“I gave up women and alcohol in 1969 – I think it was the worst 20 minutes of my life”, George Best (1946-2005) once wittily summed up his life philosophy in a single sentence. He was one of the best footballers England has ever produced and the player who turned British football from a game for the working class into a pastime for intellectuals, artists and hippies, but above all for girls and women. But as good as he was, George was also problematic: “I was born with enormous talent and sometimes that is accompanied by destructiveness.”
It was clear that he would never be at home in classic professionalism when he left his native Belfast in Northern Ireland at the age of 15 for England to try his luck at Manchester United. “I think I’ve found you a genius,” read a telegram sent to the club by talent scout Bob Bishop after seeing George play, who his mother said was only interested in the ball in life, but who turned out to be even more interested in his mother.
Just 24 hours after he landed in England, he had already fled home, but his furious father, tired of struggling through the rigours of life, quickly sent him back, knowing that an opportunity like this only comes once in a lifetime.
George returned to England and stayed on the island after finding surrogate parents in the coach and the housekeeper he was living with. Extremely quick and skilful with the ball, he had his baptism of fire in the first team in September 1963 at the age of 17, but as he did not immediately become a permanent member, he went home for the New Year holidays.
He got a call from the club at Christmas. He should come back immediately because he has to play against Burnley, they said. I will, he said, but only if you take me home immediately after the game. Right, was the reply. At that moment, teenage George knew he was special. And he never forgot it.
He impressed the football public with his outstanding command of space and ball, his boyish smile and his music-star hairstyle, people who not long ago hissed venomously against football.
Before he had turned a corner, he was receiving thousands of fan letters a week and was increasingly besieged by shopkeepers and fashion agencies with offers to become their face. The salary at United was admittedly not very high, but the side money he earned made him so financially strong that the ground soon fell out from under him.
After Manchster United beat Benfica 5-1, George returned to England with a sombrero on his head, the nickname “The Fifth Beatle”, given to him by the Portuguese press for his exceptional qualities, and a ticket to a life of stardom. It was the right thing for him.
“If I had to choose between playing five players at Anfield and kicking from 40 yards out or knocking over the world’s missus, I think it would be a tough decision. Fortunately, I did both,” he later said, looking back without regret on a time when he was not only the most famous British footballer, but the biggest star on the Island.
He somehow resisted a complete collapse until 1968, when he was named European Footballer of the Year and Press Player of the Year, and Manchester United became the first English club to win the European League Championship, after which he was no longer able to do so. But the stands were full again because of him, King George, as he was called, and he influenced football in a way that no one had before him.
He changed it not only with his extraordinary skill in pushing the ball in front of him, but also with his star-like appearance and his attitude to life, which was completely at odds with the expectations of the time, namely that a footballer should be as discreet as possible in private.
For example, at the age of 22, he took up gambling. The first time he sat down at a gambling table, he earned $50,000. Although he has only lost money since then, he has relentlessly tried to repeat his initial luck.
He opened two nightclubs and a boutique, trying to somehow balance his horribly fluctuating finances, after having made good money from sponsorships, but also lost a lot from his habits.
“I spent 90% of my money on women, booze and fast cars. The rest I blew,” he says, describing a period in which he basked in the limelight of the media, but also in the bile of his teammates.
He was reprimanded for refusing to pass the ball on the pitch and always shooting at goal himself. Slowly, they became fed up with his stardom, which often made the club look the other way, and gave him privileges that others did not have.
For example, he got his own flat and was rarely alone in it. Women offered themselves to him on a regular basis. If he refused, she sued him or sold the story to the tabloids. They were full of it, but it didn’t bother him, it started to bother his new coach.
In 1969, Matt Busby, George’s coach and surrogate father, decided it was time to retire. George was left unsupervised and therefore completely without self-control. He started missing training sessions, and he was experiencing drop-outs in matches. Once, when he knocked a ball out of a referee’s hand, the new coach suspended him for a month.
