At the start of 2011, Samuel Eto'o started to realise something wasn't quite right.His mother back in Cameroon wasn't receiving all of the money he was sending her and a Cameroonian nightclub that he owned claimed for a series of payments he'd not made to them.

The agent of Eto'o was in charge of making those payments.It turned out that a company that the player owned and kept most of his earnings in had transferred his fortune into someone else's hands.

Eto'o now owned just one per cent of said company, with the rest lying in the name of various companies controlled by his agent, Jose Maria Mesalles.

But how did this happen?

The striker had put his full trust in Mesalles since he was 22 years old, allowing him to buy, sell, make transfers, manage his payments from Inter, all using the player's money.

Everything Eto'o had earned, which was 40 million euros between 2006 and 2009 alone, was put in the hands of Mesalles. The aforementioned company owned a number of Eto'o prised possessions: four houses in Palma, Barcelona and Paris, an entire building in Douala (Cameroon), parking places, storages and a Bentley.

It was at that point that Eto'o realised that this company owned practically nothing anymore and all its actions were carried out by his agent or companies under his name.

Eto'o also found himself in debt from several loans he'd made to those companies. At the time, the forward was playing for Anzhi Makhachkala in Russia and, after consulting close friends, he relinquished all of Mesalles' powers and filed a lawsuit against him.

In the end, he was able to recover his large fortune, but at the time, he was on the verge of financial ruin.

This is the 17th episode in a new series called 'MARCA: Stories We Never Told,' a collection of stories and anecdotes that, until now, were filed in our drawers for different reasons and are now seeing the light.