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Some players seem destined for the top before they have kicked a ball at senior level. Scouts take them from local clubs, newspapers and television build them up, and a few go on to justify every word. Plenty do not.
Sonny Pike is a good example of the second kind. Hailed as a boy wonder in the 1990s and tipped for the very top, he never made the grade as a professional. With time he was allowed to fade from public view, remembered only by people who watch far too much football.
Some players are not given that privacy. Their potential was written into the database of Championship Manager, and for a generation of fans who spent long evenings indoors building teams in their own image, those names will never fade. They sit in the memory alongside the football stickers of the same era.
Why Championship Manager made legends out of unknowns
The game was created by brothers Paul and Oliver Collyer and first appeared in 1992. It became a phenomenon across the 1990s, with editions such as Championship Manager 2, Championship Manager 97/98 and the much-loved 01/02, before Sports Interactive split from publisher Eidos and carried on under the Football Manager name from 2004.
Its research network was its genius and its curse. Local scouts rated thousands of real players, including teenagers nobody outside their club had seen, and those ratings decided who would dominate the virtual world. Buy the right reserve-team kid and he would win you the league. Many a reputation was built on a spreadsheet. Some were never matched in real life.
Here are a handful of players of promise who could not live up to their virtual selves, using the in-game position codes of the time.
Tonton Zola Moukoko and Ibrahima Bakayoko
First comes Tonton Zola Moukoko (AM/F C), available for a few hundred thousand pounds from Derby County's reserves. Derby never seemed keen to play him, which only made him cheaper. In the game he scored goals the way the rest of the population breathes.
Moukoko was the undisputed king, a cross between Elvis, James Bond and Tony Montana: ruthless, clinical and impossible to dislodge, even with far more famous names on the transfer list.
His real career was a different story. A wish to study while at Derby caused friction with the management, a personal tragedy and a spell away from football followed, and by 2011 he was playing for Atlantis FC in Finland. The affection of those who spent late nights turning him into a virtual giant never went away, and a fan group was set up in his honour, which can be found here.
Next, Ibrahima Bakayoko (AM/F C). The Ivorian was not cheap in the game at around £10m, but in the 97/98 edition he scored at a rate that seemed unfair. Wherever he was played, deep in central midfield, on the wing, behind the striker or up front, the goals simply kept coming. Countless save files had Bakayoko carrying unlikely sides, Doncaster Rovers included, to European finals.
In reality he was not so prolific. When Everton paid £4.5m for him, a number of pundits declared he would take to English football straight away, apparently on the strength of his reputation rather than having seen him play. He managed four goals in 24 games and earned a cruel nickname. His career carried on in France and Greece, and in 2011 he was playing for newly promoted PAS Giannina.
Cherno Samba, the schoolboy goal machine
Then there is Cherno Samba (S C). At 13, the Millwall youngster was attracting interest from Liverpool and Manchester United after scoring 132 goals in 32 games at schoolboy level. The game's researchers noticed too, and turned him into a monster of a striker who made the Brazilian Ronaldo at his peak look ordinary.
The fairy tale fizzled out. Samba never got close to the top. His highest level in England was a spell at Plymouth Argyle, and by 2011 he had made only 27 appearances since turning professional in 2002, scoring once. He moved on to Greece with Panetolikos, a long way from the Champions League finals he won on so many virtual screens.
It is easy to laugh, but the story says more about the hype machine around young players than about Samba. A 13-year-old scoring four goals a game against other 13-year-olds proves very little, yet the expectations were set in stone, literally coded into a game played by millions.
Svindal Larsen and the developers who picked themselves
Tommy Svindal Larsen (M LC) was a different kind of cult hero. The Norwegian cost around £250,000 from Stabæk in the game, and the low price did not reflect what you got. He dominated matches on the left or in the middle and chipped in with goals as well.
In real life he stayed in the bargain bin of European football. He won 24 caps for Norway but never made a big mark abroad; a four-year spell at 1. FC Nürnberg passed quietly before he returned home to Odd Grenland.
Finally, the people who wrote themselves into the game. Mark Collis and Ferrah Orosco (AM C and D RC) appeared in the 93/94 edition, and unsurprisingly they were superb. Who would not do the same, given the chance to live life as an all-conquering hero in a virtual world?
The best of them was Tó Madeira, one of the game's Portuguese researchers, who turned himself from a keen watcher of football into a lethal striker. Strikers like that are why so many fans still test themselves on the transfer histories of real players and why old football games such as International Superstar Soccer 64 still have devoted followings. Madeira never kicked a ball in a professional league, yet he scored more goals than most of the players in this list.