Motivation Quote by Alan Hansen

Hansen’s line is doing two things at once: paying tribute to a particular kind of greatness, and quietly defending the people who were unlucky enough to run into it.

Brazil ’82 has become football’s most seductive “what if” - a team remembered less for a trophy than for a style that felt like a promise. By calling them “definitely the best team never to have won,” Hansen isn’t just ranking them; he’s canonizing them. The word “definitely” matters. It’s the emphatic certainty of someone who faced them, not a nostalgia merchant scrolling highlight reels. That authority gives the romance credibility.

The subtext is also self-protective, in the way athletes talk when they want to be honest without diminishing themselves. If you were beaten by a champion, fine. If you were beaten by a team that didn’t even win the tournament, that loss can sound worse on paper. Hansen flips that logic: losing to Brazil ’82 becomes a badge, because the “never to have won” isn’t framed as failure but as evidence of football’s cruelty. The game doesn’t always reward the best ideas, only the most durable ones.

Context does the rest. Brazil’s 1982 side, stacked with artists like Zico, Socrates, and Falcao, ran into an Italy team that was pragmatic, clinical, and perfectly timed. Hansen’s quote keeps that cultural argument alive: football isn’t just a scoreboard; it’s a debate about what we value - beauty, control, risk - and how often those things get punished.