Paolo Di Canio
Italian football player and manager
Paolo Di Canio (born 9 July 1968) is an Italian former professional footballer and manager. During his playing career he made over 500 league appearances and scored over one hundred goals as a forward. He primarily played as a deep-lying forward, but he could also play as an attacking midfielder, or as a winger. Di Canio was regarded as a technically skilled but temperamental player.
Di Canio began his career in the Italian Serie A, playing for Lazio, Juventus, Napoli and Milan, before a brief spell with the Scottish club Celtic. He subsequently spent seven years in the English Premier League with Sheffield Wednesday, West Ham United and Charlton Athletic. He returned to Italy in 2004, playing for Lazio and Cisco Roma before retiring in 2008. He played for the Italian under-21s, making nine appearances and scoring twice, and was a member of the squad that finished in third place at the 1990 UEFA European Under-21 Championship under manager Cesare Maldini, but was never capped for the senior team.
Among the individual awards he received as a player, Di Canio was named SPFA Players' Player of the Year in 1997 and West Ham's player of the season in 2000. However, his career was at times characterised by controversy: he received an eleven-match ban in 1998 for pushing a referee and attracted negative publicity over his allegiance to fascism.
The public source identifies “Paolo Di Canio” as italian football player and manager. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Paolo, Canio and Italian.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q44655. VIAF identifies the subject as 36417804. The Library of Congress control number is nb99154717. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1968, 2004, 2008 and 1990.
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This entry incorporates text from “Paolo Di Canio” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.