15-Year-Old Wonderkid Added To Video Game After Dad's Tweeted Permission
The real point of career modes in soccer video games is to snatch up a grip of the world's most hyped youngsters and slowly build a juggernaut. Fans of Football Manager—that impossibly detailed, life-consumingly fun computer game—were dismayed to find Norway's new starlet Martin Ødegaard missing on account of his age. Thanks to this future world of camera phones and Twitter, the problem has now been rectified.
Before we get to how young Ødegaard got into the game, we should touch on why everyone wanted to play as him in the first place. The answer's a short one: he's 15 and he's already amazing.
The attacking midfielder treats grown men like toddlers in his home country's top division, sliding around them almost as if they weren't even there, before poking the ball through the defense to set up a teammate. In not even a full season as a first-team player, he has caught the eye of every big club in Europe. Probably most impressively, Ødegaard has already made two appearance for Norway's senior national team. At 15! That is insane!
Naturally, soccer fans have wanted to harness all this budding talent and channel it into realized greatness for their various clubs of choice, at least in digital form. Hence Football Manager players' disappointment when Ødegaard was omitted for being under 16 years old.
There remained a way, though, to get the Norwegian into the game, and that was if one of the player's parents consent to the move. Luckily for video game players, Erik Midtgarden plays for the Norwegian club Ødegaard's father currently is an assistant coach at and let pops know the deal. Martin's father wrote up a message to Miles Jacobson, the director of the studio that makes Football Manager, okaying his son's inclusion, and Midtgarden tweeted it to him: