There are as many different career trajectories in soccer as there are individual players. Nonetheless, certain paths share some overarching similarities from which you can fashion several different archetypes. To list just a few: the longtime journeymen who eventually find something like a forever home; the born superstars who appear destined for greatness as youngsters and sure enough go on to achieve it; the players who weren't considered big talents as kids but who explode into stardom out of nowhere.
As a fan following from the outside, each archetypical trajectory offers its own delights, but one of my favorites is the one where a young stud will burst onto the scene and generate tons of hype, only for the hype to die down when the youngster experiences the natural struggles of development, and when all is quiet and the player has been more or less written off as a bust, the player's talent erupts after all, old expectations finally met. Like any good soccer fan/soccer video game enthusiast, I love the bounty of insultingly young hotshots each new season brings, and the idle fun there is in forecasting their potential futures in my mind's eye. At the same time, I hate the fickleness of the hype cycle, which gorges itself on new "surefire, can't-miss, buy-now superstars of tomorrow" every year and makes room for the next group by callously vomiting out yesterday's batch as "uncoachable, injury-prone, mentally weak, don't-love-the-game BUSTS." Hype is a burden even in the best of circumstances, and it sucks when it's followed by an even more cumbersome backlash, especially in the common case where the only thing the player in question has done "wrong" is fail to, like, win the Ballon d'Or by their 20th birthday. Navigating that hype-to-backlash cycle must be hard, so it's great to see someone come out the other side, if not unscathed then hardened, sharpened by the experience.
