No, that’s not a clever headline you’re reading, this is an attack that really did happen. According to soccer blog THE SPOILER via German newspaper BILD, former German Bundesliga Champion Thorsten Legat finalized a guilty plea which closed a year-old case pending against him focused on an attack of a German citizen in the parking lot of a McDonald’s. The weapon Legat used in the attack? Why, that would be a samurai sword.

(The referee might not be so cavalier if he knew Legat had a sword!)

In fairness, Legat wasn’t the guy who started the trouble. The former Werder Bremen and Schlake star was in his car outside of his neighborhood McDonalds when he and his wife were threatened by your everyday, average German street gang. To scare them off, Legat promptly pulled his samurai sword from his boot (we didn’t know that was even possible) and started waving it around to scare off the alleged “group of youths”.

The problem is that, at one point, Legat’s sword actually made contact with someone’s head. While it may seem like someone would have lost their head, literally — given that the weapon a samurai sword, after all — the attacker was actually just injured, and promptly sued as a result.

Well, color German courts a tad more liberal than American ones, after Legat was forced to pay 1,000 Euros to the “victim” for the attack. That’s right, a former soccer star was threatened in his car, fought back against the assailants and then had to pay them 1,000 Euros. If that sounds crazy to you, well, it does to us, too.

Then again, we are talking about a guy who rolls around with a samurai sword in his boot — and who looks like a crazed Nicholson character on the pitch (above) — so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at all. And soccer stars do have quite a history with McDonald’s parking lots. Remember Joey Barton? He doesn’t sem quite as crazy now, does he? OK, yeah, he still does seem like an inhuman monster. Well, we tried.