10 Football Manager Legends Who Flopped In Real Life
3. Maxim Tsigalko
In the game:
A skillful teenager with a keen eye for goal at Belarus's Dinamo Minsk, Tsigalko could be picked up for less than £1 million in Championship Manager 01/02. Within a few years the young striker would be netting a goal a game.
Twin brother goalkeeper Yuri wasn't half bad either.
In reality:
More properly spelt Maksim Tsyhalka in our alphabet, the young forward was a regular scorer as Minsk won the 2004 Belarusian league title. Persistent injury problems, however, hampered his development beyond that.
After rupturing his knee, Tsyhalka tried brief spells in Kazakhstan and Armenia, but was unable to recover completely. Ultimately, the injury forced him into early retirement when he was still just 26.
While his contemporaries were earning the big bucks playing top level football, Tsyhalka found himself doing construction work for just $5 a day. He has struggled both financially and with the long term effects of the injury that ruined his playing career.
Tsyhalka would later admit to wishing that he had been aware at the time of his Championship Manager fame, suggesting that he could have leveraged some of that iconic status in the virtual world into money in the real one.
His brother Yuri, meanwhile, had a solid but unspectacular goalkeeping career in the Belarusian top division, picking up three caps for the national team along the way. He too, though, never quite hit the heights predicted of him in the game.