There's a unique, and totally unwarranted, sense of pride in seeing a player that you managed on Football Manager go on to achieve something and become a well known player in real life. For example, I smile every time Swansea City's Gylfi Sigurdsson scores in the Premier League, with him having been the catalyst behind my journey into European football with Reading back in Football Manager 2009 when he broke into my team as a 17 year old that I had never heard of before.
However, there is also an opposite reaction, and this occurs when a player you had written off as a journeyman in the game goes on to become a star out in 'the real world'. It's tough to describe, almost a skepticism, which is again totally unwarranted, but these are the blurred lines of reality that effect hardcore Football Manager players as a game that gets so much right, can often get things very wrong.
Miles Jacobsen, director of Sports Interactive, knows and admits that this is a regular occurrence, and in a recent interview with The Mirror he spoke of a personal meeting with Harry Kane at last year's London Football Awards, where he personally apologised to the Totttenham Hotspur striker for not having done him justice in the series.
We did always have him as all right but I have personally said sorry to him because there was a long period where he was on loan at other clubs and we didn't think he was going to reach the heights that he has done.
I met him at the London Football Awards and he is known for playing a lot of computer games and I said 'we get 0.5 percent wrong, you were one that we got wrong', and he said to me one of the reasons he was trying so hard was to make sure his stats were better in the game.
He's been a revelation for a lot of people and was just a late bloomer and was probably suited better to playing Premier League football than Championship football which is rare and usually the other way.
So that means that even the scouts who are paid to evaluate the potential of footballers all over the world looked at Kane's spells with Norwich and Leicester and thought he wouldn't become the player he is today.
It's reassuring for those of us who watched Manucho scoring screamers at the African Cup of Nations and thought Manchester United had pulled off a masterstroke in the transfer market.
Just me? Ok then..
Jacobson was also asked to pinpoint which young talents stand out to him as must-buy players in this year's game, to which he suggested that Italian teenage goalkeeper Simone Scuffet, and reported Arsenal target Breel Embolo, were the men to build your team around.
Of course, Balls.ie readers should have Embolo on their radar already as he showed promise for 'Cavan FC' in our brief fantasy experiment conducted late in 2015.
