Antonio Cassano: Genius and Intemperance
“Sex plus food: the perfect night.”

Cassano with Totti

By Nicolas Stark
december 2008

Cassano was born in the southern Italian city of Bari on 12 July 1982, the day after Italy's win over Germany in the World Cup Final. His father left the family shortly after and he was raised by his mother in the tough working-class neighbourhood of Bari Vecchia. He began playing street football at an early age and was spotted by a scout for the local club AS Bari and brought up through the team's youth system. He made his Serie A debut for Bari in 1999 at age 17.

Many of Cassano’s street urchin friends got into trouble with the law, some wound up on the fringes (or worse) of organised crime. The supremely talented striker says soccer saved him from a similar fate. “There’s no doubt that had it not been for football, I would have become a hoodlum,” admits Cassano in the book entitled “Dico tutto (e se fa caldo gioco all’ombra” ), [“I’ll tell all (and if it’s hot I’ll play in the shade)”].

In the summer of 2001 when Cassano was just shy of his 19th birthday, Roma outbid rivals Juventus and paid a transfer fee of €28 million, making him the most expensive teenage signing in the world at the time.
The move marked the start of a stormy relationship with Roma’s disciplinarian coach Fabio Capello, which continued when both were later at Spanish giants Real Madrid.

An exasperated Capello even coined the word Cassanata to describe the player’s petulant outbursts of insubordination and outrageous behaviour.
Cassano’s antics eventually tired the club management, his team-mates and even Roma’s passionate fans.
In January 2006, he acrimoniously parted ways with the giallorossi and signed with Real Madrid.

Roma’s loss cannot be said to be Real’s gain. The tantrums continued but the stunning plays became a rarity. Cassano made no secret of his love for junk food and Real Madrid fans quickly began to ridicule his ungainly girth.
From his autobiography we learn that Cassano is not only passionate about football and food, he also loves sex. And like every passion in his life, he seems driven to excess. “Dico tutto” claims he has slept with “between 600 and 700 women.”

When Cassano was at Real, he would pay the bellboy to sneak a woman into his hotel room late at night on the eve of each home game. “I played my best games after having sex until six in the morning and then breakfasting on three or four cream pastries,” reveals Cassano. “Sex plus food: a perfect night.”

In August 2007 Real dealt Cassano to the Genoa-based Serie A club Sampdoria. He now says he has found an “ideal home” with Sampdoria and feels he has become a more mature and settled player. But in a game in March this year he earned a five-match suspension for histrionically insulting the match referee and we may well not have seen the last of his Cassanate.