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It is, frankly, horrifying that a philosophy founded on such a basic misinterpretation of figures could have been allowed to become a cornerstone of English coaching. Anti-intellectualism is one thing, but faith in wrong-headed pseudo-intellectualism is far worse.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (35%)

When Soviet myth-making was at its height, it was said that the Dinamo sports club, which was controlled by the Ministry of the Interior and ran teams across the USSR, chose blue and white as their colours to represent water and air, the two elements without which man could not live. The truth is rather that Charnock was from Blackburn, and dressed his team in the same colours as the team he supported: Blackburn Rovers.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (21%)

The camp was overflowing with personalities and eccentrics. There was F. Charles Adler, a world-renowned conductor who had studied under Gustav Mahler; Sir James Chadwick, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who had been the first to conceive the idea of the nuclear bomb; Prince Monolulu, a horse-racing tipster and probably the biggest black celebrity in Britain at the time; ‘Bertie’ Smylie, the alcoholic editor of the Irish Times who usually sported a sombrero; and Geoffrey Pyke, who invented aircraft carriers made out of ice, once demonstrating them to Winston Churchill in his bath.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (19%)

The familiar battle-lines were drawn: England, physical, quick and tough; the continent, technical, patient and probably lacking in moral fibre.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (17%)

The coffee houses were jubilant: their way of doing things had prevailed, largely because of Sindelar, a player who was, to their self-romanticising eye, the coffee house made flesh. ‘He would play football as a grandmaster plays chess: with a broad mental conception, calculating moves and counter-moves in advance, always choosing the most promising of all possibilities,’ the theatre critic Alfred Polgar wrote in his obituary

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (16%)

‘Game after game,’ Galeano wrote, ‘the crowd jostled to see those men, slippery as squirrels, who played chess with a ball. The English squad had perfected the long pass and the high ball, but these disinherited children from far-off America didn’t walk in their father’s footsteps. They chose to invent a game of close passes directly to the foot, with lightning changes in rhythm and high-speed dribbling.’

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (10%)

Uruguayans and Argentinians, uninfected by British ideals of muscular Christianity, had no similar sense of physicality as a virtue in its own right, no similar distrust of cunning. The shape may have been the same, but the style was as different as it was possible to be. The anthropologist Eduardo Archetti has insisted that, as the influence of Spanish and Italian immigrants began to be felt, power and discipline were rejected in favour of skill and sensuousness – a trend that was felt across a range of disciplines.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (10%)

Team sports, it was thought, were to be promoted, because they discouraged solipsism, and solipsism allowed masturbation to flourish, and there could be nothing more debilitating than that.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (3%)

What was it Gary Lineker said in 1990, after the Germans had knocked England out of the World Cup? “Football is a simple game; twenty two men chase a ball for ninety minutes and at the end, the Germans win.”

— A History of Football in 100 Objects by Gavin Mortimer (77%)

Eyeing his subjects with barely concealed disdain, Cantona sipped from a glass of water. Then he said: “When the seagulls follow the trawler it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea. Thank you very much.”

— A History of Football in 100 Objects by Gavin Mortimer (73%)