Nature & Animals Quote by Brian Clough

Clough’s genius was never just tactics; it was theater. This line shows him catching himself mid-boast, then turning the boast into a lesson about power and perception. “Telling the entire world and his dog” is pub-room exaggeration, funny because it’s true: he built his legend in public, through press conferences as much as on the pitch. Then he drops the kicker: “I knew I was the best.” It’s jaw-dropping arrogance delivered with the casual certainty of a man who’s already won the argument. That confidence is the brand.

The twist is the regret. “I should have said nowt” isn’t humility so much as strategy belatedly understood. Clough is admitting that self-mythologizing has a cost: it creates a target, raises expectations, and invites resistance from players, owners, rivals, and the media. If everyone is watching for you to prove you’re “the best,” every wobble becomes a referendum. He’s diagnosing the pressure economy of elite sport: attention is currency, but it also compounds debt.

The final clause, “they’d have worked it out for themselves,” is the most revealing. Clough believed authority works best when it feels inevitable, when people arrive at your greatness as if by their own discovery. It’s a manager’s version of misdirection: don’t demand belief; make space for it to take hold. In that sense, the quote is less confession than a masterclass in image management from a man who helped invent the modern manager-as-celebrity, then learned how punishing that spotlight can be.