At eight years old, there was no doubt in my mind who the greatest footballer in the world was: Martin Palermo.
Martin Palermo’s Gaming Hero Status
I didn’t know what he looked like, what his skillset was, or why he was particularly effective in a front two. What I did know was that if I paid between £11,000,000 and £13,000,000 for him on Championship Manager 00/01, I possessed a weapon capable of great things.
I would often find myself feeling like the man who phoned TalkSPORT to talk about Mickey Quinn, because like Newcastle’s former number nine, Martin Palermo scored so many goals.
I don’t remember exactly how I came to find him, it was probably a friend or their older brother who signed him first – but I highly doubt they still think back to it. I’m certain they wouldn’t have kept half an eye on his career or celebrated him scoring a World Cup goal ten years later.
Discovering gems and wonderkids has been an essential part of Championship Manager and Football Manager fandom since the very beginning, and everyone has a favourite. Martin Palermo is mine.
Not exactly a hidden gem and, at 26 years old, definitely not a wonderkid, but he played a major part in my love of a computer game that I still play 26 years on. I’ve owned every single edition since the turn of the millennium, the less said about CM4 the better though – the real victim of Eidos and Sports Interactive’s messy divorce.
Who Remembers Championship Manager?
It was a difficult game to explain to people who didn’t play it.
These days, it’s frequently compared to a spreadsheet and has become the subject of countless memes. In the early 2000s, if you were mid-game, you couldn’t save and exit while a match was on.
This caused a few back-and-forths between my mother and me when it was time to shut down on a school night.
Developments over the years have brought positive, futuristic changes, but many purists still won’t bother with the 3D match engine. For some, gameplay peaked with the bird’s-eye-view dots. In Championship Manager 00/01, the game didn’t show you any match action at all.
Instead, it was described via a bar at the top of the screen and, if like me you had the speed set to “Very Fast”, you rarely knew what was happening until the bar started flashing “GOAL” or you were redirected to the tactics screen because a player had been injured or sent off.
Martin Palermo was the name I saw following that goal announcement more than any other. I spent hours building teams around him, watching with glee as he plundered goals.
He was the key, the catalyst during several campaigns, the focal point of my Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United, Barcelona and Real Madrid attacks.
I became obsessed with the mystique behind him, Boca Juniors, and a part of the footballing world I knew nothing about. I wasn’t alive to see Maradona’s handball in 1986 and was too young to be particularly bothered by Diego Simeone’s misdemeanours in 1998.
My knowledge of Argentine football didn’t stretch much further than Gabriel Batistuta, Juan Sebastián Verón and Roberto Ayala, thanks largely to a Stars of World Cup ’98 book that I read cover to cover before bed. The same book also profiled two future Championship Manager 01/02 cult heroes: Taribo West and Ibrahim Ba.
The Lost ‘Wonderkid’ Mystique
Any Championship Manager or Football Manager fan will tell you there’s always a buzz in finding a gem, but football has changed. Global exposure means we’re at risk of losing that feeling.
If an 18-year-old scores in the Peruvian second division, there’ll be clips on social media within an hour. Within two hours, everyone will know who he is, and within three, Chelsea will have signed him and loaned him to Strasbourg.
Back then, we didn’t have that level of access. Championship Manager 00/01 gave us a key to unlock players from all over the world. It introduced us to countless gems, and there’s long been debate about who the game’s greatest export really was.
For me, there’s no debate, but others might suggest a tricky Brazilian winger from Grêmio called Ronaldinho, or a half-Swedish, half-Bosnian 18-year-old forward from Malmö FF named Zlatan Ibrahimović, or perhaps Flamengo’s young striker Adriano.
Seasoned veterans may even remember that if you signed the latter early enough for an English club, he could acquire a British passport and become eligible to represent England internationally. Hopefully, the aforementioned trio went on to have long and successful careers…
Not all Championship Manager cult heroes were so fortunate.
Several failed to live up to their in-game reputations in real life. Cherno Samba, Tonton Zola Moukoko and Belarusian goal machine Maxim Tsigalko never really made the grade.
Perhaps the most famous example is Freddy Adu, the 14-year-old American taken on trial by Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United and hailed as the heir to Pelé’s throne, who ultimately spent his career drifting between clubs across the globe.
Mike Duff racked up over 600 appearances in the English Football League and earned 24 international caps, yet I once watched him captain Real Madrid to a league and European Cup double.
The Dichotomy of Martin Palermo
Martin Palermo sits somewhere between these extremes. On one side of the coin, he’s a genuine legend: Boca Juniors’ all-time top goalscorer, immortalised with a statue alongside Diego Maradona and Juan Román Riquelme, and a World Cup goalscorer to boot.
On the other, he ultimately failed to make his mark in Europe after joining recently promoted Villarreal in January 2001 (thankfully before Championship Manager introduced transfer updates).
After an amazing few seasons for Boca Juniors, there was talk of moves to Napoli or AC Milan, but nothing materialised. His time in Spain was disrupted by injury, most notably a broken leg suffered while celebrating a goal – an incident that ended his season and effectively ruled out any slim hopes of making Argentina’s 2002 World Cup squad.
Disappointing spells at Real Betis and then second division side Alavés followed before he returned to Boca Juniors, where he continued his form from his first spell, finishing with a total of 236 goals across 404 appearances.
That second spell cemented his status as a club legend. At La Bombonera, he won more three league titles, a second Copa Libertadores and two Copa Sudamericana’s before retiring as a hero in 2011. His own managerial career followed, earning him a solid reputation across Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay and, most recently, Brazil. Perhaps this time he decided Europe wasn’t for him.
Little did I know though, while I was bringing El Loco to Europe on my Championship Manager saves, that he already held a Guinness World Record, one that seems unlikely to ever be broken and one that I doubt anyone will hope to break.
Martin Palermo remains the only footballer in history to miss three penalties in the same international match. At Copa América 1999, with the world at his feet, he missed three penalties during a 3–0 group-stage defeat to Colombia.
The incident came to define an international career that promised far more. He retired with nine goals in 15 appearances, spread over eleven years, for Argentina.
Martin Palermo & Argentina: The Last Tango
Redemption arrived at the 2010 World Cup, though, when a surprise call-up from Diego Maradona led to his first and only World Cup goal, slotting home after a shot from Lionel Messi was parried in his direction during a group-stage victory over Greece. That goal was celebrated just as passionately in one Milton Keynes living room as it was in Buenos Aires.
By then, Palermo was an elder statesman, and the match proved to be his final appearance for his country, in a tournament that ended with Argentina’s quarter-final exit.
Playing Championship Manager 00/01 as an eight-year-old still learning the ins and outs of football left a huge impression on me. It introduced me to players like Martin Palermo and clubs like Malmö FF, names I’d never encountered before. If they didn’t appear on Match of the Day or in MATCH Magazine, I probably wasn’t aware of them.
That game was the clincher. I paid no attention to tactics and only made substitutions when players were injured, but it was gripping, it was fun, and it helped spark a love affair with a computer game that’s lasted ever since. Here I am, more than a quarter of a century later, still loading up Football Manager and still searching for the next Martin Palermo.
What’s your best Martin Palermo moment – digital or otherwise?