Sir Alex Ferguson is famous for his invective, Phil Brown for a malapropism, Brendan Rodgers for his gibberish, Glenn Hoddle for foot in mouth – and Antonio Cassano for his love of pastries

1) Sir Alex Ferguson: take your pick

Some managers have that quality, that magnetic appeal, the ability to command the attention of a room, from José Mourinho self-administering the Special One nickname to Brian Clough revealing that his conflict management style was to "talk for 20 minutes, then decide I was right", from Bill Shankly's thoughts on football's place in the grand scheme of things to Kevin Keegan noting that Argentina wouldn't be at Euro 2000 "because they're from South America".

Then there are the ones who are experts at saying precisely nothing, at putting a mask on in press conferences and letting their media training suffocate you, which is either because they hate journalists – tap the ball into the empty net if you must – and want to make our lives as awkward as possible or because they are human, vulnerable and do not enjoy speaking in public. The former is the more plausible and understandable explanation, as distressing as that is to contemplate.

It is not necessarily the case that a manager has to be able to shout his mouth off in order to be successful. It is hard to remember anything that Carlo Ancelotti has ever said but he manages to get by with a mixture of decency, manners and vast knowledge of food and wine. And Manuel Pellegrini could send Buzz Killington to sleep but his Manchester City play scintillating, edge-of-your-seat football and have just won their first trophy of the season. This is not an exact science.

For instance, Sir Alex Ferguson professed to hate the press. When they weren't banned for some minor indiscretion such as noting that the sky was blue – evidence of pro-Manchester City bias – he would regularly let those on the beat know what he thought of them. "I'm not fucking talking to you," Ferguson said when he was asked about Juan Verón in 2003. "He's a fucking great player. Youse are all fucking idiots." In 2006, he was asked whether he was interested in signing Darren Bent from Charlton Athletic. "Jesus Christ," came the reply. "How do you lot come up with this stuff? It's Korky the Cat, Dennis the Menace stuff. Do you read Lord Snooty? Which comic is it you guys work for these days? Absolutely priceless."

But for all the disagreements, a man who was and still is obsessed with control, even in retirement, also saw how he could use it to his advantage and inspire Manchester United's players and fans. The media were a necessary evil. Ferguson could shape the narrative of a title race and gain an edge on his rivals by placing a seed of doubt in their minds.

Ferguson was not afraid of voicing an opinion or settling a score. He said that Arsène Wenger was "a novice and should keep his opinions to Japanese football". City were dismissed as the "noisy neighbours". Liverpool were knocked off their "fucking perch" and we were allowed to print that. He called Paul Ince "a big-time Charlie". Dennis Wise "could start a row in an empty house". He didn't want Sven-Goran Eriksson to replace him at United in 2001 because he was "the acceptable face". He raged about "typical Germans" and said he checked under the sauce if an Italian said it was pasta on the plate. Sometimes he crossed the line – but he always made an impact.

And Ferguson also had a rare knack of coming up with lines full of vivid imagery and imagination. Sometimes he could be blunt, calling his 1994 Double-winning team "real tough bastards".

Or he was lyrical. Pippo Inzaghi was born offside. The run-in was redefined as "squeaky-bum time". When United beat Bayern Munich in the Champions League final in 1999, he was at his best. "It would have been Sir Matt Busby's 90th birthday today, but I think he was up there doing a lot of the kicking," he said in his post-match press conference. Even Liverpool fans would have to acknowledge the simple beauty of that line. Ferguson, bloody hell.

The one that catches the eye the most, though, is a quote from when United sacked Ron Atkinson and appointed Ferguson in 1986, before all the success, when Liverpool were still sitting pretty on that perch. United were a mess, a team of dispirited, disorganised underachievers who needed a hairdryer up the backside, and a friend made the mistake of asking Ferguson about the youth policy he had inherited from Atkinson. "What youth policy?" he replied. "He's left me a shower of shit." Twenty-seven years later, they made a film about the Class of 92.

Mind you, it could be said that Ferguson left David Moyes a shower of Ashley Young, Antonio Valencia and Bébé. But that's an argument for another day.

2) Philosophers

Who's your favourite comedian? Stewart Lee? Bill Hicks? Jim Davidson? The Joy of Six? Take your time – it can be difficult to rank genius.

Sometimes, though, you can't go wrong with fetching your laptop, closing the door, sitting down and typing "The best of Phil Brown" into the search engine of your choice.

A relentlessly endearing maverick who thinks so far outside the box he can't even see it any more, there was the time he talked a woman off a Humber bridge or the epochal moment he wondered on radio whether Andrea Pirlo is "homophobic" because he never hankered after a move away from Italy – while it is obvious how the Brownian logic worked with the second one, it is no less amusing.

