Everyone’s making the same joke about Thierry Henry joining Belgium as assistant manager

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Tom Victor

Everyone’s making the same joke about Thierry Henry joining Belgium as assistant manager

If you’re as obsessive about football and gaming as most of us here in the JOE office, you’ve probably spent a long time on one save of Football Manager.

You know the type. You started out in 2003 and suddenly the game is in the 2020s and your star striker has long since retired and gone into coaching.

Sure, people might say the game’s unrealistic, but when it comes to unlikely players moving over to the management side of things it can be closer to real life than we’d care to admit.

Case in point: Belgium have appointed Thierry Henry as Roberto Martinez’s assistant manager. If you think it’s weird, it kinda is. Not ‘Hernan Crespo managing Chesterfield’ weird (seriously, it happened on one of our saves), but it’s close.

It’s the sort of thing you’d come across in – oh, we don’t know – a certain football management simulation game, perhaps.

What’s that, you noticed too?

Thierry Henry as Roberto Martinez's assistant with the Belgium national team. Football Manager is very much real.

— FraserClarke (@Fraser_Clarke) August 26, 2016

wtf? Roberto Martinez with Thierry Henry as his assistant for Belgium😵 this makes Football Manager look more real

— Sam (@psalms_black) August 26, 2016

Henry assistant manager to Roberto Martinez at Belgium sounds like something from football manager!

— Jack Toohey (@JackToohey94) August 26, 2016

Thierry Henry as assistant to Roberto Martinez at Belgium is like something that would happen on Football Manager.

— Ian Walsh (@walsh_i) August 26, 2016

Thierry Henry is the assistant to Roberto Martinez with the Belgium national team. Football Manager has become real life.

— Matt Cotton (@FindingCotton) August 26, 2016

It’s a joke that works the same in many different languages.

Thierry Henry assistent for Martinez, som leder Belgias landslag. Det er noe Football Manager-aktig over dette.

— Eivind Ho (@eivindho) August 26, 2016

https://twitter.com/HeberPrincipe/status/769119308119179264

Mostly English, though.

https://twitter.com/dputtock1986/status/769118896674762752

It makes a change from those folk who always use their own Football Manager CV in job applications, and we’re tempted to say the Belgian FA’s decision is a sly dig at that lad from your uni lectures who decided ‘this’ll be really funny’.

We wonder if this will cheer up Romelu Lukaku, who didn’t seem too pleased at the appointment of Martinez a few weeks back.