Roberto Di Matteo

“I still did some things in football, but I needed to get away from the game. I needed closure. And once I felt I'd achieved that, the hunger came back. That fire in your belly, the desire to feel the adrenaline at the weekend. That's when I felt I was able to go again.”

“We want to challenge ourselves against the top teams in the world and are happy to be competing on so many fronts. And, personally, it's great for me to work with the quality of player we have here at Chelsea.”

“For most players it's hard to accept you've ended your football career and that you have to go out and do something else. But the way it happened to me, so suddenly... I went into depression and had to deal with that, being depressed, something that had never happened to me in my life before.”

“Well, I grew up in Switzerland where my parents were immigrant workers, but my whole family are very good cooks - my father also. So I always saw my parents enjoying to cook and prepare the food.”

“You have to kind of sustain a level of performance in the Championship to be able to come out of it at the end of the season.”

“Obviously if there is a Chinese player that has the quality and the ability we will certainly be looking to recruit.”

“I'm generally an optimistic person.”

“Pre-season is a lot of hard work and no player really enjoys it, but you look forward to the start of the season when the competitive games start.”

“It doesn't matter what country but I need to be challenged by it. I need to feel the ambition of the club. You need to have a good relationship, with the board and with the owner.”

“I still wish Chelsea and all the players every success. I spent so many years connected to the club. One incident is not going to change that.”

“It's the biggest challenge for any manager to play against the best team in the world, but for every player as well.”

“I've experienced being a manager and I would love one day to do it again.”

“I believe in passing football with a purpose. You have to be physically strong and sometimes, in some games, you have to be more direct because that style requires it. We will prepare our teams to be ready for all situations.”

“I don't forget my roots. My father was an emigrant from Italy who worked in a steel factory. My mother worked part-time. When my father came home she would go out to work, cleaning offices.”

“Food was always such an important part of my family life when I was growing up.”

“There was not much money around, but my sister and I were happy. All the sports facilities were 10 minutes' walk from my house and the school system was very good.”

“I wouldn't lie and say it's not disappointing to have reached so many semis and a final and not won the Champions League.”

“It was something I always wanted to do, to own a restaurant, because I love food. But particularly when I first moved to London, because I was on my own - I was single, away from my family, so it seemed very important, to have a place where you could go to meet friends and eat.”

“I had a great career, to go from a small town in Switzerland to play for the Italian national team was a dream come true. So was playing for Lazio and Chelsea, winning trophies. When I look back I am very grateful for what I had, rather than what I missed.”

“Every session we do we try and talk about the way we want to play, I try to organize the sessions in a way that the players can understand the way I want them to play.”