Smoking is generally not advised by football’s increasingly influential nutritionists and sports scientists – but that hasn’t stopped top stars from Barcelona, Juventus, Arsenal and PSG enjoying cigarettes.
You’d think that smoking is something that football left behind decades ago, like the culture of sinking seven or eight pints the night before a match. But you’d be surprised how prevalent smoking has been to this day, including at some of European football’s elite superclubs.
Here are nine football figures who have famously enjoyed a tab or two.
Wojciech Szczesny
You might’ve seen that viral photo of Sczcesny posing with a cigarette outside Barcelona’s training centre. The picture goes hard, but it is unfortunately (obviously) a cheeky photoshop. Here’s the original.
The veteran Poland international is open and honest about his smoking habit. He’s been photographed with a cigarette numerous times, including during celebrations in Barca’s dressing room, but he doesn’t want to glamourise it.
“I do not smoke in front of children so as not to affect them. Sometimes, someone takes a picture of me while hiding behind trees, where I can’t see them. This is not in my hands. I try to hide it and not show it to people,” Szczesny said after joining Barcelona.
“If anyone thinks that I will change something in my personal life, think again because I will not do that and I will remain the same I’ve been like this all my life, and these things are nobody’s business.
“I want to be judged as a goalkeeper and not by looking for stories that don’t interest anyone.”
Fair enough.
Johan Cruyff
The legendary Dutchman picked up the habit whilst young and never quit during his playing career, while he was often seen with a cigarette in hand whilst on the touchline as manager.
“I’ve had two addictions in my life: smoking and playing football. Football has given me everything, whilst smoking almost took it all away,” Cruyff famously once said.
The above quote was delivered in a Catalan anti-smoking advert filmed soon after he quit, in which he also booted a packet of cigs into orbit. Cool as f*ck with or without the smokes, that one.
Jeremy Mathieu
“They say that I smoke? Yes. And what?”
Full marks for honesty, Jeremy.
“The Spanish press wanted to kill me because of it during my time at Barca,” Mathieu reflected years later.
“I am not the first footballer to smoke and I won’t be the last. When people see me play, they are satisfied. That is the most important thing for me.”
What is it with Barcelona and cigarettes?
Maurizio Sarri
The bloke loves lighting up more than he loves intricate passing triangles. And he really loves intricate passing triangles.
READ: Maurizio Sarri and cigarettes: A timeline of a turbulent relationship
Radja Nainggolan
One of Serie A’s most colourful characters of the 2010s, Belgian midfielder Nainggolan is a bit of a one-off. One of those wonderfully enigmatic footballers managers found impossible to tame, but such was his charm.
“When he was at Roma, he’d leave the dressing room to have a smoke with the assistant manager, he did what he pleased and wouldn’t care what people would think of it,” former team-mate Leandro Castan later recalled.
“But he would then go and deliver on the pitch, where it matters. It was great to play alongside him.”
Later in his career, Nainggolan’s smoking habit got him into hot water. In 2022 he was suspended indefinitely by Royal Antwerp after vaping on the bench during a 3-0 defeat to Standard Liege.
He never played for the club again and promptly returned to Italy, signing for second-tier SPAL.
Mario Balotelli
It’s not exactly a secret that the eccentric Italian liked a smoke. A quick search brings enough tabloid snaps from over the years.
“Every morning, he used to take me out the back of the dressing rooms, there was a little area with a few tables – you could have a coffee or a cup of tea or something,” former Man City kitman, Les ‘Chappy’ Chapman reminisced on the 93:20 podcast.
“And every morning, Mario used to say ‘Chappy, c’mon’ and we used to go round the back and sit at this table and he’d have one of my fags. I used to smoke then.
“He’d probably have two cigarettes, one after the other. Never bring his own. He must have had 80 packets and 70 lighters all the time he was there but never got me one cigarette.”
Classic Balotelli.
Gianluigi Buffon
Lighting up in the St. Mary’s dressing room was reportedly one of the major reasons that Wenger had seen enough in Szczesny and decided to get rid of the ‘keeper.
Juventus evidently had a much more lax approach to the indiscretion, given they employed Buffon and Szczesny for decades – with a significant period of overlap.
At least you know there was always a lighter handy.
Buffon was pictured smoking in his car following the Old Lady’s Champions League semi-final victory over Monaco back in 2017, one of multiple instances over the course of his lengthy career.
No one ever made a big deal out of it – maybe because it was apparently so commonplace.
Nicklas Bendtner said smoking “was much of a thing in Italy, much more of a normality than it might be in England” and that on his first day at Juventus he walked into the bathroom and found “10 or 12 of the players in the bathroom drinking coffee, talking, enjoying each other’s company and having a cig.”
Marco Verratti
The industrious midfielder left Pascara as a youngster to spend his peak years at PSG, but the smoking habits of his homeland apparently never left him.
“Last week he was partying until 6am for Neymar’s birthday, because he smokes, because he drinks because he’s out almost every day of the week,” French football journalist Julien Laurens told BBC Radio 5 Live back in 2019.
“I think if he had the lifestyle of Cristiano Ronaldo, for example, the work ethic of him, I don’t where he would be in terms of world-class midfielders.
“But the ability he has combined with the lifestyle that he has at the moment and yet still being able to put out a performance like tonight is just incredible.”
Verratti covered a lot of ground as a smoker. Just imagine how he might’ve fared with the increased lung capacity.
Robert Prosinecki
“Playing with him was amazing,” Peter Crouch told FourFourTwo of his time alongside iconic Croatian striker Prosinecki at Portsmouth.
“He’d smoke before the game, at half-time in the showers and after the game as well. Red Marlboros, too. The real heavy stuff.”
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