A Nutella jar and Antonio Cassano.

The latest remarkable story about a former athlete comes from ex-soccer star Antonio Cassano, who played for several Italian Serie A clubs and the Italian national team plus Spain’s Real Madrid between 1998 and 2017. Brad Hunter of Canada’s canoe.ca has more on the latest revelations from Cassano (seen above in 2010), now 38, and they involve significant discussion of both Nutella and sex (but not at the same time). First, the Nutella:

He recently admitted that his long-term weight struggles were a result of eating buckets of Nutella spread.

“Nutella was one of the sponsors of the club (Real Madrid) and each month they gave us five kilos of product,” Cassano said.

…“In seven months I gained 14 kilos (30 pounds). I ate Nutella directly from the bottle and I didn’t care. I was ashamed.”

That is probably the most innocuous context “five kilos of product” has ever been used in. And there are maybe some questions about if it’s worth it for a sponsor to provide professional soccer players with five kilos of Nutella each month. But anyways, on to the sex, which Cassano said was less harmful to his (on-pitch) performance, but did lead to an interesting arrangement with a waiter friend:

He also boasted that he had slept with between 600 and 700 women before he had turned 25. Sex, he said, typically allowed him to play “great.”

…Cassano also admitted that he loved pastries. One friend who was a waiter played a particular role for the star.

“His job was to bring me three or four pastries after I had sex,” Cassano wrote in his book. “He would bring the pastries up the stairs, I would escort the woman to him and we would make an exchange. He would take the girl and I would take the pastries. Sex and then food, a perfect night.”

At first glance, the claim of sleeping with 700 women by age 25 may seem a bit much, but it’s perhaps possible (mathematically speaking). If Cassano became sexually active around his eighteenth birthday (and that may be late), that would give him seven years to hit that mark, which would add up to 100 new women a year, or one every 3.65 days. And that’s before any consideration of him sleeping with multiple women in one night at times. So that seems perhaps doable for an incredibly famous Italian soccer star, one who made his senior team debut (with Bari) at 17 in 1999. And hey, if sex allowed him to play “great,” that seems better for his career than the five monthly kilos of Nutella.

[Canoe.ca; photos from Chez Le Rêve Français and Wikipedia]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.