If you aren’t familiar with the name Ivica Strok, then you certainly should be.
Regular readers of JOE will know all about the legendary Croatian from an earlier article, but just in case you haven’t seen it, let us give you a brief outline.
Ivica Strok is Celtic’s all-time record goalscorer, a six-time winner of the European Golden Shoe, and the highest ever scorer in international football with his country. The downside to all this is that he’s entirely fictional.
Strok is what’s known as a Football Manager ‘regen’ – one of the players created by the computer game’s engine. Despite this, he has managed to run his own Twitter account, has conducted interviews with real publications, and even (very briefly) had his own Wikipedia page.
But now, there’s an exciting new update on the fictional player. Recently, the first ever Ivica Strok Celtic replica shirt was bought – as proven by the following Tweet.
A VERY special shirt arrived today! @IvicaStrok10 pic.twitter.com/NzaUi5lfOU
— SwiftsureEightFour (@Swiftsure84) August 31, 2015
Complete with Strok’s name and number ten on the back, the shirt was ordered to an address in Australia.
Thanks to the Tweet, Jonny Sharples, the man responsible for the fictional striker’s fame, became aware of the shirt.
“I was quite taken aback when I first saw the shirt,” Jonny told JOE. “Ivica has been a big part of my life for the past year or so but I didn’t expect him to impact on others in quite the same way.”
“I thought maybe Ben [the shirt’s new owner] was a Celtic fan who wanted to mark their shirt a bit differently but when I saw he was from Australia then I was even more impressed.”
Does anybody remember playing this?! 😝😝😝 pic.twitter.com/rZ62kadnS2
— Ivica Strok (@IvicaStrok10) June 17, 2015
With replica shirts bearing Strok’s name now making their way to the other side of the planet, and people even creating FUT cards with his stats on, it’s no great surprise that Jonny tells us that there’s more to come from this brilliant Football Manager story.
“I’d love to put a statue outside Celtic Park, even if it’s only a few inches tall,” he jokes. “Other than that there’s a few projects I’m working on at the moment that I can’t really talk about yet, but all will be revealed by Ivica on his Twitter account soon.”
It’s well worth keeping an eye on Ivica’s Twitter page to see what happens next.
