Marco Borriello’s Premier League stint was about as unmemorable as you could imagine, but the opposite is true of the Italian striker’s wider career.
Borriello played just twice for West Ham in an injury-hit spell in the 2013/14 season, and few will recall anything he did in East London, but either side of that he has been at the centre of some curious events.
When you see a career encompassing 16 seasons in Serie A but for 11 different clubs, you imagine there was a bit going on away from the pitch. You don’t know half of it.
After making his AC Milan debut shortly after his 20th birthday in 2002, Borriello would wait another four seasons before scoring his first goal for the club.
Having spent time on loan up and down the country, the striker must have thought he was ready to kick on, only to be handed a drugs ban when he tested positive for banned substances following a game against Roma.
Athletes have come up with plenty of creative excuses after a positive drugs test, but ‘penis cream’ isn’t usually one of them. Borriello clearly wasn’t like every other player, though.
The striker’s girlfriend said she passed on a sexually transmitted infection and - more crucially - recommended him a treatment which contributed to the banned substance issue.
“I advised him to use the ointment but forgot it contained cortisone,” Rodriguez said at the time.
“Our sex session proved fatal.”
It didn’t work (the excuse, we mean - no idea if the ointment was effective), and Borriello was banned for the rest of the season, missing out on Milan’s Champions League victory over Liverpool.
Borriello would later claim Rodriguez 'was given bad advice and exaggerated during the interview,' but sex-related explanations were easy to believe as far as the Italian was concerned.
This was a man who, after all, once said in an interview: “Sex is very important because I am passionate…. I’m lucky to know that if I want it, I can have it at any time.”
There were reports in gossip pages at the time that he bragged about having sex 37 times a day.
Whether having it or talking about it, sex certainly seemed to play a big part in his life, and a constant at a time when he moved from one football club to the next with regularity.
The goals continued to flow, though, even if he was moving to a new city every couple of years.
He hit double figures in single seasons for Genoa, Milan, Roma and Cagliari, but even then the off-field distractions continued as he entered the twilight of his career.
After leaving Cagliari for newly-promoted SPAL in 2017, Borriello was approached by a fan while travelling on the team bus.
Familiar with the striker’s reputation, the supporter took it upon himself to urge him to “have less sex” - looking at this video of the incident, it’s safe to say Borriello didn’t see the funny side, and seemed just about ready to leave the vehicle and debate the matter with the fan, mano e mano.
Even in his mid-30s, Borriello was arguably a sex symbol as much as he was a footballer, and unlike some others he was open about that side of his personality.
In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2017, he admitted he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t aware of that reputation, saying “I have been hanging around this environment for a while, I know how things work.”
In the same interview, he spoke of a tattoo on his private parts “that nobody knows”.
Well, they do now.