George, who had achieved all that could be achieved with Manchester United, was losing more and more ground. He was now truly addicted to alcohol. He often smelled of champagne when he returned to training. When he was reproached for this, he started drinking vodka. Soon he was drinking it like water, even though he knew the consequences of excessive alcohol consumption. His mother was an alcoholic and she later died as a result.
Things went from bad to worse until, in January 1974, both sides had had enough and George left, aged 28. He later admitted that he had thrown away his best years in football, but at the time, moving from club to club and continent to continent seemed like the best thing he could think of.
But no matter how hard he searched for a place under the sun where he felt at home, he kept returning to England. Of all the women he slept with, he married and divorced two. For a while he was seeing Miss World.
Anecdotally, he took her to the races. They placed a bet, made £5,000 and returned to the hotel. They were counting the money on the bed when the waiter brought them champagne. He looked at the Miss World, the money on the bed and the expensive champagne and said to Best, without a hint of irony, “George, where’s the snag?”
It all came crashing down in 1968, when he was too young to win it all, and then it just went downhill. In 1984, he was arrested for drink-driving and assaulting a police officer. A few years later, he appeared on a talk show visibly drunk and only partially present, yet he was living quite decently on the income he got when he turned up wherever they wanted to see him.
Unfortunately, there was alcohol everywhere and by 2002 it had so damaged him that he had to have a liver transplant. During a ten-hour operation, he almost bled to death. He had to be given several litres of blood. He later joked that he had “broken my old record by 20 minutes”.
He has always used his wit to save himself, for example when opposing fans tried to stop him with insults and beer cans flying from the stands. One fell on the grass just as he stepped into the corner to kick the ball. He picked it up and pretended to be drinking. The stadium burst into laughter and the fans left him alone.
His jokes didn’t help when he started drinking again and his new liver failed. After playing 704 professional games and scoring 252 professional goals, he lost the game of his life the day after England passed a law allowing bars to be open 24 hours a day. He was 59 years old.
Garrincha
Ten years younger at the time of his death was the Brazilian actor Garrincha (1933-1983), who grew up with poverty and alcohol, but also with an extra burden. After suffering polio, his spine was S-shaped, his right leg curved inwards and his left leg six centimetres shorter than it.
His favourite sport as a child was the struggle to survive alongside his father, who, in an alcoholic stupor, was so furious with his newborn son that he did not even write his surname on his birth certificate, so he had nothing officially to do with his son. Thus, the son was remembered by everyone simply by his nickname, Garrincha, given to him by his sister Rose, after a tiny bird.
At the age of 14, he got a job, got married and had his first child at the age of 19, although he lost his virginity not to a girl but to a goat. He freely admitted this, as well as much else that others would have kept to themselves. Tests showed that he had never psycho-emotionally outgrown the level of a pre-school child, but the ball did not care about that, just as it did not care what his physical limitations were.
Like other poor kids, ball was his salvation, but he also sought it in alcohol, which didn’t stop him from signing with Botafogo when he was 20, after the coach had seen for himself how good he was.
With the perseverance he learned on the streets of his native Rio de Janeiro, he turned his physical limitations into strengths and became the player who “gladdened the hearts of the most people” with his play, even though he often had no idea who he was playing against or the importance of the match he was fighting to win.
As his fame grew, so did his money, and both increased his chances of winning women. He never had just one, but it so happened that he was simultaneously involved with children in three places: a young Swedish woman became pregnant abroad, his wife gave birth to their fifth child, and an official mistress announced the pregnancy.
By the time of his death, he was said to have fathered 14 children with 5 women, although rumours claim that he fathered 36 children in total. It is not known how many he met, nor how many of the women with whom he was intimate he actually remembered. Not only because there were so many, but also because he drank so much.
He emptied a bottle of brandy every day and often tipped it before a match, yet he remained in such good shape that in 1962, when the World Cup was held in Chile, journalists had to ask: “Which planet is Garrincha from?” He was so outstanding that the Brazilians could not lose and won the title for the second time in a row, which they had already won in Sweden in 1958.
