FAUST AND FURIOUS
Gun-loving Faustino Asprilla snubbed career in porn, lost a £44k stallion and injured himself kicking a bus
Newcastle's former forward had the potential to be one of the world's greatest players
COLOMBIAN legend Carlos Valderrama once said that Faustino Asprilla could have been the greatest player in the world.
And you know what? He may well have been right.
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In a professional career lasting 16 years, ‘Tino’ starred for Parma in Serie A (where he won five trophies including two UEFA Cups and the Cup Winners’ Cup) and Newcastle in the Premier League.
He also won 57 caps for Colombia, scoring 20 goals.
The trouble was that Asprilla was more often found on the front pages of the newspapers and not the back ones. Not that he cared.
“Even if some people believe that I didn’t take full advantage of my talent, I think I played as well as I could,” he once said. “I played football as long as my body held up and I am satisfied,”
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Posing with Colombia legend Carlos Valderrama
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He’s generous to a fault…
In 2015, Asprilla decided to lend a close friend his prize possession, a £44,000 show horse called Lucas so he could parade it at the Buga Fair in Colombia.
Bad idea.
Not only did his mate get drunk at the fair but he lost the horse too, prompting Asprilla to offer a cash reward for its return.
The animal was eventually found in a stable… in Florida.
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He’d pick on anyone… and anything…
At the end of his first season at Parma, Asprilla returned to Colombia to visit his poorly mother back in his hometown of Tuluá.
While it was a nice gesture, there was always going to be some scrape waiting around the corner and as he was driving to see his mum, he was cut up by a bus.
Infuriated, Asprilla got out of his car and, inexplicably, booted the bus, badly injuring his foot in the process.
The incident would see him miss four weeks of the season and cost him a place in the starting line-up of Parma’s triumphant Cup Winners’ Cup Final win over Antwerp.
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He loved money and he loved spending it…
One of the many perks about being a professional footballer, aside from the supermodel girlfriends, was the financial rewards and Asprilla was never shy when it came to splashing the cash.
But his attitude to money often drew criticism, not that Asprilla cared much.
“Well, for them [his critics] it is f****** hard when they see a black man with money,” he once said.
“I think that what they would like is for me to still walk around with broken shoes and ugly clothes.”
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That said, Asprilla did recognise some of the problems that wealth brought with it.
“When I didn’t have anything to spend, I was well behaved, but then, when I got something to spend, I became undisciplined,” he mused.
He fancied a firearm or two…
On New Year’s Day in 1995, he was sentenced to a year in prison (suspended) for firing a gun twice without a permit and in 2008 he was arrested for allegedly firing a machine gun at security staff near his farm in Colombia. He was later placed under house arrest.
He even used firearms to motivate his teammates.
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When he was playing for Universidad de Chile towards the end of his career, he sat out a training session but turned up with a gun and started firing blanks into the air.
“I don’t like the way you are running!” he screamed at his colleagues. “Go faster, you b*******! We have to be the champions!”
His nickname works on several levels…
While football fans know Asprilla as ‘Tino’ it’s not just because of the last syllables in his first name.
It’s also because in Spanish ‘Tino’ also means ‘aim’, which, for the most part, was a perfect description of his shooting.
And what he did with guns, obviously.
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He wasn’t just gifted on the football pitch…
In 2007, Asprilla took advantage of an offer to appear in SoHo magazine.
All well and good, you’d think, until you see the photographs.
In the piece, Asprilla appeared wearing a pair of angel wings and, well, nothing else.
You can see it here if you must.
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Talking of which…
Asprilla’s, er, talent in the trouser department has also caught the eye of the adult film industry.
Well, it would have been hard to miss it, to be fair.
In 2013, Tino was offered 20 million pesos (around £6,500) for a one-week contract with the producers becoming “convinced that with a little training you could exploit another talent all of Colombia knows you have.”
Remarkably, he turned the offer down.
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He’s got an entrepreneurial eye…
In 2014, with his playing career over, Asprill announced his latest business idea to a largely indifferent world – flavoured condoms.
Made in China, the prophylactics went under the brand name ‘Tino’ and came in a vareity of flavours and sizes, his favourite of which was the guava one.
“When I was growing up, we had a guava tree in our garden and that’s a flavour and aroma that’s very good for romancing,” he said.
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Which brings us nicely to…
As well as appearing on several reality shows in Colombia, Asprilla’s larger than life personality has also seen him immortalised in rubber in the country’s equivalent of Spitting Image.
Have a look here. It’s quite disturbing.
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Newcastle United's Colombian legend Faustino Asprilla taunts old teammate Alan Shearer with dinosaur video as pair bet over big game