Marco Gentile (footballer)
Dutch footballer
Marco Gentile (born 24 August 1968) is a Dutch retired footballer who played as a central defender.
Career
A tough-tackling defender, Gentile is related to Italian World Cup winner Claudio Gentile. Born in The Hague, he started playing football at local amateur side VVP before joining professional outfit FC Den Haag. He became infamous for breaking PSV and Brazil striker Romário's leg which made him miss the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy. In 1995 he controversially moved to MVV on a free.
He was brought to the UK by Adrian Heath to join Burnley in the Football League in 1997, but when Heath left Gentile was disregarded by successor Chris Waddle and left the club after only one competitive, cup, match. After a spell back in the Netherlands with Volendam, he joined Willem II in summer 1999 and played in the UEFA Champions League with them.
He also had a short spell at Scottish club Dumbarton.
After retiring as a player, Gentile worked for Haarlem as an assistant to manager Jan Zoutman, for ADO Den Haag as a youth coach and for Excelsior, Sparta and RKC as a video analist. He also was an assistant to the manager at Excelsior.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Marco Gentile (footballer)” as dutch footballer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as dutch footballer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1816724. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1968, 1990, 1995 and 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Marco Gentile (footballer)” 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.