But as time went on, the alcohol took its toll. Once Garrincha was so drunk that he accidentally ran over his father, but he didn’t remember it afterwards. Another time, in April 1969, he crashed his car into a van. He survived, but his mother-in-law did not. This time, it was not a hole in his memory that protected him from blame. He tried to kill himself, but failed, and from then on he lived as if he were committing suicide by rationing.
He divorced his wife Nair, with whom he had 8 children, in 1965 after 13 years of marriage and married samba singer Elsa Sores. They had been in a relationship that was poisoning both of them for years.
Three years after his mother-in-law’s death at the age of 39, he said goodbye to football after spending a few years in local clubs. Now his fate was sealed. Alcohol had alienated him from his family and friends. Like his father in the past, he was now so deep in the booze that he was no longer aware of his surroundings before his death in 1983 at the age of 49.
He was bald, but even after his death, he remained the only Brazilian actor who brought “joy to people’s hearts”.
Diego Maradona
Diego Armando Maradona (1960) brought a lot to them, and not always well. “With Maradona, everything is exaggerated – the bad and the good. As a player he was number one. He could be charming, but in his private life he broke all the rules,” wrote one journalist about him.
In 1984, for example, he was one of the most passionate about the fight that broke out when his Barcelona lost a match against Athletic Bilbao after the final whistle. In a fight of all against all, he thrashed around so much that he was derisively declared a karate Kid.
He earned a suspension, but avoided it by leaving Spanish football and Barcelona, where, in his two years of playing anyway, he only got into trouble for acting like a cock on the pitch under the influence of cocaine.
Barcelona paid a record £5 million for him in 1982, and now Naples has paid a new record £6.9 million for him. He was the player who took the club to the top, even if he was often absent because his worsening cocaine addiction meant he forgot to turn up for a game.
He got poorer and poorer until he was officially caught abusing cocaine in 1991. He earned himself a 15-month ban from the game, ending an Italian period during which his marriage to Claudio Villafane began to fall apart and a son was born, but he refused to acknowledge it. His Italian mistress sued him for child support even after he admitted his son under pressure but refused to support him.
This was also the period during which he was allegedly closely linked to the Neapolitan Comorra Mafia. Who knows whether he had already come up with the idea that he could defend himself against the press with a gun. In 1994, as he was preparing for his last World Cup, journalists besieged his house and he fired an air rifle at them, wounding several of them.
He then returned early from the World Championships because he tested positive again for banned substances, but people continued to love him. At least the Argentinians did, and he had finally lost the English people’s affection eight years earlier when he had shamelessly and brazenly cheated them at the World Cup.
Argentina and England meet in the quarter-finals. The score was 0-0 when the ball flew into the air and the English goalkeeper drove towards it, as did Maradona. He calmly boxed the ball into the empty net with the outside of his fist and then celebrated the goal as if it were real.
The referee didn’t see what happened, Maradona was no stranger to sporting fairness, and England lost the game 2-1. Afterwards, Maradona said in a press conference, looking smug, that he scored the goal “a little bit with Maradona’s head and a little bit with God’s hand”.
Sixteen years later, he changed his statement a little after he boxed in a paparazzo’s windscreen and smashed it: “Today I declare that this broken glass is the result of the hand of reason.”
Nobody thought it was funny, just as nobody was enchanted by the crazy look he gave the camera after his brilliant goal against Greece at the 1994 World Cup. It was almost impossible to miss that he was under the influence of drugs.
But he could not afford to abuse his own body indefinitely. When he retired in 1997 at the age of 37, his real problems had only just begun. Years of cocaine and alcohol use had seriously affected his health, and he had become extremely thin. Just when it seemed he was on the verge of the end, he miraculously recovered, underwent stomach surgery and emerged in a new guise, but ready to take on his old challenges.
