I'll Be the Korea Football Association President
You never really know where life is going to take you.
The work you've poured yourself into can vanish overnight. Your entire existence can be snuffed out in an instant. And just as easily, a chance encounter can hand you the thing you've always wanted—or plant a goal so enormous it reshapes everything that comes after.
And now, I was about to seize the goal that one of those chance encounters had set in motion.
People staring at me with open suspicion. People looking on with genuine goodwill. And the ones jamming cameras in my face like snipers lining up a shot through a scope. I took them all in, cleared my throat, and began to speak.
"…Candidate number three for President of the Korea Football Association, Han Do-a."
How did I end up deciding to become president of the Korea Football Association? To understand that, you'd have to go back several years.
No—not just several years. Let's start much further back than that.
Everyone dreams of a second shot at life.
I was one of them.
A guy in his twenties who'd graduated from a decent-enough university, only to get blindsided by a forced break in the form of mandatory military service. A guy who scraped by on military savings and whatever pocket money he'd managed to hoard, dabbling in stocks to pass the time. A guy whose only two real joys in life were watching soccer and playing games.
Who could have guessed that one morning I'd wake up as a baby?
And not just any baby…
"What a bee~autiful little princess!"
"Honey, finally… we finally have a daughter…. Do-a, it's Daddy. Daddy…!"
I—a hyper-masculine guy who'd marched through the notoriously brutal Marine Corps with pride (and maybe a touch of swagger)—had, overnight, become an adorable, precious little princess.
That's right. A lovely princess with a distinctly empty space between her legs.
—Pinch!!
"WAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!"
I'd already been miserable. The nurse pinching my butt made it twice as bad. Bidding eternal farewell to a brand-new son I'd never even gotten to use, I could only bawl my eyes out in that nurse's arms.
It didn't take long, though, to understand that the ordeal was exactly what I needed—a trial to be reborn as someone new.
I dozed off, woke up again, and quietly looked around. This was no ordinary hospital room. The place practically radiated the word "opulent." There were so many doctors and nurses hovering over me that I found myself wondering, Does a newborn really need this many people?
The answer hit me almost immediately.
"Oh my~ Is this our granddaughter? You poor thing, you've been through so much…! You've worked so hard…!"
"Yes, Father. It's a granddaughter. An absolutely beautiful granddaughter."
I knew that old man. I'd seen him on the news—not just any news, the financial news. He was the former chairman of the Hanul Group, one of the biggest conglomerates in Korea. And he was calling me his granddaughter?
He also looked younger than I remembered. I'd thought he was around ninety; right now he looked more like he was in his sixties or seventies.
"Dad, is she our little bundle of luck?"
"Her name is Do-a now."
"She's so cute…."
"Can I touch her cheek?"
"Not yet. But you're all going to dote on our youngest, right?"
"Yeees~"
And every one of those still-young faces was familiar, too. The future titans of Korean business. The future chairmen who would one day run the Hanul Group's countless subsidiaries. And they were calling me their baby sister?
That was right. In exchange for my solid, magnificent brand-new son, I had become a cooing, adorable infant. And not just any infant—the youngest child of the Hanul Group.
Apparently my shiny new son had been upgraded to a diamond spoon. At that rate of equivalent exchange, even the alchemists would have to nod and say, "Fair trade." Or not. What were they going to do about it either way? I was a diamond-spoon kid now. An SSS-tier diamond spoon, one of the rarest in all of Korea.
And that wasn't all.
As the chubby, springy baby fat melted from my cheeks and my features began to take shape, I grew into someone people instinctively described as "doll-like." Doll-like was underselling it, honestly. I looked like a princess straight out of a fairy tale. The nickname stuck, too: the Little Princess of the Hanul Group.
What I loved most was that my family expected absolutely nothing from me.
And why would they? My four older brothers were superhuman, every last one of them. World-class universities. Subsidiary after subsidiary built from the ground up as "tests," each one a roaring success. Tangible results brought home to every single family gathering.
Having one pretty, sweet, beloved youngest sibling who literally did nothing was more than fine. And when that youngest was the only daughter—and a late baby at that? Spoiling her rotten was a given.
Or so I thought. Then two things became a problem: studying hard enough to get into a university far better than anyone expected, and taking every bit of allowance I'd received since childhood and dumping it into Bitcoin until, at barely twenty, I was a fifty-billion-won multimillionaire.
More precisely, Grandfather finding out about it became the problem.
"Our Do-a is still a Hanul, after all. Shouldn't you try your hand at running at least one subsidiary?"
"……Excuse me?"
"You got into a fine university, and I never imagined you had this kind of insight. It's high time this old man looked after you properly."
"Um… Grandpa, I'm fine…! I'll just go to college like a normal person and…"
"You can't raise a tiger cub like a house cat, now can you?"
In that instant, my super-easy life difficulty ratcheted up to merely easy.
What I got saddled with was a subsidiary that barely registered on the Hanul Group's balance sheet—frankly, the kind of company you could run into the ground without anyone flinching. Hanul Invest.
A minor investment arm. A non-core affiliate. And they tossed me straight into it.
The silver lining was that it was, at least, an investment company.
On day one of the handover, I wasn't even sure it qualified as a company. For a conglomerate subsidiary, the place was a joke. How did an office have this many empty desks?
