5 Crazy Football Truths – with a payroll flavour!

5 Crazy (slightly payroll related) football truths!

 1.      Minimum Wage Issues?  World’s lowest paid soccer player

In July 2001 the world’s worst paid player earned just 16p a month!

23 year-old Lucian Badaluta was tied into a contract playing for CSM Resita in Romania which allowed him to afford just one loaf of bread each week and could only afford to continue playing because of gifts of food from fans.

2.      Surname and employee code problems? Bungay  – v – Bungay

A football match where all 22 players, referee, linesmen and reserves shared the same name of Bungay took place in the town of Bungay in Suffolk a few years ago.  

The idea for the match came about after Shaun Cole who is on the Bungay Town FC management committee decided to investigate ways of promoting the Anglian Combination League club.

Mr Cole wrote to all the Bungays he could find on directory enquiries and contacted others internationally on Facebook and Twitter.  Retired lorry driver Chris Bungay, 57, of Queensland, Australia, agreed to play in the match while combining it with a holiday to visit his relatives in Britain.

3.       Managing sickness? Phantoms and lies

Football player Carlos “Kukin” Flores of Peru’s Inti Gas Deportes was stopped by the police one December when he was running naked through the streets of Huamanga.

When questioned, he said that he could not stop as he was being chased by ghosts. He later confessed that he had made up the story so that his wife believed it – in reality, he was ‘engaging with dirty ladies’ (his words not ours) and they had mugged him.

He admitted “I didn’t want my wife to be suspicious about ladies so I just told her it was a ghost. She failed to believe me.”

4.       Severence pay issues?  Footballer transferred for 15 kg of Sausage Meat

A Romanian football team is apparently demanding a refund after having bought a player for a transfer fee of 15 kilos of pork sausages. Defender Marius Cioara retired a day later saying he could not face any more sausage related taunts at his expense. Cioara, who played for second division team UT Arad, was sold to fourth division Regal Hornia for the sausage meat.

After the deal a spokesman for Regal Hornia confirmed, “We gave up the team’s sausage allowance for a week to secure him, but we are confident it will be worth it.”  However, a day after the deal was leaked to the media, Cioara announced he was giving up football and had decided to flee the country.

Ananova the News agency reports that he said, “The sausage taunts all got too much. They were joking but I would have got more from the Germans and making sausage jokes was a huge insult. I have decided to go to Spain where I have got a job on a farm.”

5.      Fixing problems to get results?  Football team won 61-1!

I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” claimed Goa journalist Anthony Marcus, after watching local side Wilfred Leisure hammer Dona Paula Sports Club 55-1 in 2004.

The ridiculous result was due to Second Division rivals Curtorim Gymkhana and Wilfred Leisure’s bitter struggle for promotion from the Second Division as the season’s climax approached.

Level on points, Wilfred had to win by seven goals more than Curtorim, but with officials discovering that their rivals were also hammering their rivals, the last games went goal crazy, and Curtorim won their game 61-1.

All four teams involved were banned for a year, with local politicians widely blamed for the farce.

We hope you enjoyed our little bit of trivia – we have more within the depths of our blog pages too: 

Payroll outsourcing – Top 5 rejection statements

Cultural biography of a paper payslip

10 Bank holiday facts – past and present

If you would like us to write about anything you find interesting in the payroll world – why not drop me an email:

tracy@payrollsolutionsltd.co.uk