Motivation Quote by Alan Shearer

Shearer’s line lands like a shoulder barge: blunt, physical, and oddly revealing. On the surface it’s comic in its clumsy repetition, the kind of sentence you can hear in a post-match scrum when adrenaline is still doing the talking. But the subtext is sharper than the syntax. He’s describing a quiet moral theatre inside elite sport, where defenders and strikers negotiate an unspoken contract about what counts as “proper” contact. When he says “they don’t like you to kick them,” he’s not confessing thuggery so much as pointing at football’s constant argument over legitimacy: pain is acceptable until it feels intentional, and intention is always in the eye of the bruised.

The phrasing also exposes the gamesmanship Shearer built a career around. As a striker, he lived in the space between being fouled and being “handled,” between drawing contact and being accused of seeking it. The line flips perspective: the opponent isn’t just physically impeded; they’re psychologically affronted, as if the pitch has rules beyond the rulebook. “They feel you’re not allowed” captures how players routinely outsource judgment to feelings, reputations, and referee vibes. It’s sport as social negotiation, not law.

Context matters: Shearer came up in an era when the Premier League sold toughness as authenticity. His quote preserves that mindset in a single messy bundle - entitlement, grievance, and a wink at the audience that knows kicking is part of the business, until it isn’t.