My third older brother, who'd come along to help with the transition, put it bluntly:
"Do-a, I'll be straight with you. If this place tanks, nobody will even notice. Do whatever you want."
I laughed it off. I was confident I'd succeed.
Who was Han Do-a, after all? A cheater from the future who knew exactly how things would unfold—a cheating boy… no, a cheating girl. My choices were answers. My hands were golden.
The following spring, I dumped half the company's capital into a firm nobody was looking at. Third Brother tried to stop me.
"Uh, Do-a. This is basically gambling…"
"He's right, Madam Chairman. This is actual gambling."
"It's cheap because so many people think it's a gamble. Max out the position. Oppa, you said yourself that if it tanks, nobody will notice. Leave it to me."
Exactly six months later, against every expectation, that company rewrote the industry's playbook. The name Hanul Invest landed on the front page of every financial section in the country.
After a few more repeats of the same miracle, people started calling me the Midas of Yeouido.
Two years on, there wasn't an empty desk left in that office. The once-sleepy floor thrummed with shouting and urgent conversations, and I sat quietly in the middle of it all, simply doing my work.
Those successes finally bought me back the freedom I'd lost…
"No—hey! Over there! You call that a shot?! What are you doing!!! AAAAAARGH!!!"
…and I could finally enjoy the greatest hobby of both my lives: watching overseas soccer.
In my previous life, nothing had topped settling in for a foreign match. After the reincarnation, I often watched games with my soccer-obsessed grandfather, too.
You might ask what fun there is in watching when you already know the results. Here's the thing—I couldn't tell you why, but the flow of events kept diverging from my past life.
So it was fun. It was thrilling. It was always new.
Several months after people started calling me the Midas Touch of Yeouido, I was in the chairman's office at Hanul Invest.
"Um, Madam Chairman."
"Yeah, Yu-gyeong?"
My precious secretary—and someone I'd known since we were kids—Jeong Yu-gyeong spoke up from beside me.
"Even so, watching a soccer match first thing in the morning is a bit much…"
The big TV in the chairman's office was showing a World Cup match. That's right—the World Cup. The festival of the entire planet.
Yu-gyeong was offering me her earnest counsel, apparently unaware that this was humanity's greatest party. I was pretty sure our employees grinding away outside were sneaking peeks at the game themselves.
"Leave it~ I've already finished everything I needed to do, and more importantly—it's the World Cup."
"Even so, as chairman you should set an example…"
"Ugh, come on."
I fired off a message in the company group chat, no subtlety whatsoever.
"……Madam Chairman."
"Don't people need days like this every now and then? Besides, the World Cup is the world's festival. It'd be a shame to miss it. Work exists so people can live, right? Show a little flexibility~"
"Haaaaa…."
"Hehehe~"
Yu-gyeong clutched her head like it was splitting open. I beamed a victorious smile right back at her.
The match that followed was frustrating, sure, but still pretty damn good. The coach's tactics felt like he was trying to wash away the pain of twelve years ago, and we snatched a win right from the first game.
Maybe that was why I went all in.
Drunk on victory, I completely overlooked what had happened to this World Cup in my past life—and more importantly, what disaster was about to unfold. Maybe I told myself, This timeline could be different!
But then…
"Right there—that ball! If you miss that—! AAAAAAAAH!!! Why the hell do we have to lose?! Why!! Myeong Jae-ho, you worthless son of a—!!!"
Second match: a 1–0 loss.
Still fine. Disappointing, but it was the kind of game everyone had treated as a reverse fixture anyway.
The next match was the real one.
Against the weakest side in the history of Korea's World Cup appearances, we lost without managing a single goal—and with that, failed to advance from the group stage.
"……Yu-gyeong unni."
"Madam Chairman."
"Ah… Ms. Yu-gyeong."
"Yes, Madam Chairman."
"…Did I seriously give our entire staff the morning off so they could watch this garbage?"
"………Yes."
Fortunately, I clung to the last shred of my sanity and didn't pull a stunt like ordering everyone to come in immediately. Instead, I spent the entire day working in a black fury, with only one thought looping through my head: What the hell is wrong with Korean soccer?
On the drive home, I shared the brilliant idea I'd come up with with Yu-gyeong unni, who was behind the wheel.
"Hey, Yu-gyeong unni."
"Yeah, Do-a?"
The workday was over and we were off the clock, so we could talk comfortably. That might have been why I said it.
"……I think I might run for president of the Football Association."
In the rearview mirror, Yu-gyeong unni's face looked more rotten than any expression I'd ever seen on her.
But I was dead serious.
No matter how I turned it over, the problem with Korean soccer was at the top—the Association. The same leadership that had installed a failed coach for the national team on a whim.
So why not fix the Association myself?
I had the money. I had the will. So what was stopping me?
Even in my past life the Football Association had been a mess, and back then I hadn't had the power to do anything about it. Now I did.
Let's do it. President of the Football Association. That was the only real answer to putting Korean soccer back on track.
"I'm really going to do it. President of the Football Association."
"Should we stop by a psychiatrist?"
"I'm perfectly sane, thank you."
That was the last word I got in before enduring Yu-gyeong unni's lecture for the entire rest of the ride.
Even so, my resolve never wavered.
I was going to be the president of the Korea Football Association.