Top 35 Brian Clough Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I wasn’t on that particular job.”

— Brian Clough

Featured in: Sarcastic Quotes, Funny Motivational Quotes, Funny Office Quotes, Soccer Quotes

2. “We had a good team on paper. Unfortunately, the game was played on grass.”

— Brian Clough

3. “If I had an argument with a player we would sit down for twenty minutes, talk about it and then decide I was right!”

— Brian Clough

4. “Don’t send me flowers when I’m dead. If you like me, send them while I’m alive.”

— Brian Clough

5. “They love me for what I’m not They hate me for what I am.”

— Brian Clough

6. “If God had wanted us to play football in the sky, He’d have put grass up there.”

— Brian Clough

7. “There are more hooligans in the House of Commons than at a football match.”

— Brian Clough

8. “I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one.”

— Brian Clough

9. “I want no epitaphs of profound history and all that type of thing. I contributed. I would hope they would say that, and I would hope somebody liked me.”

— Brian Clough

10. “When I go, God’s going to have to give up his favourite chair.”

— Brian Clough

11. “It only takes a second to score a goal.”

— Brian Clough

12. “If any one of my players isn’t interfering with play, they’re not getting paid.”

— Brian Clough

13. “The river Trent is lovely, I know because I have walked on it for 18 years.”

— Brian Clough

14. “When you get to a certain age, there is no coming back.”

— Brian Clough

15. “Anybody who can do anything in Leicester but make a jumper has got to be a genius.”

— Brian Clough

16. “That Seaman is a handsome young man but he spends too much time looking in his mirror rather than at the ball. You can’t keep goal with hair like that.”

— Brian Clough

17. “Walk on water? I know most people out there will be saying that instead of walking on it, I should have taken more of it with my drinks. They are absolutely right.”

— Brian Clough

18. “On occasions I have been big-headed. I think most people are when they get in the limelight. I call myself Big Head just to remind myself not to be.”

— Brian Clough

19. “Players lose you games, not tactics. There’s so much crap talked about tactics by people who barely know how to win at dominoes.”

— Brian Clough

20. “Acne is a bigger problem than injuries.”

— Brian Clough

21. “You don’t want roast beef and Yorkshire every night and twice on Sunday.”

— Brian Clough

22. “Being thick isn’t an affliction if you’re a footballer, because your brains need to be in your feet. And Beckham works hard, he’s brave and he crosses a ball superbly. He treats a football like he does a wife, lovingly, with caresses.”

— Brian Clough

23. “I can’t even spell spaghetti never mind talk Italian. How could I tell an Italian to get the ball – he might grab mine.”

— Brian Clough

24. “Saturday comes again, welcome or not, it comes again like it always does, welcome or not, wanted or not, another judgment day – The chance to be saved, the chance to be damned.”

— Brian Clough

25. “For all his horses, knighthoods and championships, he hasn’t got two of what I’ve got. And I don’t mean balls!”

— Brian Clough

26. “Bill eventually became Mr Tottenham Hotspur, and produced such a dazzling team at White Hart Lane that they won the double and played the game in a way that was an object lesson to everybody.”

— Brian Clough

27. “We used to go to the pictures every Saturday night but we had to leave a little bit early and get home and watch Match of the Day – and my wife still complains she missed the last five minutes of every film we saw.”

— Brian Clough

28. “Telling the entire world and his dog how good a manager I was. I knew I was the best but I should have said nowt and kept the pressure off ’cos they’d have worked it out for themselves.”

— Brian Clough

29. “If a chairman sacks the manager he initially appointed, he should go as well.”

— Brian Clough

30. “The ugliest player I ever signed was Kenny Burns.”

— Brian Clough

31. “I’m dealing with my drinking problem and I have a reputation for getting things done.”

— Brian Clough

32. “Resignations are for Prime Ministers and those caught with their trousers down, not for me.”

— Brian Clough

33. “I like my women to be feminine, not sliding into tackles and covered in mud.”

— Brian Clough

34. “I gave my players a version of the same message at ten-to-three every Saturday: ‘I would shoot my granny right now for three points this afternoon.’ They knew how important it was to give everything in the cause of victory. Every time. That’s why my granny enjoyed more lives than my cat.”

— Brian Clough

35. “I’m sure the England selectors thought if they took me on and gave me the job, I’d want to run the show. They were shrewd, because that’s exactly what I would have done.”

— Brian Clough

36. “If he’d been English or Swedish, he’d have walked the England job.”

— Brian Clough

37. “Beckham? His wife can’t sing and his barber can’t cut hair.”

— Brian Clough

38. “Who the hell wants fourteen pairs of shoes when they go on holiday? I haven’t had fourteen pairs in my life.”

— Brian Clough