The Football Manager game is considered to be the best and most detailed management simulation there is in football. Databases of hundreds of thousands of players, upgrades and improvements every year that make the title as close as possible to reality, and a huge community of players who each want to be the greatest manager in the world.
The game that broke the road was the Championship Manager, which came out in 1992 for the first time. In the early 2000s (01/02 season), the version was released that is still considered mythological, and has a fan base that continues, even 19 years later, to play it devoutly.
The goal is, like any coach, to lead your team as far as possible – and to do that you need the best players. One of the biggest stars, and some would say the greatest of all in all versions, first appeared in the 01/02 season – he was called Maxim Ziglko.
He was an 18-year-old Belarusian striker who began his career at Dinamo Minsk. Today (Friday) his country reported that he was dead, when he was only 37. The cause of death was not disclosed, but one of the reports claimed it was a heart attack.
To what extent Ziglko, or Zichelka, his real name and not the distortion that appears in the manager and made him a familiar name to any football fan, was a star in terms of the game can be understood from his inconceivable numbers, with a season of 100 goals certainly a plausible achievement. In fact, fans of the manager have a challenge called Ziglko 1,000, in which they are supposed to publish his career numbers and reach 1,000 goals.
In reality, Tzichelka’s career did not rise much. Although he is considered a great talent, his potential amounted to two appearances for the Belarus national team and a single goal. The team he grew up in led to winning the Cup in 2003 and the local championship in 2004. And that’s about it. In 2010 he was forced to hang up his shoes, when he was only 26, following a string of injuries from which he was unable to recover.
At Dinamo Minsk, they said goodbye to him on their Twitter page and wrote: “At the age of 37, Maxim Tzichelka’s heart stopped beating. We will remember you forever.”