Career The New John Charles - Eriq Zavaleta

[danovic78]

So I thought I would give a shorter complete update of my attempt at the John Charles Challenge.

Sadly, I currently do not have the time to give a lengthy career updates but I hope that will change in the future.

Straight on with it then. So I decided to head back to Ajax, where I finished my last big career with Freddy Adu. There was lots of reasons, the league is fun to play in, Ajax have a great youth system and I wanted to try a few of those players out but mainly I felt my chosen player would have the best chance of reaching the target of 385+ goals.

So looking around, it took me while to settle on my chosen player and I headed to Canada to pick up my man - 

Eriq Zavaleta

As you can see, he is not someone pulling up trees but a solid defender with not bad stats for a target man. We just need to improve his shooting! He cost me just £3.5m from Toronto.

I managed to retrain him as a natural striker without too much trouble, he was yellow in the striking position to start with.

How did he get on?

Well, he did very well indeed I think. He started playing as a Poacher is a 4-3-3 but was not quite hitting the numbers that natural strikers got in my tactic so I had to change things up and went to a 4-1-3-1-1 formation that really suited him and for the last three seasons he hit 50+ goals per season. 

He managed to pass the target of 385 and hit 436 goals in just 426 games! A fantastic return for a defender come striker.

I ended the challenge after 9 seasons and he was still looking ok as a 33 year old.

Career Stats

So I managed to build a pretty impressive team with Ajax over the years and win the title each season. We also enjoyed success in Europe with 3 Champions league titles, including one in my very last game!

I also took over at Italy and won the Euro's, International League and Confed Cup, first time I have really stuck at the INT manager as its far from perfect.

My league campaigns also included a couple of unbeaten seasons.

My Golden Boot winners were primarily my inside forwards while I was playing my 4-3-3 with Neres, Gevanuio and Vinciius Junior picking up the awards before all three wanted to move onto somewhere bigger, that's when the Kasier took over, @BatiGoal would be proud as he won the last 4 in a year. No awards at all for Zavaleta.

Thank for reading this short update, I hope to be back with a more detailed career.

[Taff]

Amazing work there @danovic78, great numbers from a CD

[FuddledFox]

Brilliant career at over a goal a game from a CD. Shame he didn't win any awards for all his efforts.

[Nucleus]

Great numbers them @danovic78 congrats  

[danovic78]

3 hours ago, Taff said:

Amazing work there @danovic78, great numbers from a CD

Thanks, he did very well indeed. The dutch league was perfect for him as he found it tough in Europe against better defences.

3 hours ago, Foxy said:

Brilliant career at over a goal a game from a CD. Shame he didn't win any awards for all his efforts.

I know, not even a sniff of a trophy!

51 minutes ago, NucleusNT said:

Great numbers them @danovic78 congrats  

Thanks, was an enjoyable career, shame I didn't have the time to share the full story.

[Woody]

Dude....your making these challenges look like park football. Too easy for you.

Well done mate.