https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-14390107/Meet-former-Premier-League-star-needed-Pablo-Escobars-permission-clubs-makes-living-selling-condoms.html
Meet the former Premier League star who once needed Pablo Escobar's permission to move clubs - and now makes a living selling condoms
Faustino Asprilla played for Newcastle in a two-year spell in the late 1990s
The maverick Colombian has a knack for making the improbable seem ordinary
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Faustino Asprilla has often likened his life to a wonderful dream. It is not hard to see why.
From the football pitch to the nightclubs of northern Italy, Tyneside and beyond, the maverick Colombian has always had a knack for making the wildly improbable seem ordinary.
Who else would mark their club debut by enjoying a pre-match glass of wine before performing a Cruyff turn to set up a vital equaliser within minutes of coming on as a second-half substitute, as Asprilla did within hours of joining Newcastle United?
Who else would report for training wearing nothing but a jockstrap, a snorkel and a pair of flippers? Or invite entire bars back to his place after last orders? Or teach a horse to play football while wearing an enormous dinosaur costume?
Given the myriad myths that have come to enshroud Asprilla's career, it can be difficult to separate truth from fiction. It is not true that he accidentally shot his own horse at his home in Tulua, western Colombia; it is true that during a spell at Universidad de Chile he fired a fake gun during training in a bid to make his team-mates work harder. As for whether he was really inside that oversized T-Rex outfit, we'll probably never know.
If Asprilla, now 55, has a super power, it is the ability to live life on his own terms. The exception that proves the rule came in 1992, when he left Atletico Nacional, the Colombian team for whom he scored 32 goals in 75 appearances after joining from Cucuta Deportivo in 1989, to join Serie A side Parma.
It was an open secret that Atletico Nacional was the plaything of Pablo Escobar, the world's most notorious drug lord, and for all Asprilla's reputation as a non-conformist, even he acknowledges the transfer would not have gone through without Escobar's say-so.
'Escobar certainly had Nacional Medellín at heart,' Asprilla told La Gazzetta dello Sport. 'And at the time, nothing was done without his consent.'
'He talked about tactics and I didn't understand anything,' said Asprilla. 'I needed the ball to have fun, to run, to get past the opponent. Imagine if I cared about the 3-5-2 or the descending markings.
'One day, he asked me to run for half an hour. I threw my shoes at him and said: "I'm not Forrest Gump, I'm a footballer." And I left the locker room.'
Yet Asprilla was more than just a show pony. He would go on to win three European trophies under Scala - a fourth would follow after he briefly rejoined the club in 1998 - and later added a Coppa Italia victory to the Colombian league title he earned with Atlético Nacional in 1999.
In England, of course, Asprilla is best remembered for his two-year stay on Tyneside. Newcastle were nine points clear at the top of the Premier League when his private jet touched down at Teesside airport in February 1996, and some maintain to this day that the £6.7 million striker's mid-season addition to Kevin Keegan's Entertainers upset the balance of the team and cost the Magpies the title that year.
Even former Newcastle midfielder Keith Gillespie, who lost his place in the starting line-up to accommodate the new boy, is among those who have suggested Asprilla's arrival unsettled the team. It is a view that tends to get short shrift among the club's fans.
'It’s wrong to say his signing unsettled the side in '96,' says Jamie Smith, a writer for Newcastle fanzine The Mag. 'The fact often overlooked is that we had a horrendous run-in of away games, and the team's head seemed to go as Man United returned a long run of lucky 1-0 wins.
'There were games in that run, like his debut against Boro or West Ham at home, where Tino was the shining light in the team, and he’s only remembered with fondness.'
Small wonder, for it would be hard to imagine a player with qualities better suited to Keegan's flair-filled side - as the club's former manager was quick to point out.
'To blame him for our demise in the championship is nothing short of scandalous,' Keegan said. 'I think there was a lot more to it than that; I think if people analyse it, they'll see. A lot of players didn't play well from the time he came.'
If anything, it was Asprilla who might have been forgiven for wondering what he had gotten himself into. Lured to the north-east by the promise of a life by the sea, he was famously greeted by a snow storm on his arrival, instantly dispelling the hopes he harboured of sailing yachts and relaxing on the beach.
Asprilla nonetheless took quickly to both the club and his fellow players, forming a close bond with Alan Shearer and earning the respect of the dressing room.
'There’s been a few characters wearing those [black-and-white] stripes down the years, but Asprilla is out on his own when it comes to crazy,' says Smith.
'Even in a team known for its maverick approach and cavalier football, Tino stood out a mile. His wild dribbling skills and extravagant celebrations were obvious from his debut.
'He was always a highly individual player, and there were games where he set the place alight, then other times when the team didn’t seem to know what he was doing. Luckily, the opposition didn’t either.'
At times, Asprilla's antics infuriated - a case in point came when he took off his shirt and hoisted it aloft on a corner flag after scoring in a Uefa Cup game against Metz, earning a suspension-triggering booking for his troubles - but the affection in which he was held was near universal.
'He was the life and soul of the team,' former defender Warren Barton told The Set Pieces. 'We were a very tight-knit group and he came in and added to that. He integrated very quickly; his smile every morning was infectious. You could always hear his voice. He had an interpreter, but his English was better than he let on.'
Beloved by colleagues and fans alike, Asprilla in turn embraced the city's warmth - not least that of the female population.
'I don’t know how many girlfriends I had in Newcastle,' admitted Asprilla. 'At the beginning, I didn’t even understand what they said.'
While Keegan largely tolerated Asprilla's penchant for a party, Kenny Dalglish, who became manager following Keegan's resignation in January 1997, took a more pragmatic view of both the team and the players who would fit into it.
Dalglish's shift to a more defensive style meant Asprilla's days were numbered, yet there was still time for the front man to enjoy his finest moment in a black and white shirt.
That came on September 17, 1997, when Asprilla marked Newcastle's Champions League debut by scoring a hat-trick in a dramatic 3-2 victory over Barcelona. Notoriously, it almost didn't happen.
'Dalglish wasn't going to play me, because I had come back late from Colombia and he was angry,' said Asprilla, for whom timekeeping was never a strong point. 'So I had sex with my girlfriend before the game, which I never did because I thought it was unlucky. I never prepared properly. Goodness knows what would have happened if I had!'
Briefly married to Catalina Cortes, a fellow Colombian with whom he had a son, Santiago, in 1992, Asprilla has candidly admitted that he is not cut out for a life of monogamy.
'I'm not made for fidelity, for life as a couple,' said Asprilla. 'I like women: as soon as I see one, I run after her. It's the same now that I'm no longer a boy. At that time I thought about football, having fun, money.'
These days, Asprilla makes a living by selling sugar cane produced on his farm in Tulua and selling branded condoms, an enterprise that has its origins in a wardrobe malfunction he suffered during a friendly match against Chile in 1993.
The reputation he acquired following that incident led to a naked appearance on the cover of a Colombian magazine, and in 2013 he was reportedly even offered a contract to make adult movies.
From there it was merely a short step to making his trademark 'Tino' condoms, one of the more recent iterations of which is a flavoured version inspired, he says, by the aroma of passion fruit tree.
'Sex has always been important to me,' he says. 'I am Asprilla: lots of sex, no rules and pure life.'
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