There are legends that never fall into oblivion, no matter how many years pass. Tó Madeira, the famous — and mysterious — star of the game Championship Manager (CM), is certainly one of these examples. The urban legend was rescued by the hands of Luís Franco Bastos, more than a decade after P3 obtained the only interview to date granted by Tó Madeira. The three-episode fictional series launched by the comedian on YouTube brought together thousands of nostalgic users and had the power to resurrect the “cult” that began 25 years ago. Did Tó Madeira see and like the series? What becomes of him now? Armed with an old contact, we tried our luck.
“I found the first episode funny, but then I didn’t like the direction the series took”, admits António Lopes, Tó Madeira’s real name. Disappointed by the fact that the story was highly fictionalized and deviated from the truth of the facts, he says he is, nevertheless, happy and pleasantly surprised by the fact that someone has recovered his feat.
“It surprised me, it’s something with much more visibility than one-off things. I found out from a friend of mine who is part of the series that there had been contact with Desportivo de Gouveia and that it would be Luís Franco Bastos doing it. But no one spoke directly to me”, he says.
How was the story of Tó Madeira born? In 2000, Sports Interactive (SI), the company responsible for CM, a simulation game in which the player assumes the role of coach of a football team, was looking for volunteers to catalog the lower divisions of national football. At that time, the game already had thousands of teams and their players, an impressive database that captivated millions of people.
António Lopes volunteered to profile the players of CD Gouveia, then in the third division. With the help of two friends, he filled out tables with evaluations of dozens of parameters of the players on the squad, a time-consuming process that requires impartiality. In the end, as a reward for the work completed by the three, he added three names to Gouveia’s file: “Tó Madeira” (himself) and those of his two friends. With normal game parameters, they went unnoticed.
Everything would change in CM 2001/02, the next edition of the game. António Lopes was invited by SI to update the data on Gouveia’s squad, but, in the middle of exams for the Civil Engineering degree, the student did not have time to be diligent.
“The solution I found was to put myself, my friends and cousins all in the squad, keeping most of the ages”, he revealed to P3 in 2014. “I exaggerated the characteristics I attributed to each of the players, of course, but I always thought there would be some type of algorithm to check the database”, he confessed in 2014. But that was not the case and the game took on other forms.
The result was Tó Madeira, a super player who combined the speed and strength of Cristiano Ronaldo with the technique and skill of Lionel Messi. He also added to this recipe the ability of David Beckham in dead balls and Mário Jardel in headers. In short: for anyone who wanted to win a championship or a Champions League, having Tó Madeira on the team was halfway to success.
The Peralta brothers, another popular phenomenon in the game, were, in fact, two of António’s cousins who he decided to include in Gouveia, changing their dates of birth: “But my cousins actually ended up playing for Sporting Clube de Portugal.”
An update to the game corrected these superheroes disguised as footballers, ending the participation of Tó Madeira and company on CM’s virtual pitches.
Back to the present, 11 years later, he keeps the story line by line. He even admits to having installed the game again to test Tó Madeira’s prowess. “I reinstalled the game. I’m a Sporting fan and I usually play with Sporting in these games. I can even send a photo, I scored 92 goals in one season. It was my record. At the time I remembered that I scored around 50 or 60 goals per season”, he reiterates. Minutes later, the photograph arrived to prove the feat.
Now the media attention has returned. At the time, several employees of SI, the company that was “deceived” by Tó Madeira, were so impressed by the story that they created an amateur football club named after the player.
At António’s daughter’s school, there are already several students who have heard about the mythical Tó Madeira through their parents, uncles or teachers. In padel, a sport that Tó Madeira practices regularly, the shirt bears the name of the CM character. Opponents and colleagues ask for autographs and photographs when they find out who is in their presence.
The attention that Tó Madeira devoted to the Civil Engineering exams — which led him to invent players and assessments to avoid failing the SI deadline — would end up paying off.
António now has a construction company with two other partners. A peculiar professional path for someone who was, for a few months, the best player in the history of humanity. This without even needing to kick a ball.
