10 best excerpts from Andrea Pirlo's 'I Think, Therefore I Play'

#8 ‘One of them is the only mean Swede....’

Pirlo, throughout the book, remains firmly tongue-in-cheek whenever he gets the chance. He even talks about his penchant for making up unbelievable stories underneath the magnificently calm, composed expression that fans watch from afar when he plays games.

At the beginning of chapter 12, when he is finished with expressing his dissatisfaction with Silvio Berlusconi for the ill-fated signing of Klaas Jan-Huntelaar by the club, Pirlo talks about a time when he wanted to quit football. Even at that time, he cracks a worthy joke on his teammates Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Oguchi Onyewu, whose infamous brawl in the 2010-11 season went public:

“One of them is the only mean Swede, the other the solitary American who prefers football to baseball, basketball, gridiron, ice hockey and even hamburgers at McDonald’s.”

Quite a teammate to have, one can safely say.