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Learning you’ve been traded is usually an unpleasant surprise if you’re a professional athlete, especially when it’s clear your team didn’t place a ton of value on your talents—which was definitely the case with the Romanian soccer player who was once traded for a whole bunch of sausage.
Most people would love to be in a position where they can get paid to play a sport for a living, and while it tends to be a pretty sweet gig, it can also come with its fair share of downsides. For example, there’s only so much you can do to ensure your life isn’t going to be turned upside-down in an instant if the team you play for decides to go in a different direction.
At the end of the day, sports are a business, so while players may not be thrilled about having to start over in another city, they usually come to terms with the reality they find themselves facing when they hear the news.
However, that was not the case with Marius Cioara, who decided to hang up his cleats after being on the wrong end of a fairly disrespectful move in 2006.
A soccer player decided to retire after being traded for sausage
Terms like “a bag of pucks” and “a box of baseballs” are commonly used to refer to transactions involving a player who was traded away for practically nothing in return, although there aren’t many situations where they were literally swapped for those goods.
Marius Cioara, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky.
In 2006, Cioara was playing for UT Arad, a Romanian club that was a member of the country’s second division. He found himself at the receiving end of a downgrade when he was informed he was being shipped off to Regal Hornia of the fourth division, a move that was facilitated with the help of a unique transfer fee that led to the agreement being finalized: 15 kilograms of sausage.
However, the defender didn’t take kindly to that development and opted to retire instead of being subjected to the mockery that came with it, as he quickly fled back to his native country to start a new career, telling a local outlet:
“The sausage taunts all got too much…I have decided to go to Spain where I have got a job on a farm.”
Hornia subsequently forced Arad to forfeit the sausage that was used to…grease the wheels of the deal.