Where are they now?

I’m sure many of you have had some experience of the Football Manager or Championship Manager games. If they have somehow (surely they haven’t?!) managed to pass you by they are a series of football management simulation computer games. The majority of people who have played them have probably also been addicted to them at some point. Yes you read that correctly, addicted and I include myself in this group.

When I started this blog, I never thought I would write something about the virtual football world but to be honest I have felt almost as much an attachment to some of my teams on the games as I feel to the real life team I support. Not quite the same of course, it never could be but the level of emotion I have had to my teams on the game is rather worrying.

I randomly started thinking about the older versions of the game that I used to play and the unbelievably skilled and talented (although admittedly in the most part the stats weren’t realistic) young players that I discovered for my world beating teams. I realised to my horror and disappointment that the majority of the “next best thing” youth talent never made it in real life. Even more distressing, no actually that doesn’t convey the feeling, even more painful/heartbreaking was that they never got close and the non-football manager world will never have heard of them as they quietly slipped into the obscurity of the footballing world.

So, where are they now and what did they achieve?

Sergey Nikiforenko

Same name problems as with Maxim Tsigalko/Maksim Tsyhalko here. In the games he is Nikiforenko, in real life apparently it is Syarhey Nikiforenka. Anyway, that’s not the point. He was often referred to as one of the best players on the older games with people often teaming him up with Tsigalko to produce a free scoring strike force.

Nikiforenka, like Tsigalko is a Belarusian player and they have had similar careers in reality. Although Nikiforenka isn’t quite as widely travelled in terms of whom he has played for. In fact he has only ever played for two clubs; FC Shakhtyor Soligorsk and FC Dinamo 93 Minsk. Both are Belarusian teams and it was with his hometown team Soligorsk that he began his career and it seems he will probably end it there as well.

His first spell with Soligorsk was short, only a year and he was a young player at the time. He only played twice and didn’t open his scoring account for them. 1997 saw him spend a season at FC Dinamo 93 Minsk but once again never quite got going managing only one goal in 14 appearances. However, a year later he returned to Soligorsk and has been there ever since. I was going to say and the rest is history but that would suggest he has an unrivalled scoring record there and is one of the greatest players ever. That’s probably a bit too harsh on the Belarusian striker; he has scored 87 goals in his 12 years there (over 291 games). It’s not awful, I’ve certainly seen worse scoring records but not a patch on his Championship Manager exploits.

 Maxim Tsigalko

Tsigalko is a name you would expect to see in this list as he is one of the legends of the series. On his Wikipedia page it even mentions how he achieved some degree of fame in the UK due to his ability (sadly for Maxim it was only virtual ability). Ok, first thing is first; his name is not spelt Maxim Tsigalko, although it is probably pronounced like that (if someone who speaks Belarusian reads this, please enlighten me). His name is in fact Maksim Tsyhalka.

In real life, he had a humble and quiet career in Belarus. It was a career which unfortunately came to an end when he had to retire at the age of 26 due to persistent injuries. Maksim’s career started at Dinamo Minsk where he moved up through the youth team and eventually played for the first team. In his 5 years at Minsk he played only 53 times but had a relatively good scoring record of roughly 1 in every 2 games. It was during his time at Dinamo Minsk that he managed to break into the Belarusian national team. He only managed to get earn 2 caps for his country and scored one goal.

In 2006 he moved from Dinamo Minsk to another Belarusian club; Naftan Novopolotsk. His two years at Novopolotsk weren’t particularly impressive (only 3 goals in 24 appearances) and his one and only season for Kazakhstani club Kaisar Kyzylorda was a similar story (7 goals in 21 appearances).

The early part of the 2008 season saw Tsyhalka play for two clubs. The first was Benants Yerevan in Armenia; for whom he played just four times although he did score twice during this very brief spell. After leaving the Benants and the Armenian league, he soon found another club in Belarus; FC Savit Mogilev. Tsyhalka played 8 times and scored twice before the club had to release him due to financial problems which ultimately saw the club fold.

Kennedy Bakircioğlü

 

One of my personal favourites from the old games is the great Kennedy Bakircioğlü. The first thing you will notice about him is the Ajax shirt he is wearing, which pleased me greatly after having no clue where he ended up after he had been an integral part of my world beating team. The fact that he has played for Ajax probably means I shouldn’t feature him in this list but I am doing so for two reasons. Firstly, he was never near as good as he was in the game, and at 30 he probably never will be. The second reason for including him is purely just because he vastly improved my early teenage years by his virtual ability. Yes that is down to the people at Sports Interactive but I would like to think that if only I had been his manager he would have gone on to greater things!

Between 1996 and 2005 King Kennedy played for 3 clubs; scoring 52 goals in 185 games from his attacking midfield role. He spent the majority of those years at Hammarby in Sweden; the country with which he would go on to win 14 caps for. His family moved to Sweden from their native Turkey in 1972.

In 2005, after a move to FC Twente he became well known in Dutch football after scoring 23 in 66 games. His fine form earned him a move to Ajax, a team which he played for until last year. At the end of his first season with Ajax, then manager Marco Van Basten declared him surplus to requirements but Bakircioğlü remained with the club until last season despite only making a handful of appearances.

He is currently plying his trade in La Liga with Racing Santander and thus far has played 21 times and scoring once. Santander are sitting in 14^th in La Liga at the moment but only 4 points above the relegation zone. If anyone can turn that around it’s King Kennedy.

Julius Aghahowa

 

If you follow your football (real and/or virtual), you have probably heard of him due to his spells at Wigan Athletic or Shakhtar Donetsk. Out of all the players in this “Where are they know?” article he is undoubtedly one of the most well-known of them all but if you ever had him in your team on the game then you will appreciate that he never quite reached the same level in real life that he did in the games.

The Nigerian striker (if you ask me he’s always been better employed as a winger, but that’s probably why I’m not a real manager) has a certain amount of experience on the world stage as he has featured in the Nigerian team 32 times and has scored 14 goals for the Super Eagles. It was Aghahowa who scored Nigeria’s only goal at the 2002 World Cup, it came against Sweden.

The first two years of his career where split between a year at Bendel Insurance FC in Nigeria and one at Esperance in Tunisia. His performances there obviously didn’t go unnoticed as Shakhtar Donetsk picked him up in 2000. He remained there for seven years and he scored roughly once every three games on average during his time in the Ukraine. The Premiership’s very own Wigan Athletic then picked him up in January 2007. Unfortunately for him, things didn’t really work out in the North West as he failed to score in his 18 months there.

So it was another year and another club for Aghahowa and this time he found himself in Turkey playing for Kayserispor. That makes it sound like he woke up there after a heavy night out at one of Wigan’s many classy nightspots, he didn’t, he moved there in a legitimate transfer. Aghahowa had a slightly better time in Turkey than he did in Lancashire, but still only managed six goals.

In the summer of 2009, he returned to Shakhtar on a free transfer. Surely this time at Shakhtar he will be the world beater he was on Championship Manager, well unfortunately not yet as they have loaned him out to PFC Sevastopol.