Having gotten everything that needed saying out of the way, it is time to finally get to work on building this massive project to life. As I said beforehand, every aspect of the database has to be created from scratch, except for a couple of teams comprised of not just the greatest footballers of all time but also the best of the modern sport. So, where to start, considering the countless historical personalities the world has seen, spanning thousands of years and who are/were impactful on so many different areas of life? When in doubt, one should start from the beginning, naturally.
But what was really the beginning of world history, from a human point of view? Adam and Eve? The Semitic God before them, creator of all things? Izanagi and Izanami? Gaia creating Uranus? Ahura Mazda? The opinions, of course, differ. I decided to go with a safe, secular, though surprising and interesting choice: I am going with the theory of evolution, not because I believe it is superior to the others – in fact, compared to most creation myths around the globe, it is frankly really boring and uninspired – but first and foremost because it will provide me with a juicy, unorthodox (…even more so…) inaugural collection of teams. This is why the first team on ΖΩΗ is the oldest football side of this database, having appeared first on the scene a good four million years ago: which still doesn’t mean that its players used all that time to get any better in this sporting craft…say hello to the Australopithecus.
Shocking, outlandish…and you are reading that which is merely the first episode of this editing series…! Recreating our primitive ancestors is going to be an interesting challenge – the first of many -, not just from a visual point of view of course but mostly because I will represent them as football players with somewhat impressive physical attributes – could you beat an Australopithecus on a mano-a-mano? I know I couldn’t…- yet with little footballing skill, as a consequence of, for example, the fact that the Australopithecus has been revealed to have less than 35% of a modern human’s brain capacity: should he be able to find his way to the stadium, get dressed and enter the pitch shall be considered a tremendous victory in itself. Such a team will produce a unique virtual football experience, for I imagine they will, despite their lack of skill, be very hard to beat because of their above-average strength and speed; on the other hand, carrying these guys to worldwide glory on a Master League sounds incredible – and quite the journey it should be, considering they are certainly going to be one of the weakest teams in this database. Imagine reading that the Australopithecus had beaten the Roman Empire on the final of the WEFA Cup. You would never sleep again, would you?
Fortunately for me, there seems to have been recorded quite a lot of subspecies, meaning I can field in a proper stacked roster of different Australopithecus, whose main star will inevitably have to be AL-288-1, best known as Lucy, the most famous Australopithecus of all time. Feminists rejoice as the inaugural team of ΖΩΗ is captained by a female, after tirelessly fighting for decades for equal rights for Australopithecus, in a world of football classically dominated by males for millions of years. It took long but they reached their objective. ΖΩΗ is so feminist that Lucy will have slightly better (which is still absolutely awful) technical attributes than her male counterparts, vindicating the classic women’s rights’ motto which states that, while males had 35% less brain capacity than modern humans, female Australopithecus had just 34,5%, and are therefore, superior. Modern science hasn’t confirmed such idea yet, but those who have been wowed after seeing Lucy’s marvelous very mediocre left foot need no scientific confirmation of any kind. You go, girl.
Additionally, naturally, the subsequent species will also feature: they are the Homo Habilis, the Homo Erectus and the Neanderthals. While all of these four groups of “ancestors” will have the same footballing “profile” – physically competent but technically awful -, the Homo Habilis team will be a bit more technically proficient than the Australopithecus side, while the Homo Erectus footballers will be better on that regard than the Homo Habilis, and so on, reflecting of course the actual evolution of the species, translated on a football pitch. I personally can’t wait to play a 4-team cup to find out who the dominant primitive species is…
Visually, recreating these guys (and girls…) will be very challenging; but hey, no one said this project was going to be a walk in the park. Anyway, they won’t be there to do fashion photoshoots or runway modelling: they will be there to compete against the most important people in the history of the world for total and utter footballing domination as humanity’s…”grandparents”. Or so they say…?
Libero Magazine 
I thought this was going to be based on Countries, not on literal eras and people. This will be a long project, a year or so probably?
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I have already edited much more than I have revealed: I already have practically all team clubs, almost all of them with full rosters made. But yes, it’s going to be a long journey anyway, because they still need proper likenesses and attributes. Anyway, speaking of countries, National Teams will also exist alongside those “football clubs”, even if some clubs will be countries also (Soviet Union, Ancient Greece, the Portuguese Empire, etc.)
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The thing I was most interested in was that how will you give the players actual faces?
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I will edit them using the ingame editor, so while they won’t be exactly alike, we can get at least something that looks like the real deal.
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