THE FUSE

In February 2015, newspapers from London to Lagos reported that Samuel Eto'o had bought a ghost. The property was Villa Altachiara, a 40-room cliff-top palazzo above the Ligurian fishing village of Portofino, and the price tags attached to it ran to about $28 million (18.5 million pounds). The villa came with a legend. It had once belonged to Lord Carnarvon, the British aristocrat who financed the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1923 and died soon after, feeding a century of talk about a pharaoh's curse. The story wrote itself. Africa's greatest striker, then the best-paid footballer alive, was said to be moving into a haunted Italian mansion.