The Worst Player In The World

What’s the first thing you do when you try a newly-acquired sports game for the first time?

Probably, you play a friendly match, you check out the game modes…but I’ve always had this habit of checking each team’s squads on the game’s editor before actually playing the game itself, regardless of whatever sports title I’d be trying out (except CM/Football Manager, I’m not a masochist). It was my thing.

Every once in a while one would stumble upon some kind of quirkiness on a game’s database. I remember a shockingly-low-rated Brian Scalabrine on NBA games, some mexican guy having a 99 overall in a FIFA GameBoy Advance game, and Miguel Miranda on Portugal’s National Team in PES3 – to this day, and despite the fact that I’m Portuguese and a die-hard football fan, I have no idea who that guy is. However, there is one that absolutely overshadows any other, including the above mentioned.

Autumn, 2005. I’ve just bought PES5, and I broke my tradition of checking the rosters first, for a good reason though: was at my mate’s home, trying out a brand-new PES5 on a projector – which I had never used before. After that long gaming session, I got back home and it was finally time for…The Data Check!

As I’m scanning Serie A’s Udinese team – a pretty decent squad they had -, I stumble upon what was probably the worst player in the history of the Pro Evolution series. A team stacked with very competent strikers (including Iaquinta, Di Michele, Di Natale…), all of them having many stats above 75 and 80, has a 32-year-old Libyan guy with by far the most horrendous statsheet I’ve ever seen in a PES game.

Gheddafi on PES5. Truly a wonderkid!

My younger self was astonished. Who was this guy, how did he get the “job”, and what was he doing playing for one of the top-level football clubs in Italy, in one of the top-3 leagues of the world at the time?

This was back when one didn’t have Google in his pocket, ready to immediately satisfy even our most exquisite information needs. And because PES5 was one of the football simulations I’ve spent more time playing – not data checking, actually…playing! -, I’d just forget about this odd man as soon as I switched off my console. I must’ve visualized his game profile 2/3 times in a decade; as I don’t remember ever using Udinese or having faced him on the pitch (it’d be the ultimate sports prank played by the CPU…), naturally my memory of this strange incident grew hazier until it was completely forgotten.

It wasn’t until very recently that I reopened the file on this case. After deciding to go full-retro-gaming mode, I replayed PES5 for the first time since almost a decade, and another Data Check was due. And boom, a wild “Ghedaffi” appears. Fortunately, I only get better with age – true story – so my vastly improved knowledge of the World allowed me to instantly recognize the name of the player, which 2005-me was unable to.

“This guy is related to Muammar Ghedaffi, the now-deceased Libyan dictator!”

Ok, part of the mystery was solved: Muammar Ghedaffi was still alive and in power in 2005, so this is a relative that only got to play for a Serie A team because of some sort of shady deal that probably involves a lot of money.

But I had to know more about it.

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Al-Saadi Qaddafi (or Gheddafi) (or Khadhafi) (or God knows what more translations this guy’s name has) is the third son of Muhammad Qaddafi. Now, imagine yourself as being the undisputed leader of a country; the World country is your oyster, you can do whatever you please as long as it pleases you. You have a son, and he’s a die-hard football fan. What do you do? Obviously, you make a couple of phone calls and by the next day, little Al-Saadi is playing top-level Libyan football.

Here, the legend of Al-Saadi begins to take shape. He quickly reaches Libya’s National Team squad and is made captain of the team; but he doesn’t stop there: he also becomes the president of Libya’s football federation while he was still a footballer. On his club, Qaddafi is captain as well, and is said to have scored more than 150 goals in more than 300 matches. The man was everywhere, and was there all the time.

As expected, football in Libya is said to have been heavily arranged to favor Qaddafi’s team; however I found that on his 12-year spell with Al-Ittihad Club, his team only won the league three times…when not even having the son of a dictator can bring you silverware, there’s surely something profoundly wrong with your sports organization. Still, it gets even more ridiculous: there was a law that forbade announcers to mention any player’s name, except for…Qaddafi, of course! They had to refer to their shirt numbers instead.

But Qaddafi was an ambitious man. He had it all in Libya, but the country was beginning to feel like too small of a pond for a big fish like him. A devoted admired of Italy’s Juventus, he desired to play alongside the likes of Del Piero and Edgar Davids. A (very) small step towards achieving that goal was almost taken in 2000, when Malta’s Birkirkara FC had a deal to bring him in – which would get him the opportunity to play Champions League football. However, the gods decided it was not Qaddafi’s time and the deal was off.

2003. Time for Qaddafi to export his brand and move to Italy. It wasn’t hard for Qaddafi Senior to pull off this move, as the New York Times explains perfectly:

“Of course, links between Libya and Italy go back a long way. Libya was an Italian colony between 1911 and 1947 and Italy’s economic interests there have remained strong since. In particular, Fiat, Italy’s biggest company, has always been interested in Libyan oil, and did a lot of business with Qaddafi. Fiat is the owner of Italy’s oldest and most successful team, and the team with the most fans — Juventus. The Qaddafi family built up considerable holdings in Juventus, obtaining, according to some reports as much as seven percent of shares in the clubs in recent years. In 2002, the Italian Supercup final was played in Tripoli, the currently embattled Libyan capital, thanks to these links.”