Marvel at the fearless confidence he displayed when he was learning his trade at Blackpool. "Even at 35, in my first press conference at Blackpool, I was asked where I hoped this would take me and I said 'managing England one day',"Brown said in 2010. "There were a few titters in the audience, as there to tends to be, because people get frightened of ambition."

There were a few titters in the audience, as there tends to be. Look at the nonchalance, the knowing nod. Phil was used to it, even then.

Although it is clearly not holding him back at Liverpool, Brendan Rodgers is also fluent in gibberish. He has described Luis Suárez as "a real warrior of spirit", mused: "You train dogs, I like to educate players," promised: "I will leave no stone unturned in my quest – and that quest will be relentless," and revealed: "My biggest mentor is myself because I've had to study, so that's been my biggest influence."

Complete nonsense – but still no match for Brown, whose finest moment came in the aftermath of Hull's FA Cup defeat at Arsenal in 2009. Having accused Cesc Fábregas of spitting at Hull's assistant manager, Brian Horton, he then took exception to the Arsenal midfielder's fashion sense. Listing his complaints against Fábregas, who was disgracefully wearing jeans and a jacket, Brown said: "Being dressed in the manner in which he was dressed." Admirably specific from a man who would go on to wear a salmon pink jumper on live television.

3) Andy Cole versus Glenn Hoddle

Time is a healer and eight years out of the game have soothed Glenn Hoddle's reputation. He has not managed since being sacked by Wolves in 2006 but some people have been lulled into thinking that he is English football's saviour-in-waiting because he has been known to speak some sense as a television pundit, ignoring that while he was outrageously gifted with the ball at his feet, he later developed an unfortunate habit of inserting his loafers into his mouth on numerous occasions as a manager.

The impression he often left people with was that he would have been a better manager if he wasn't, well, Glenn Hoddle. He showed that he could be an original, innovative thinker at times. His England team were tactically astute and stylish – when he got his team selection right – and there has arguably not been a better England performance since the defeat on penalties against Argentina at the 1998 World Cup. The problem for Hoddle – other than the ill-advised views about karmic retribution that got him sacked – was that he was to man-management what Livia Soprano was to motherhood. The hand of Hod was more likely to slap you in the face than guide you.

Michael Owen was on the receiving end when Hoddle said he wasn't a "natural goalscorer" but more amusing was Andy Cole's reaction to Hoddle's undermining assertion that "he needs too many chances to score a goal" in 1998. Hoddle later said: "It wasn't a criticism, it was an observation," after Cole scored Blackburn's winner against his Tottenham.

But Cole wasn't going to stand for it. "His comments are diabolical and disrespectful," the Manchester United striker hissed, warming up, waiting to land the killer blow. And when it came, it was delivered with a sickening thud. "Is he a man or a mouse?"

What a putdown, so overblown it could have been delivered in a deep timbre by a furious Frasier Crane. We're not entirely sure what point Cole was making, we'll grant you that, but that isn't going to stop us enjoying it.

4) Sex, food and booze

Not that Antonio Cassano was keeping count, but he once said that he had slept with "between 600 and 700 women" by the time he was 25. Given that the Joy of Six doesn't even know six or seven women, we are unable to properly speculate on whether such a feat would be possible, but the claim is so outlandish that we are inclined to believe it is true. Let's just say that the organisers behind the Lad Culture Summit would not have approved of Cassano's approach to life at Real Madrid. "I had a friend who was a hotel waiter," he wrote in his autobiography. "His job was to bring me three or four pastries after I had sex. He would bring the pastries up the stairs, I would escort the woman to him and we would make an exchange: he would take the girl and I would take the pastries. Sex and then food, a perfect night."

That does indeed sound like a great night, one to tell the grandkids about, and Cassano might have got away with it in an era when there was nothing strange about a slap-up meal of steak and chips before a match. But times have changed since the days when the former Scotland great Jim Baxter said: "All the great players I've ever known have enjoyed a good drink." The best footballers now are athletes, and a gluttonous lifestyle is hardly conducive to maintaining a body that can cope with the demands of elite sport. Cassano's natural talent allowed him to enjoy a perfectly acceptable career in which he has won the league in Spain and Italy but it is impossible not to assume that he could have achieved so much more if he had been more professional.

But some footballers cannot help themselves. They do not care that you might gain a mile in your legs if you lose an inch round your waist. "Drink loads of beer and smoke loads of fags," Gerry Taggart said when he was asked for his advice to aspiring players in 2001.

