Name: Pavlos Papaioannou



Country: Greece (born in Brazil)
Club: AEK Athens
Position: *DMF, CMF, SB
Side: RF/BS
Age: 30-34 years (19/3/1959)

Height: 173(?) cm
Weight: 70(?) kg

Attack: 65
Defence: 79
Balance: 79
Stamina: 85
Top Speed: 75
Acceleration: 73
Response: 81
Agility: 76
Dribble Accuracy: 74
Dribble Speed: 70
Short Pass Accuracy: 73
Short Pass Speed: 76
Long Pass Accuracy: 79
Long Pass Speed: 79
Shot Accuracy: 63
Shot Power: 80
Shot Technique: 62
Free Kick Accuracy: 64
Curling: 64
Header: 73
Jump: 71
Technique: 76
Aggression: 66
Mentality: 80
Goalkeeper Skills: 50
Team Work: 76

Injury Tolerance: B
Condition/Fitness: 6
Weak Foot Accuracy: 5
Weak Foot Frequency: 5
Consistency: 7
Growth type: Late Peak

CARDS:
P06 - Pinpoint Pass
S09 - Covering

SPECIAL ABILITIES: Covering

Attack/Defence Awareness Card: Defence Minded

INFO:

Pavlos Papaioannou is a former Greek-Brazilian footballer, considered a legend of AEK for his 10 years with the club. Most famously, he scored the winning goal in a 1-0 victory over Real Madrid, which is maybe the biggest result in the club's history. Born in Brazil to a Greek father and a Brazilian mother, he started his career as a right back but later became more of a defensive midfielder, although he still often played as a defender on both sides. He was a good "soldier", tenacious, versatile and hard working, with good defensive awareness and tackling, although he was quite slow and technically limited. He was very defensively focused, barely leaving his own half. When playing as a full back he would come into the middle to receive the ball and support the midfield instead of overlapping, and when he played in midfield he would drift out to the side and cover the full back positions while his teammates went forward. As such, he only scored 7 goals in his 300 games for AEK, with 3 of those coming in his last season. His short passing was inconsistent but he could make some nice long passes forward and he often tried that when he had the ball. His last two seasons were probably his most successful as AEK won the title in both years, with Papaioannou forming a very strong midfield with Refik Šabanadžović, Toni Savevski and Giorgos Savvidis, undoubtedly one of the best teams in AEK's history. He chose to play for the country of his father and won 10 caps for the Greek national team.

Excellent Stuart, it's a pleasure watching your work on a Greek team so far I'll try to give some more insight [if needed] in due course. Of course you shall tell your thoughts about the all-star team at some point. About Pavlos: he had indeed excellent physicality & his teammates dubbed him "slave" because he did all the dirty work and he wouldn't complain.

Any suggestions are appreciated. I'm only rating based on what I see in the games and in the very few articles I can find. Nikolaou and Ravousis for example only had 1 game available (the Germany game at Euro 1980) and very little written about them that I could find so maybe there are things that I missed. Kefalidis and Sofianidis were impossible for me to make with the tiny amount of information available, probably need a specialty book on AEK's history for that, and of course I can't read Greek anyway. Same with the legendary 30s trio of Tzanetis, Magiras and Maropoulos.

By the way, it's a shame there's no games of Bajević in his AEK era as that would be interesting to see.

I've found newspapers archive being sold online. Hopefully soon I can buy it [although expensive], find some time to do my research and then start posting.

Send me that link, I also want to buy it!