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!

Looking forward at your attempt on him
The Cup final is with greek commentary unfortunately but maybe Fanis can help you out there. Btw, watching the last video, I'm still impressed how good Domazos was - although he was already 36 years old and certainly past his prime back then.

Thanks a lot! I'll have a go at Bajevic then but I'll leave the set for his peak years to anyone more knowledgeable than me.

No problem mate, looking forward to the set and some others from that generation as well. I guess Mavros is in your plans already but maybe you can also try to work out something for their partner in attack, Cyprus legend Tasos Konstantinou.
Btw, don't know what other AEK players you're planning to do create but I found this channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/@AEK-LIVE
Incredible collection of match reports, season compilations (starting from the 1984-85 season) and a lot of full games as well. Probably also interesting for Fanis

Mavros will come soon, I've already seen him at Euro 1980 and although he didn't score he was clearly a threat to the defence. He seemed like a kind of technical penalty box player (like Aguero for example). I have Cyprus in my OF so I might as well see if I can figure out something for Tasos while I'm already researching AEK. I could probably make Giorgos Savvidis too since I've got a few more 90s games to watch for Manolas (who was a great defender, but I think I've already seen him receive 4 or 5 red cards in about 10 games). Thankfully there are lots of games on Footballia for the early 90s but that YouTube channel should be useful for the early 80s and late 70s which don't have any games on Footballia and was one of the best eras for AEK. At one point they had Papaioannou, Mavros, Bajevic and Domazos all at the same time with Puskas as coach. The problem still remains that there is very little footage of anything before 1970, so it seems impossible for me to make those players apart from maybe Nestoridis.