Arsène Wenger, inventor of broccoli and grilled chicken, is credited with changing English football's dietary habits. "The diet in Britain is really dreadful," the Arsenal manager sermonised in 1997. "If you had a fantasy world of what you shouldn't eat in sport, it's what you eat here." Ian Wright was stunned. "He has put me on grilled fish, grilled broccoli, grilled everything," the Arsenal striker wept. "Yuk!" Another Frenchman, Gérard Houllier, did not hide his distaste for the culture of drinking in England. "Drinking alcohol is as silly as putting diesel in a racing car," the then Liverpool manager said in 2000.

There is fierce debate about the issue of having sex the night before a game, though. Steve McManaman told Loaded magazine in 1995 that the theory that it had a negative effect was "a load of shite really". Ronaldo thought it made him play much better and who are we to argue? But Freddie Ljungberg said that it "made me lose all feeling in my feet" and left him unable to, er, control the ball. "Instead I watch erotic movies the night before," he said. "That doesn't affect my power." Ahem.

Managers had the same view. "We don't want them to be monks," Sir Bobby Robson said. "We want them to be football players because monks don't play football at this level." Bill Shankly thought a player could get away with it once in a while. "But if he did it for six months, he'd be a decrepit old man. It takes the strength from the body."

However it was difficult for players to accept when managers did impose a no-sex rule, not least when Brazil decided that no women would be allowed into their training camp at the 1974 World Cup. "This is supposed to make us world champions," Luis Pereira raged, weirdly frustrated and irritable for some reason. "Of what? Masturbation?" Perhaps that explains Brazil's on-pitch filthiness during that tournament: they were just letting off steam. In the match against Holland, one of the dirtiest in World Cup history, Pereira got rid of his pent-up rage with a vicious, medieval reducer on Johan Neeskens and was sent off. Who knows what he got up to once he was left to his own devices in the dressing room?

But let's leave the last word to Andy Gray. "If it was a straight choice between having sex and scoring a goal, I'd go for the goal every time," he said in 1995. "I've got all my life to have sex." Wise words.

5) Owners

The best owners are those who are not consumed by the urge to meddle in affairs which have nothing to do with them. Sadly they often feel like a rare breed; some millionaires, their egos as big as their fat wallets, are incapable of accepting the simple reality that teams do not require their unique expertise to win trophies, the ungrateful swines.

Shortly after Derby County parted company with Brian Clough in 1973, the club's chairman, Sam Longson, said: "Even I could manage this lot."

Clough, who somehow managed to carve out a successful career without Longson's inspiration, knew the score. "Football attracts a certain percentage of nobodies who want to be somebodies at a football club," he said in 1989, and not much has changed since then. Keep that heatseeker in mind the next time Vincent Tan or Mike Ashley is overcome by a special brainwave.

6) The entertainment industry

Paddy Crerand saw football's Serious Age coming long before it arrived brandishing heat maps and chessboards in our faces. "If the tacticians ever reached perfection, the result would be a 0-0 draw, and there would be no one there to see it," he said in 1970. Thankfully his prediction never quite came to pass but 37 years later, Jorge Valdano was similarly unimpressed by the stultifyingly dull mini-series between José Mourinho's Chelsea and Rafa Benítez's Liverpool to the extent that he dismissed it as "shit hanging from a stick".

"Football is made up of subjective feeling, of suggestion – and, in that, Anfield is unbeatable," Valdano wrote in Marca. "Put a shit hanging from a stick in the middle of this passionate, crazy stadium and there are people who will tell you it's a work of art. It's not: it's a shit hanging from a stick. If football is going the way Chelsea and Liverpool are taking it, we had better be ready to wave goodbye to any expression of the cleverness and talent we have enjoyed for a century."

It does need stressing – over and over again, until we are all blue in the face and unable to speak any more – that football is supposed to be fun. "It's an entertainment history, for heaven's sake, not life or death," Matt Le Tissier once said. He also decried the way he was overlooked by England: "The one thing I'd like to rid myself of is the word 'but'. You know: 'He's a great player, but …' or: 'So much skill, but …'" Like Alan Pardew, the but haunted him.

"Football is an excuse to feel good about something," Valdano said. Arrigo Sacchi called it "the most important of the unimportant things in life".

Maybe Danny Blanchflower put it best. "The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning," he said. "It's nothing of the kind. The game is about glory. It is about doing things in style, with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom."

An escape from reality, yes, but what an escape.

• With thanks to Phil Shaw's Book of Football Quotations and Daniel Taylor's Squeaky Bum Time: The Wit and Wisdom of Sir Alex Ferguson