Picture the scene: We’re recording a podcast from the Sports Interactive studio in Stratford, which for a Football Manager player feels like a footballer playing at Wembley (insert other iconic Stadiums should you not be English), and we’re having a chat with Ant Farley, Producer for the Design Team at Sports Interactive, when we ask him to nominate a player to be nominated for the 5 Star Potential Wonderkid Hall of Fame, his reply was meet by gasps, superlatives and the sudden realisation that as a group of Football Manager nerds we had never discussed him making the grade. That player was Javier Saviola.
His rise to stardom begins at River Plate where he made his debut at 16 and quickly became a prolific goalscorer alongside players such as Ariel Ortega, Juan Pablo Angel and Pablo Aimar. In 2001 he made the move to a struggling Barcelona – if you class 4th in La Liga as struggling – where he scored 21 goals in his first season playing alongside Patrick Kluivert in a classic big man-little man partnership. His first 3 seasons at Barcelona saw him return 44 goals but it wasn’t nearly enough for Barcelona to build a team around him.
Subsequent loans to Monaco and Sevilla proved unsuccessful with neither team making a move permanent but it was in his final year with Barcelona where he decided to make the move to rivals Real Madrid. Did they need him? Probably not when they had attacking depth in the shape of Ruud van Nistelrooy, Raul, Gonzalo Higuain, Robinho & Arjen Robben but in true rivalry fashion it was better to have him under contract in Madrid than remain a threat at Barcelona.
Over the course of two seasons he played a bit-part role but did finally get his hands on a La Liga trophy, something that evaded him while at Barcelona. He then moved to Benfica in 2009 for regular game time where he got back amongst the goals scoring around 1 goal in every 3 games. He followed his time in Benfica with short spells at Malaga, back when Manuel Pellegrini & Al Thani started building that wonderful side, Olympiacos & Verona before bowing out where it all began at River Plate.
With that IRL stuff out of the way, let’s go back to the days of barrows and farrows and Championship Manager 99/00. A 17 year old Javier Saviola was the talk of the message boards and you can see why when you look at his attributes;
Acceleration – 20 Pace – 20 Agility – 20 Stamina – 20 Determination – 20 Technique – 20 Flair – 19
And that’s without listing all the 17’s he had as well…. Aged just 17! Imagine a player like that in FM22, he’d have more YouTube experiment videos than Whizz Kid Science!
There’s probably not a Football Manager player that’s older than 28 that doesn’t have a story to tell about Javier Saviola and that includes myself, aside from signing him as often as I could back in the early days, I signed him in FM17 (in the very early days of the podcast in fact) during a network save where I was managing River Plate, I bought him back to the club to play upfront with Radamel Falcao for the princely sum of just £35.
So when it comes to inducting a wonderkid into the podcast Hall of Fame we judge them on certain criteria:
Wonderkidness – how much of a wonderkid they truly were across one or more versions of the game
Usage – How we each rate our experiences of using and/or encountering each wonderkid in-game
Real Life – How their real-life career transpired in comparison to their in-game wonderkid status.
I can’t see how or why my fellow co-hosts would fail to induct him, but we do have Dave ‘I wasn’t even born’ Azzopardi on the panel so I wouldn’t put it past them.
Javier Pedro Saviola Fernandez, you’re a Hall of Famer in my eyes.