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Analysing The Smoking Habits of Footballers and Iconic Managers

While medical science has come to the consensus that tobacco and rigorous exercise don’t mix, there are still many icons of football who enjoy a crafty smoke.

Over the past half a century or so, medical science seems to have come to the consensus that smoking and rigorous exercise do not mix. Indeed, many doctors are even more down on the ol' cigarettes these days, this despite the fact that, according to the incontrovertible truth of conventional wisdom, every single member of the medical profession is on 40 Richmond Superkings a day. Between reduced lung capacity, limited blood flow and narrowed arteries – this not including serious conditions like COPD and cancer, both of which are real shithouses – huffing on tobacco habitually is likely to curb long-term athletic potential. That said, there have been a select few sportsmen in the modern era who have flown in the face of the doctor's orders. Using the logic of modern politics, this means that medical science and the so-called 'experts' are out of touch, while in reality no one actually gets lung disease and people should be able to light up in hospitals, nurseries, petrol station forecourts and, most importantly, carpeted pubs.

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In that select group of sportsmen who have defied the findings of several decades of detailed research on tobacco – and the sinister decrees of the nanny state, of course – the most iconic smokers come from the world of football. Discounting the good old days, when everyone agreed that smoking helped exercise the lungs and should actually be used to aid athletic endeavour, footballers who smoke tend to be either rebels, mavericks and bohemian nonconformists, or men who want to be perceived as such. So Johan Cruyff is surely football's most famous connoisseur of the cigarette, cultivating as he did a serious habit during his playing days and his career as a manager. Growing up in the surroundings of sixties Amsterdam, the cigarette – a very adult luxury – was no doubt an emblem of rebellion at a time when youth culture was coming into its own in the Netherlands. Cruyff was associated, and associated himself, with the liberalisation of Dutch culture and the anti-establishment, so it was little wonder that fags became a feature of his public image, this alongside his louche aesthetic, effortless fashionability and habit of annoying the conservative orthodoxy with his defiant nonchalance.

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