Dimitar Berbatov has revealed a shocking ordeal early in his career in which he was taken hostage in a restaurant by people trying to force him to leave the club. The former Manchester United striker was just a teenager establishing himself at CSKA Sofia when the alarming episode came to light.
After a training session, his teammates drove him under false pretenses to a restaurant, where a group of men detained him for several hours and forced him to transfer to a competing team. Berbatov, who went on to play for Bulgaria, Tottenham and the Red Devils, spoke about the unusual incident on the Rio Ferdinand Presents podcast.
He said: “I was playing for CSKA Sofia and I was really starting to show my qualities. And usually when you show your qualities as a player, teams will come to you and make you an offer and ask you how long your contract is, how much the acquisition cost, etc.”
“Back home it was a lot different. Back home it was like, ‘Him? All right, bring him here.’ I didn’t have a car, so after training my teammates said, ‘Come with me, we need to take you to your friends.’
“And, of course, I was a little naive. And maybe I trusted him because we played on the same team. So I got in his car and he took me to a restaurant. We went into the restaurant and there was obviously a table in the restaurant.”
“At one table, there was a guy sitting by himself. And at the other three tables, there was a big guy, a refrigerator, typical Balkan guys sitting behind him, just looking scared. The guy who took me there was like, ‘Go over there, sit down, I’ll see you later.’ And the guy was like, ‘Come here, sit down.’
“I was just sitting there thinking in my head, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on? I’ve got to call my dad, I’ve got to call my dad.’ And the guy starts talking, ‘Do you know what they call me?’ Now, in English, it’s probably like, ‘They call me Cook.’
“I’m like, ‘Okay, so we know you. We need to change the team. We want you on our team. We need to get you.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but I play for CSKA Sofia. I mean, I like it there.'”
“He said, ‘We’ll figure it out, don’t worry.’ And the guys were sitting there, and I was just like this, scared, of course. So I sat there for probably two or three hours, and eventually the guy got me to call my dad.
“And I’m like calling my dad, ‘I’m here. I don’t know where I am. People around me, great people.’ I was talking so fast that he said, ‘Calm down, breathe. Calm down, just breathe.’
“And I said, ‘What the heck? They’re going to kidnap me here, but I don’t want to go, I want to go home.’ And he said, ‘Okay, okay. Let’s see what we can do. I’m going to call that person.’
“In the end, someone called someone and the leaders of both teams figured out a way for me to not move and just stay put. In that situation, as an 18-year-old and knowing how things were going in Bulgaria at the time, I thought to myself, ‘This is the limit for me. Maybe they’ll beat me, or I don’t know.’
“But eventually my dad came and put me in the car and I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ It made me realize early on in life that I had to grow up and be a man.”