Andrés Escobar
Before the start of the 1994 World Cup, 27-year-old Colombian defender Andrés Escobar (1967-1994) was as nervous as his national team colleagues, but much more so than footballers from other countries. He played football for his country at a time marked by a golden generation of extremely talented footballers, but he is also remembered as one of the most violent in Colombian history. Contracted assassinations and kidnappings were a constant throughout the country, and his home city of Medellin was renowned as the most dangerous in the world.
It was also the “headquarters” of Pablo Escobar, allegedly the richest mafioso in the world. Although they were related, Pablo and Andrés were not connected, but Pablo had “business” links with drug traffickers until the end of 1993, when he was killed. In those days, 80% of all the world’s cocaine came from Colombia, and some of the money coming back into the country was laundered through football and clubs.
Football betting was as popular as horse betting in England, so expectations were high ahead of the World Cup in the USA. The legendary Pele had predicted a win for the Colombian national team, and the local mobsters were demanding no less from the national team.
Pressure was the order of the day, death threats too, and the footballers were scared for their lives like they had never been scared before. It was difficult to play under such circumstances and a moment of indecision was enough to send Andrés Escobar into his own goal in the match against the Americans.
The favourites, the Colombians, returned home early. Andrés knew that the unfortunate own goal would reverberate across the country, but he did not follow the example of his national team colleagues, who, instead of showing it off to their furious compatriots, threw it into Las Vegas and Disneyland. He meekly walked in front of the press, and they were reminded once again why he is called a football gentleman and why he is regarded as a hard-working boy in the otherwise obscure world of Colombian football.
A week later, on Saturday 2 July 1994, Andrés and his friends went to the then notorious Padua disco, where drug dealers, whores and pimps gathered. No one noticed him when he and his party entered at around 10 p.m., and at around midnight he was approached by the Gallon brothers, well-known drug dealers.
He and his company began to jeer, but Andrés successfully kept his blood calm and the intrusive crowd was removed. Andrés spent a pleasant rest of the night with his friends, and towards morning paid the bill and walked alone towards the car park.
He was unlucky. He was spotted again by the Gallon brothers, and they were on him again. Car honk, car honk, they chanted as he unlocked the car door. Andrés had had enough of them. The voices rose, the atmosphere became more intense.
“You’re a good boy. Let’s go our separate ways,” some of the group tried to calm the passions, but they were already too heated. A taunt from one of the Gallon brothers got on Andrés’ nerves and the commotion in the car park attracted the attention of the Gallon brothers’ driver.
Humberto Munoz Castro got out of the car. “What does this faggot want?” he shouted. Without waiting for a reply, he fired six bullets into Andrés’ chest. Each time he pulled the trigger, he shouted, “Car!” Andrés bled to death on the seat of his car.
Castro is sentenced to 43 years in prison for the murder. Until the verdict, he claimed he did not know who he had shot, even though he shouted autoclave during the shooting. The Gallon brothers were each jailed for 15 months, and rumours spread that the murder was not accidental but planned.
Andrés Escobar is said to have died because he used a car to harm Colombian mafiosi who were betting on him to win. The Gallon brothers were among them, but this is probably not the case. On the night Andrés died, 40 other people died in Medellín. You could hire an assassin at any time for a small amount of money, so the Gallon brothers would certainly not have involved themselves in a murder if they had planned it.
They were linked to him because they were alone in the wrong place at the wrong time, but no one wanted to believe it. Andrés’s murder resonated all the louder because he was considered the good boy of Colombian football and the opposite of the great goalkeeper René Higuita, who embodied everything that was bad about Colombian football.
René Higuita
José René Higuita Zapata (1966) lived in Medellín like Andrés Escobar, but he was a child of poverty and the streets, which is why drug baron Pablo Escobar was his Robin Hood, building football fields, neighbourhoods and millions of dollars in the football club where Higuita played.
