The mists of time can be a powerful if confusing prism that warp our memories. Drifting through them offers a measure of comfort that we all recognise and cherish, but also relegates precise details to the periphery of relevance. What was real, and what was not? More to the point – what actually mattered?
Slipping the green disc into the CD drive mattered, as it meant a few hours of pure escapism was about to begin. Championship Manager is a franchise that has captivated millions; for this writer it was the 1996/97 Italian season – in those days, it was one entire CD just to load a single league – that inspired endless rabbit holes of digital wonderment. AC Milan was the poison of choice, but the venom itself was a mystical, deadly Frenchman by the name of Jérôme Capron.
Capron was the focal point of an attack so lethal it felt almost unfair on the artificial opponents. This was a side that included World Player of the Year George Weah, fresh from his insane pitch-length dance through the entire Verona side to score one of the most iconic solo goals of the 1990s, but my first signing was even more prolific. I know this because of my frankly pathetic passion for recording every single detail of every match by hand; what I don’t know for certain is whether Capron ever actually existed.
For a start, those hand-written records are thousands of miles away gathering dust in a green plastic toy treasure chest, so I can’t consult them to find clues as to which club I signed him from, what his date of birth was, or how many goals he’d scored by the summer of 96’. I am at an age where relying on pure brainpower to recall information is becoming a struggle, so vague intuition is the best I can manage on that front.
Maybe that was the allure of those halcyon days of computing. Some innate sense it was not going to be categorically recorded forever, despite the painstaking effort of pen on paper, made it all more personal, knowing nobody else would ever be able to have precisely the same experience.
Modern life leaves one obvious method to find an answer: the internet. Surely a simple Google search would reveal the secrets that were once my most vivid realities? This is where the doubts started creeping in though. The first blast returned searches involving someone involved in pigeons, another in antique wooden tables, and a professional cyclist.
In a time when we expect instant information gratification at our fingertips, it is mightily disheartening to find the possibility a cherished childhood memory may have been based purely on a figment of an admittedly overactive imagination. Imagine the surge of adrenalin, then, when a search result about five pages in showed not just a direct match on his name, but also an apparent background in football.
Jérôme Capron is apparently the vice-president of some kind of sporting association in the French village of Margny-lès-Compiègne about 30 kilometres north of Paris. His profile picture showed a tinge of grey, which could plausible fit the timeframe for the erstwhile AC Milan legend’s age. There was even an email address…
Meanwhile, I had asked around my best contacts, and a former editor of mine who now works at Transfermarkt simply replied: “If we don’t have him on our database, he doesn’t exist.” Of course I had tried that, and the only Capron the go-to treasure trove of football statistics returned was an Eddy Capron. The Martinique-born 52-year-old had apparently played for Ligue Un sides Nantes and Stade Rennais through the 1990s, would have been in his prime when my version of Championship Manager began, and most importantly was definitely real.
One problem – he’d only scored seven goals in his entire career. I mean he was a centre-back after all, so the chances of Championship Manager simply having entered him in their database with the wrong name was very slim. The far more likely scenario, which I was loathe to admit to myself, was that Jérôme was simply Eddy’s regen brother. For those of you uninitiated in the wondrous world of Championship Manager, regen is short for regenerated player; a quirk of the game to create virtual copies of actual players, often with similar names, but invariably with mystical, artificially superhuman powers.
With renewed vigour I shot off an email to who I desperately hoped was the man in question, trying desperately to fight away the nagging doubts of logic and reason. A few weeks later, some poor French administrator still had not replied to what was surely one of the more unusual emails he’d received, and I had to resign myself to the sad realisation that my virtual boyhood hero was just that; a figment of my imagination.
All this short tale shows you is that I perhaps led an incredibly limited and worryingly deluded childhood. Read between the lines, however, and you’ll discover the real message; given the choice between cold, hard reality and the warm embrace of intensely personal memories, it’s clear what we’d all choose. Isn’t it?
Heart of Football 
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