Alan Ferguson

who should i shit on tomorrow

The night before the 1999 Champions League final against Manchester United, Mario Basler was still at the hotel bar at 3:30am, working through beers, vodka lemons and Marlboro's. When the staff told him it was time for bed, he refused and said he still had a few more beers to go. Somewhere around his tenth, someone told him that he wouldn't be able to play the next day. Basler's reply: "Fine, then we can't win tomorrow." He started the match anyway, and scored the opening goal. This is Mario Basler, a great guy. As a boy, his father offered him 5 Deutsche Marks for every goal he scored. Basler hit 40 goals, 200 marks total, and his father decided that was enough and cut off the bonus. With no financial incentive left, Basler went on to score 76 goals that season anyway. In October 1999, he got into a physical altercation with Bayern's reserve goalkeeper, Sven Scheuer, in a restaurant. Basler tried to balance a full bottle of wine on his head while sitting in a chair that was stacked on top of a table. He has admitted publicly that around half of his fellow players disliked him. Franz Beckenbauer once called him "incorrigible", Basler took it as a compliment. He also dislikes modern footballers and mocked a whole generation saying that they spend an hour on hair gel and headbands before training, then show up unable to practice because of fresh tattoos, while he could drink, smoke, and still deliver in a Champions League final. Decades later, in 2023, at 54 years old and playing as a player-coach for an amateur district league side, he scored a goal, subbed himself off and lit a cigarette on the bench. His own autobiography is titled, without irony, "Actually, I'm a Great Guy."

Just seen a kid wearing a Manchester City top crying 😢 It was sad to see. Kids don’t deserve this. It wasn’t their fault.