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In a revelation no one saw coming, football royalty Eric Cantona has been found to share ancestral ties with actual Vatican royalty, he’s a distant cousin of Pope Leo XIV, the newly elected head of the Catholic Church.
Yes, really.
The extraordinary connection was uncovered by French genealogy experts at Geneanet, who have been busy tracing the family tree of Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, after he ascended to the Papacy earlier this month.
Delving deep into the Pope’s roots, researchers discovered that while his paternal grandfather hailed from Italy, the Pope’s ancestral branches also extend into southern France. And it’s there that the path takes a detour straight into footballing history.
According to the study, Cantona and Pope Leo XIV are related through a 16th-century marriage between Bertrand Negrel and Louise Jean, who tied the knot in 1566 in the village of Roquevaire, not far from Marseille, where Cantona himself was born in 1966.
The pair are reportedly linked somewhere between the 12th and 15th generations, making them distant cousins, but cousins nonetheless. The revelation has sparked amazement, and no shortage of jokes, across both sporting and religious circles.
And that’s not the only literary twist in the Cantona family tree. The genealogy team also claims that the former Manchester United legend is a cousin of none other than Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize-winning author and existential philosopher.
So, to recap: Eric Cantona is related to a Pope and a philosopher… and some say he kicked a fan and turned it into performance art. Now it all makes sense.
The football icon, known for his enigmatic quotes and Gallic swagger, has yet to publicly comment on his newfound holy relative, but fans are already speculating about a potential Cantona-style blessing or even a poetic philosophical musing about fate and football.
As one Twitter user put it: “When Eric Cantona said he was the king, turns out he wasn’t far off, just a few papal steps away.”