New York Times

In the end, it was Perugia who came forward and signed Qaddafi. Perugia is no Juventus, he must’ve thought, but is nevertheless a step closer to achieve his goal. Sandro Gaucci, Perugia’s owner, revealed the reasoning behind the deal with a brutally honest declaration:

“Berlusconi called me up and encouraged me. He told me that having Qaddafi in the team is helping us build a relationship with Libya. If he plays badly, he plays badly. So be it.”

One could say Qaddafi Jr.’s footballing ambition was being used as a way to solidify the political and economical relationships between Italy and Libya, and in doing so, Football’s darker side was being exposed to the light – not many years later it would be exposed fully, when the “Calciocaos” scandal dropped on Italian football like an atomic bomb.

Despite how popular this deal was – Perugia’s manager Serse Cosmi is far from convinced. Even with the chairman’s pressure over his head, Cosmi invented all kinds of excuses to justify why Qaddafi wasn’t part of each and every matchday roster. “The timing isn’t right” or “he isn’t ready yet” were some of those lines, exclusively meant to hide away a crude reality: Qaddafi Jr. was never ever going to make it as a professional footballer on a top league such as the Serie A, he just wasn’t good enough – far from it actually.

The Libyan tried to meet those standards, and probably spend good money in the process. He hired Maradona as an adviser and sprinter Ben Johnson as a personal trainer, but still it wasn’t enough for him to convince his manager to play him. The supreme irony of it all is that he ended up testing positive for doping – just like both of his above mentioned assistants had, back when they were sports athletes…This happened right after he clinched his first-ever presence on the matchday team as a non-playing substitute for Perugia. After 3 months of inactivity due to the doping ban, he finally got to play a competitive football match: he was subbed in on a match against…his beloved Juventus! In the end it would be the only 15 minutes of football he played that season, with no goals or assists to show for. That marked the end of his Perugia stunt, one that left a very negative impression on both the fans and the press.

“Even at twice his current speed he would still be twice as slow as slow itself.”

Newspaper “La Reppublica”

However, Qaddafi was determined to leave his mark on Serie A. Just a year later after leaving Perugia, somehow the Libyan got his second chance on Udinese – undoubtedly a more competitive Italian club which was at the time competing in the Champions League. Also, and perhaps more importantly for Qaddafi, Udinese’s kit is strikingly similar to that of Juventus, even if the latter side is definitely much more relevant for both Italian and European football.

"For the last time Saadi, we are Udinese. Say it with me: U-DI-NE-SE!"

This time around, he played even less: got only 11 minutes of play on an end-of-season match against Cagliari, one that counted for nothing as Udinese couldn’t move up or down the league’s table, regardless of the match’s final result. It’s worth noting that Udinese’s manager was…Cosmi, Qaddafi’s manager on his Perugia days. Farewell to Qaddafi once again, as he left the club after one more disappointing season.

But hey, this was not the end! Sampdoria acquired him to be a part of their 2006-07 roster. Yet, he ended up not playing a single minute of competitive football with the team, before leaving italian football for good.

If his on-pitch impact was a complete and utter disappointment (for him, mostly), off-the-pitch he left a much bigger mark. He often bought expensive cars for his teammates and flew them on his private jets for exquisite and costly dinners and parties. One of those parties was hosted in Monte Carlo, Côte-d’Azur, where the Libyans would formalize a bid for to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The Italian press claimed that said party was just a means for Qaddafi Jr. to finally meet Nicole Kidman, but neither went as he fell sick; as for Kidman, we can only say she wouldn’t resist the charms of this Libyan bad boy, so she probably had to refrain from going or else she’d lose control in Qaddafi’s presence. After all, this was the man who bought an entire floor of the 5-star Brufani Palace, had rooms exclusively for his dogs, and had those dogs sleep on the beds while their instructors had to sleep on the floor. A total catch of a man.

In the end, he failed his goal to play for Juventus, and though he was able to train himself with some of the best football players in Italy, he barely played professional football there. 2007 was the end of his footballing career; as for his life outside of the sport, he would participate in Libya’s Civil War in 2011, helping to defend his father’s regime against the rebels – but the latter side ultimately won and overthrew the regime. Three years later he was captured, and is still said to be serving time in jail nowadays. A tragic footballing career foreshadowed a tragic end for Al-Saadi Qaddafi.

Nevertheless, you’re able to experience his supreme football skills on PES5 (on Udinese’s squad) and PES6 (Sampdoria’s). Rumor says that if you acquire Qaddafi on your Master League save, your PES Points budget skyrockets to 999.999 PES; but if you play him, the game glitches, the PlayStation will make a few funny noises before letting out a bit of smoke and die. A big price to pay to live the Qaddafi experience, but if there’s one thing we know about this man, is that he was never cheap.