Nolito: ‘Comments hurt you and your family. Being insulted isn’t part of the job’

Nolito, who faces Liverpool with Sevilla on Tuesday, opens up on Pep Guardiola, explains how a joke about the English weather led to all sorts of trouble and reveals who he thinks is the best player at Manchester City

Nolito says he was “joking”, which he often is, as another cheeky grin sweeps across his face and he starts laughing again. “Bloody hell,” he says, which is something he says a lot – or its slightly ruder Spanish equivalent anyway. And then he continues: “But it was for real, eh! I had to give her vitamin D, the poor thing. We’d go outside but the sun just never came out. Even I ended up pale …” A quick glance up and he adds, giggling: “Just like you!” And just like his daughter Lola, aged nine, and one-year-old twins, Lara and Alegría.

Towards the end of his first season in England, by which time he knew it would be his last, the former Manchester City player, now back in Spain with Liverpool’s Champions League opponents Sevilla, said his daughter had changed colour. “She looks like she’s been living in a cave,” he said then; “it got misinterpreted,” he says now. “It was just a joke, a throwaway line. And it was true: there was no sun and the paediatrician said: ‘Try this’…

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