The Valencia Match (1)
Four days.
Four days from the Atlético match to arriving in Valencia, snatching a brief rest, running through training, and lining up for the Valencia fixture itself.
The kids had been crushed by the loss to Atlético, but the gloom didn't last. The reason was simple: the program that had premiered over the weekend had exploded into a hit.
Episode one pulled a 7.8% rating. Episode two climbed to 8.3%. Solid numbers. What mattered more, though, was the reaction online.
Eunhye — a member of the hottest girl group in the country — joining as co-host sent idol communities into a frenzy. Go Yunseong's appearance briefly lit up the drama and film boards. And the place that burned hottest of all was the football community.
Posts about the other players started trickling up. Profile write-ups of each of them climbed onto the recommended boards. Among them, one thread stood out above the rest.
(screenshot of Seong Ian's sprint times)
A high school freshman running 50m in 5.81 seconds?
Is this edited again?
The hottest issue by far was my 50-meter time.
Anyone who knows Korean football communities knows how they work. Even the best players get dragged through the mud. And yet the comments under my thread were almost entirely positive.
Probably because I'm still just a prospect.
Prospects get torn apart plenty, too — usually when they get caught doing something that has nothing to do with football. Drinking. Drugs. Smoking. Anything that wrecks the body. And if they never climb to the level people expected of them, the community buries them without mercy.
Lee Seungwoo was the textbook case. In 2015, FourFourTwo ranked him second among players under twenty, right behind Martin Ødegaard. Even after a FIFA ban kept him off the pitch, Barcelona assigned him a personal trainer just to keep his individual work going. He was the best prospect Korea had.
But he never recaptured the form he'd shown before the ban. His level slipped, and he eventually moved to Hellas Verona — freshly promoted to Serie A at the time. From there it was Sint-Truiden in Belgium, a short loan to Portimonense, and finally a return to Suwon FC. He put in some good performances there, sure, but for a kid once called the Korean Messi and named among the next generation of stars, it was a disappointing arc.
Korean fans hung the nickname "Pork Belly" on him. Supposedly because he barely featured and put on weight — but either way, the name stuck. Even later, whenever he had a bad stretch, that nickname came back out to mock him.
With all that in mind, in my previous life I'd tried to keep my image as clean as possible.
But if they broadcast that Ronaldo celebration I did against Atlético…
I shook my head. People would think I was completely unhinged.
"…Maybe going full maniac this time wouldn't be the worst idea, though…"
Different sport, sure, but Conor McGregor had done it — trash-talked his way through opponents while actually being good enough to back it up. His value skyrocketed, and UFC's popularity rose right along with him.
Still, the persona could wait. Right now I needed to focus on the match staring me in the face: Valencia.
Valencia CF. A La Liga club based in the coastal city of Valencia on Spain's eastern shore. They shared a regional rivalry with Levante UD and Villarreal CF, but the club they hated most was Real Madrid. No one had ever pinned down a clean reason why — most people figured it was simple resentment toward a side that had monopolized La Liga for so long.
Valencia CF had a respectable history of their own, even if Real Madrid and FC Barcelona tended to cast them in shadow. Their list of titles had already been covered, so there was no need to rehash it. What mattered was this: we were about to play at their home ground, Estadio Mestalla.
Atlético's Civitas Metropolitano held roughly seventy thousand. Estadio Mestalla seated about fifty thousand — a touch smaller. That didn't tell you everything about a club, though. Their intensity could stand with anyone's. We couldn't feel that heat while filming, of course, but it was a spectacle I wanted to witness for myself someday.
"Alright. Let's go again! We couldn't beat Atlético Madrid — so let's take it out on these guys properly!"
"Okay! Let's go!"
We filed out of the away locker room and made our way up the now-familiar tunnel onto the pitch.
Today's squad looked roughly like this:
FW: Kang Seungwook, Kang Seonghyeon
MF: Seong Ian, Kang Minsang, Lee Wonjun, Jeong Woojun
DF: Seo Jinyoung, Joo Wonwoo, Lee Seungmin, Baek Namgi
GK: Han Seungwoo
A 4-4-2. Attacking midfielder Han Seungwoo was out, and Kang Seonghyeon — Kang Seungwook's backup striker — partnered him up top as a dual forward. Woojun and I could both handle wide midfield roles, so that wasn't an issue.
The real questions were the two central midfielders: Kang Minsang and Lee Wonjun.
Kang Minsang had been handed the all-around playmaker role. Lee Wonjun was assigned as the ball-winning midfielder.
An all-around playmaker — also called a box-to-box midfielder — builds everything on stamina, contributing to both attack and defense. Players who'd thrived in that role included Yaya Touré and Toni Kroos. Kang Minsang had the engine for it, and he already drifted freely between phases of play in a way that helped the side function. The coach had judged him a natural fit for the job.
Lee Wonjun was the problem.
A ball-winning midfielder, like a box-to-box, needs serious stamina — but the role is more than just running. One-on-one marking. The nerve to throw yourself into tackles and physical battles. Anticipation to read where the ball is going. Relentless concentration. Pace. Endless work rate. Miss any of those pieces and you can't do the job.
Lee Wonjun had the stamina, same as Kang Minsang. His natural position was defensive midfield, so the defensive fundamentals a ball-winner needs were already there. What he didn't have was the nerve. Or rather — he hadn't had it since the Atlético Madrid match.
Against Atlético, Wonjun had broken up attacks with hard challenges, pressure, and physical play. Then, in the second half, it happened. He'd thrown himself into a tackle on an Atlético midfielder carrying the ball forward and caught the man's ankle by accident. The player got back up, thankfully, and Wonjun walked away with a yellow. If that player hadn't gotten up — or if it had happened any closer to our own half — it would have been a straight red.
After that, his boldness evaporated. Tackles dropped off. Physical duels dropped off. During the training period the coach had talked with him constantly, and Wonjun had shown gradual improvement — but in the last practice match, he still wasn't performing at his old level.
How he locked his head down for this match would be the single most important factor. If we couldn't win the ball in midfield, opening any kind of attacking channel would be nearly impossible.
We took our positions. Across from us, Valencia revealed their shape.
Valencia CF Mestalla had come out in the back three they'd used all season: a 3-4-3. In defensive phases, the wide midfielders dropped to help, shifting into something closer to a 5-2-3.
Valencia took the first-half kickoff. The striker laid it off to a midfielder, and their front three immediately surged toward our half. The midfielders didn't feed the attackers right away — they knocked the ball between themselves, probing for an opening.
At the same time, our two strikers pressed high, with Woojun and me stepping up just enough to cut off the passing lanes out to their wide midfielders. Eventually the Valencia midfielder on the ball drove forward himself. He beat Kang Minsang — who was a half-step ahead of Wonjun — with real pace, then looked left, shaping to release the ball to his wing-forward.
Thud—!
A dull, heavy impact.
"Aaagh—!!"
A scream. The opposing midfielder crumpled sideways, and underneath him was Lee Wonjun.
Valencia players swarmed. The referee in black stepped in, holding them off, and reached to his waist for a card. The color he pulled out was red.
A sending-off.