In fact, Higuita started playing football on one of the pitches Escobar had built and visited the notorious mafioso in 1991 while he was in prison, even though he was not exactly suffering. In agreement with the authorities, he built his own on his land in Medellín, including luxury jacuzzis, swimming pools and a football pitch. There, Higuita competed against Escobar and his “boys”.
“Escobar was like a father to him, he did everything for him. Escobar gave him everything he had: houses, cars, travel, everything! His career could have been much better if he had not been so close to him”, Fernando Rodriguez Mondragon, whose family ran the Cali cartel, described Higuito’s relationship with Escobar.
In mid-May 1993, 11-year-old Marcela Molina, daughter of Luis Carlos Molina, was kidnapped on suspicion of money laundering for the Medellín drug cartel. Molina had asked for help from Higuita, then 24, a famous and popular goalkeeper who, apart from his football skills, was also renowned for his links with the Mafia and with shady people in the poor areas of the city.
Could you step in for a ransom? Higuita saw no problem. He contacted the kidnappers – said to be Pablo Escobar – paid them a ransom of $300,000 on 31 May 1993 and took the girl from them. As a token of her gratitude, she gave him a baby box. It contained 50 000 dollars.
Higuito accepted them. The only problem was that Colombia was the country with the most kidnappings in the world in those days, so not long before, the authorities had passed a law banning the payment of ransoms and the acceptance of brokerage commissions. They even went so far as to freeze the bank accounts of families who had been victims of kidnappers so that they could not pay the ransom.
If found guilty, Higuita could be sentenced to 10 years in prison. The law goes against “basic human nature”, his lawyer argued, adding that Higuita “respected a basic human right, the right of a kidnapped human being to survive”.
The authorities demanded that Higuita return the brokerage fee, but he managed to spend two-thirds of a dinar in a few days and his car and apartment were confiscated.
He ended up spending 7 months in jail because he had enriched himself by kidnapping, which meant he couldn’t go to the 1994 World Cup. It did not hurt him. When he was released, he explained to the media:
“The best months of my life were the ones I spent in prison. There I found a different kind of loyalty – the loyalty of so-called criminals, so-called ‘narco-traffickers’, so-called terrorists. I have had the chance to know his heart and it is an honourable heart.”
His links with the mafia probably did not end even after he got out of prison because a small bomb was thrown at his house in 1996, but certainly no one would recognise the old José René Higuito Zapata in him today. Not because he has improved so much, but because he has completely changed his face with plastic surgery.
Bruno Fernandes de Souza
Even without a new face, Bruno Fernandes de Souza, a football goalkeeper from neighbouring Brazil, got what he wanted – in 2014, a judge allowed him to play football professionally again and go to training every day, even though he will officially spend a total of 22 years and three months behind bars.
That’s how much the judge sentenced him in December 2010, after admitting that he had not arranged a fake passport for 25-year-old model Elisa Samudio and had not allowed her to leave Brazil and start a new life, as he had previously claimed. She was nowhere to be found, dead or alive, because her corpse had been dismembered and fed to Bruno’s dogs.
So ended a story that began at a party in 2009 and continued in the bed from which Eliza emerged pregnant. She refused to give up the baby, even though a well-known gatekeeper kidnapped her and tried to force her to give it up. For this, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison.
Eliza became pregnant, gave birth and demanded child support, but Bruno Fernandes de Souza resisted. Finally, he hatched a plan: with his now ex-wife Dayane, another ex-girlfriend and friends, he lured Eliza to his estate in Rio de Janeiro, saying they would discuss their then three-month-old son. He promised her that he would acknowledge it after all, and that he would buy her an apartment.
She arrived in June 2010, but never left. He did not kill her with his own hands, but he reportedly watched her being tortured in front of the child, only turning up the music so he could not hear her screams. Then the corpse was saved by serving it, disembodied, to the domestic dogs.
The police later found his son in a slum and his grandmother became his guardian, but the former captain of Flamengo, the Brazilian club with which he won the Brazilian league that fateful year in 2009, is not one of the football gods with human flaws, but a common killer.
