From Mário de Castro protesting against a murder to Carlos Roa trying to avoid the apocalypse, here’s half-a-dozen footballers who quit in their prime
You can tell a lot about a player in Italy from their nickname. Javier Zanetti was labelled “El Tractor” while Alessandro Del Piero was “Pinturicchio” – “The Little Painter”. With his everchanging crop of hair, Hidetoshi Nakata always stood out on the football pitch, and his obscene amount of talent quickly won over fans at Perugia and Roma (with whom he won a Serie A title), who all referred to him as “The Little Jewel”. Off the field, he was a marketing dream and on the day his £18m transfer to Parma was announced in 2001, an estimated four million people tried to access his homepage. But those that make a greater mark leave a bigger void and when Nakata announced his retirement at the age of 29 after the final match of Japan’s World Cup in 2006 against Croatia, in which the three-time Ballon d’Or nominee had been named man of the match, the world was stunned.
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