It is one of the most shared Football Manager stories ever. Shame that, apparently, it is not true.
The version that went around the world
In November 2016, German Lutz Pfannenstiel, head of scouting at Hoffenheim, gave an interview to talkSPORT. Soon after, the English press reported that he had found a young Roberto Firmino in Football Manager. The story had everything: a scout, a computer game and an unknown Brazilian kid who would end up at Liverpool.
Firmino had swapped Figueirense, of Brazil’s Série B, for Hoffenheim at the end of 2010. In 2015 he was sold to Liverpool for around £29 million. It seemed like the perfect proof that FM works.
The denial
But Pfannenstiel himself denied it. In a piece published by Hoffenheim titled “Roberto Firmino – a fairytale from Absurdistan”, he insisted he had not said a single word about the game during the interview, that he had never played it and, to be honest, did not even know it existed.
His version is much more ordinary. Firmino was recommended to them by the ROGON agency, which had already brought other players to the club. And Pfannenstiel, who also played in Santa Catarina, had already seen him play as a kid. He just did not know his name.
So why is it still told?
Because we want it to be true. We have all discovered a wonderkid in FM who then exploded in real life, and that makes us feel like scouts. The Firmino story fit that fantasy perfectly.
But for the record, so we are not the ones spreading the myth: Firmino was discovered the old-fashioned way.
Sources: TSG Hoffenheim (November 2016) · Empire of the Kop (11/19/2016)
