanted to act even when I was still playing football.

The real fans of football come from the working class. Now they cannot afford to come and watch the game.

I stopped playing football because I'd done as much as I could. I needed something which was going to excite me as much as football had excited me.

I feel close to the rebelliousness of the youth here. Perhaps time will seperate us , but nobody can deny that here, behind the windows of Manchester, there is an insane love of football, of celebration and of music.

When I think football, I think Manchester United. I still support United and always will. I will die with them in my heart.

You can change your wife, your politics, your religion, but never, never can you change your favourite football team.

I love Rooney as a player. But I am a bit worried. Rooney can become the best player in the world at 25, 26, if he knows that in football you need to be strong, train hard, go to bed early, be careful what you are eating, what you are drinking, what you do in life.