Former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once said, "Some people believe football is a matter of life and death ... I can assure you it is much, much more important than that." While that was clearly said with tongue firmly lodged in cheek, football, or soccer as it's known in some parts of the world, is a sport that incites passion in people.

Soccer fans the world over will follow a team and not deviate from supporting a football club for their whole life. Wins are celebrated with wild abandon, losses are mourned with real sadness. Such an obsession can only be maintained by knowing all of the latest happenings in the world of football, which is where the Internet proves its worth once again. At least for those times when you're not playing the best soccer games.

What follows is a list of eight of the best websites all soccer fans should bookmark. Some specialize in news, others in opinion, some focus on goals, others on statistics. All are valuable repositories of information pertaining to the beautiful game.

Goal

A killer domain is backed up by a range of content to suit all football fans. There's a breaking news section which is usually updated several times every hour, the normal mix of fixtures, results, and league tables, and even a daily poll designed to gauge the opinions of the site's visitors. Goal.com comes in many flavors, with different editions for each of the major footballing nations and some smaller countries too.

ESPN FC

This is a site that many football fans could spend hours browsing around and never get bored. Visitors can choose between three different versions of ESPN FC: Global, USA, and Spanish editions, but all offer the same extensive coverage of the global game. As well as news, fixtures, results, and league tables, there are columns and features delving deeper into the game, as well as podcasts, and video shows.

World Soccer

As the name suggests, this site defies the idea that each individual football fan is only interested in their own team, and instead covers the beautiful game in its entirety. So, whether it's the English Premier League, the German Bundesliga, La liga in Spain, or Serie A in Italy that excites you, World Soccer has you covered. As well as soccer news from around the globe there is a healthy mix of columns and blogs.

FIFA

FIFA, or the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, to give the organization its full, tongue-twisting name, is the international governing body of football in all its forms. There are currently 209 football associations that come under FIFA's rule, and the World Cup is also run by FIFA. This all means that its official website is full of official news and statistics about both league sides and international teams.

Soccer Lens

Soccer Lens covers the latest football news with a healthy dose of opinion added into the mix for good measure. The site, which bills itself as a blog and community, is always on the lookout for talented new writers, so why not take the opportunity to write about football as well as read about it? The content is an eclectic mix of news and views, written by people whose passion for their favorite sport is plain to see.

101 Great Goals

The domain of this website is rather misleading, as there are, of course, many more than 101 great goals featured on its pages. The ultimate point remains, however, that football is more about goals than anything else; if your team scores more than the opposing team then they'll win the game. So, why not focus on the goals (and other important highlights) from each game? There are pictures, videos, and blog posts, but the main thrust of the site are the moments that matter.

FootyTube [Broken URL Removed]

You don't always want to take the time and trouble to read about all things soccer, preferring instead to watch videos which cut through the news and views and get straight to the action. FootyTube is made for people who prefer visual media over textual media, offering an impressive array of the latest videos from the world of football. Blogs and podcasts augment the experience, but video is the medium at the heart of this particular site.

Football Filter

Football Filter is a worthy domain to bookmark in its own right, offering collated RSS feeds of posts from some of the best soccer sites on the Web. The added bonus of this, is it will give you links to a host of other soccer sites worth visiting, some of which appear on this list, others which don't. You can filter the sources to include only tabloid newspapers, blogs, particular journalists, or podcasters, to name just a few.

Conclusions

There are many more soccer websites out there on the Internet for those football fans who need to know every single piece of news about their team, their league, their country, and the world game. These eight represent, for me, a good selection that covers the full range of coverage you should expect online.

What do you think of this list? Are any of the websites that made the cut ones you already visit regularly? Are any of them new to you and being added to your bookmarks as we speak? Which soccer websites do you visit the most? And why is that one better than the countless others available? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Katie Brady