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The original was posted on /r/soccer by /u/NeroRomanusAugustus on 2026-01-17 00:19:48+00:00.
Article:
Former Sporting Lisbon football player, now 37 years old and playing for Romanian side Cluj, reveals his first season with… quirky habits.
Islam Slimani opened his book of memories to reveal, perhaps, one of the most hilarious stories from his time at Sporting, which was divided into two periods - he arrived in 2013 and left in 2016, returning in 2021/22. The Algerian striker, currently 37 years old and playing for the Romanian team Cluj, explains that the focus was so much on working and improving, then under the command of Leonardo Jardim, that he neglected his diet…
“I was starving when I arrived at Sporting. My life was like this: I’d go to training, come home and eat a pizza – one of those frozen ones… I swear it’s true. Frozen pizza at midday; and I also ate noodles, the kind that come in a packet and you boil them. I ate that every day, plus tuna and margarine… I’d take a nap, have a coffee, and what I hadn’t eaten in the morning, I’d eat at night or the next day. I did that for a year. I didn’t go to a restaurant once. I swear, and I didn’t know how to cook…”, the striker explained in an interview given to journalist Colin Dicanot’s channel.
And he finished, amidst… much laughter from both of them: “You know the worst part? They provided lunch at the Academy, but I didn’t know. I was so focused that I didn’t even know and went straight home [after training]. And nobody asked me why I wasn’t going to eat…”
With the Lion on his chest, Slimani completed 123 games (plus one in the B team), in which he scored 61 goals and registered nine assists. In 2013, the SAD paid 300,000 euros to CR Belouizdad, an Algerian club, for his transfer.