Manchester United’s Dimitar Berbatov was the victim of a kidnapping as an up-and-coming young player in his native Bulgaria. The striker was abducted in 2000 aged 19 from the CSKA Sofia training ground by henchmen of a Bulgarian gangster. The idea was to force the emerging star to sign for the gangster’s team. It needed tense negotiations and the intervention of Berbatov’s father, himself a respected player in Bulgaria, to get the young Dimitar freed without harm. Berbatov later moved abroad to play for Bayer Leverkusen i1n Germany, and Tottenham and United in England.
