brilliant
How Stoke-born Blackburn ace Ben Brereton ended up playing against Lionel Messi for Chile thanks to Football Manager and now stars in South American Pepsi advert
Ben Brereton must still be pinching himself at how things have unfolded over the past few months.
Well, actually, that's Benjamin Anthony Brereton Diaz to you. The Stoke-born attacker, who is on Blackburn's books, made his presence felt at the Copa America earlier this summer.
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Copa America you say? Brereton qualified to represent Chile through his mother, but without the help of a certain computer game his international ambitions may never have been realised.
The 22-year-old received his first call-up in May, but it was on popular simulation series Football Manager that saw him rise to prominence.
Mark Hitch, Blackburn Rovers’ FM21 scout, first spotted Brereton’s Chilean eligibility while glancing over the club’s official matchday programme.
“Every time something gets posted all my mates are likes, ‘This is brilliant! You started this!’”, Hitch told The Blizzard.
“I’ve done [scouting] for Football Manager now for probably about 10 years. Rovers did a feature in the programme called ‘A to Z’.
“Brereton was on it and he said, ‘Technically I’m eligible for Chile. My mother is Chilean.’
“So I was like, ‘That is just bonkers.’ So obviously, I was doing my update for Football Manager. ‘Second nationality: Chilean.’
"I think it was about November time he started getting comments on his Instagram.
"Just Chilean flags, all these random Chilean comments about, ‘You need to play for Chile’ and ‘Brereton for Chile.’
“All these hashtags were starting. And a few of my mates were telling me. I was like, ‘Wow. This can’t actually be how it started?’"
He continued: “I told the assistant FM researcher for Chile” he said. “They told me, ‘We have to get him out there. We have to expose Ben’s [eligibility] on social media.’
“We decided to start a campaign over Twitch on a Friday night. And then everything blew up the next Monday.
“Ben started popping up in several Chilean newspapers. A journalist from TNT had my number and he asked me, ‘Hey, is the story real?’
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“And I told him, ‘Yes, it’s real. Here, we have the interview.’ I sent him the information and then he sent it across social media.”
As they say the rest is history: quite literally.
He impressed sufficiently to receive a call up to Chile's squad for the Copa America, scoring his first-ever international goal in a 1-0 win over Bolivia.
Brereton swept home from 15 yards after being assisted by Eduardo Vargas in the group stage match having made his debut just four days earlier against Argentina, where he faced Lionel Messi.
While La Roja's dream came to an end at the hands of 10-man Brazil at the quarter-finals stage, the Brereton frenzy has most certainly not.
Brereton has now followed in the footsteps of global icons such as Messi and Ronaldinho by starring in a Pepsi advert.
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The 45-second clip shows Brereton leaving the UK to board a flight to Chile, which was unsurprisingly a big hit on social media.
While he doesn't speak Spanish fluently, the Rovers man did dish out a phrase or two during the promotional video, which must be said is marketing gold dust.
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Chile's next fixtures seem them face Brazil and Colombia in a World Cup qualifying double-header.
You get the sense Brereton will be on that plane... one way or another.
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