The goal is to win a championship. Every team enters the season with the goal to win the championship, but realistically, there are five or six teams with a realistic shot at winning a championship.
That's the one regret I have in all the years that I've played professional sports, that I didn't win a championship in the N.F.L. And that's why you play on any level of team sports: you want to win a championship as part of a team.
I believe in work, in connections between the players, I think what makes football great is that it is a team sport. You can win in different ways, by being more of a team, or by having better individual players. It is the team ethic that interests me, always.
It's a different thing when you play on a team that has to win, that doesn't consider it a good year unless you win the championship.
It's a different thing when you play on a team that has to win, that doesn't consider it a good year unless you win the championship
A championship team wins because it already has established players, while a talented team is just beginning to establish players.
Having different people come together and be on a team and win a world championship is literally, I think, the definition of being American.
When your great players are team players, everybody else follows their lead. The best team doesn't always win - it's usually the team that gets along best.
I was a young player at Real, but working with players like Zidane and Beckham every day taught me such a lot: how you win and lose as a team and how you must respect your team-mates.
Individual players don't win titles no matter how good you are as a player. The best players in the world need a team around them. It is about the team, and we are playing for the badge.
The team is always bigger than an individual or whatever, and a really good team can win a championship.
Every time we play, we want to win, that's for sure. It may be the World Championship, the Olympics, the NBA Championship or the South American Championship, but we always want to win.
I think winning a championship, for me, it put things in perspective. You can either be a great player on a so-so team, or you can be a role player on a championship team, or, in an extreme case, a great player on a championship team.
My goals are for the U.S. team to get to the second round of the World Cup and to win a championship here in the U.S. with my club team the Columbus Crew.
Our goal as a team is to keep playing as a group for as long as we can because you will never have that team again. It is like a dying limb, you have to prune it off and let another one grow in its place. That is the way you have to do it, but it still hurts losing these guys and that team because they and you have put so much effort into building a team. Even if you win that last game (and a national championship), it hurts badly because the players know they will never have that same special group of guys together on the same team again. Somebody always goes and somebody new always comes in.
On a good team there are no superstars. There are great players who show they are great players by being able to play with others as a team. They have the ability to be superstars, but if they fit into a good team, they make sacrifices, they do things necessary to help the team win. What the numbers are in salaries or statistics don't matter; how they play together does.