December 25, 2022, 3:10 PM
December 25, 2022, 3:10 PM
Former soccer player Fabián O’Neill, who was a member of the Uruguayan team that participated in the 2002 World Cup and also played for Juventus in Turin, He died on Sunday at the age of 49 from chronic cirrhosis.
“Goodbye Wizard!” The Uruguayan National Club, where O’Neill made his debut in the first division, tweeted when reporting his death.
O’Neill, who left football in 2003 at the age of 30 and who had alcoholism problems during his professional career and later, He had been hospitalized since Saturday due to bleeding in a hospital in Montevideo, where he died this Sunday.
“The most talented player I’ve ever seen, O’Neill”, described it many years ago by the French Zinedine Zidane, who coincided with the ‘wizard’ at Juventus in the 2000-2001 season.
O’Neill had debuted in the first division at the National at the age of 18 in 1992, the year in which he became League champion.
At the end of 1995 he was transferred to Cagliari, where he served until 2000 with singular success. So much so that Juventus acquired him, but after playing one season, 2000-2001, he was loaned to Perugia in 2002 and the following year he returned to Nacional where he retired from football in 2003.
He was capped with La Celeste 19 times, in which he scored two goals, and was part of the squad that was eliminated in the first round at the 2002 World Cup in South Korea and Japan. where he did not play any game because he was injured.
“Uruguayan football is in mourning. One of the best players to emerge in recent decades left and who knew how to shine on the field with his talent, magic and good punch,” the newspaper El País described him on Sunday.
For its part, El Observador considered that “Fabian O’Neill is one of those great wasted talents as a consequence of a non-soccer life not proper for a professional (…) his career was marked by alcohol and excesses”.
