This Is Spam
This is spam.
Marco Feltner. Born in Austria in 1993, an Austrian of German descent. At thirty-three years old this year, he was an incredibly young coach.
His playing career had never been particularly distinguished. He had spent time in the third tier of the Bundesliga before earning promotion to the second division, and he hung up his boots at twenty-six.
A knee injury at that age, combined with the hard limits of his talent, led Marco Feltner to walk away from playing and set out on the path of a coach instead.
He earned his coaching license and began the second act of his football life as a coach in the lower leagues…
With systematic statistics, data, and tactics tailored to them, he had managed to lift his team into the upper half of the second division. Even so, they dismissed him on the grounds that his personal imprint was too faint and that he clashed with the head coach’s style.
In the original timeline, he would have been called up the following year as interim manager of a side that had only just been promoted to the German first division. He would have hit it out of the park, secured the permanent job, and later resurrected a fallen German national team—becoming the new hero of German football.
That was exactly why I had to bring him over now.
This time he would not be the hero of German football. He would become the hero of Korean football—Korea’s second coming of Guus Hiddink.
Which brought me to the matter of salary. Naturally, anyone would assume I ought to offer him the highest wage of any manager in the K League. In general, that would be correct. And the truth was, I had that kind of money.
But why should I?
In this timeline, Marco Feltner was still unemployed. Bluntly put, he was just a free agent scraping by on whatever he had earned as a player.
Did a free agent who was not yet a master coach deserve more than a billion won—the top tier of K League salaries? No. There was no reason for that. A Saudi-league-level offer was even more out of the question.
So the salary I would offer was five hundred million won, mid-to-upper K League level. On top of that I would set performance bonuses separately and allocate a generous welfare package. And of course I would hand Marco Feltner complete authority over the team.
Marco Feltner had taken a German national side that could not produce results even with a squad of stars and restored it completely. If he were simply given full control, he would devour not only the K League but the Asian Champions League far more easily than anyone could imagine.
I took my proposal and went to Yu-gyeong.
“Yu-gyeong.”
“Yes, Chairman.”
“This is my proposal. Send it to Marco Feltner’s email right now. Check when he opens it, and if he replies, tell me immediately.”
“…Understood.”
And so, on the very day I acquired Seongjin Hanul FC and fired the manager, I finished everything I needed to do.
Now all that remained was for Marco Feltner to give a favorable answer. We would hold a purely formal interview, complete the appointment process at once, and move straight into the team rebuild.
If things simply proceeded like this, we could just barely wrap everything up within the break.
But as always—as it always is—life refused to flow the way I wanted.
Marco Feltner opened the email itself within a day. So what, exactly, was the problem?
“He didn’t reply?”
“Yeah. No reply.”
Marco Feltner, that man, had simply not answered at all.
“Unnie Yu-gyeong, how am I supposed to read this? It’s not as if he’s snubbing Hanul…”
Yu-gyeong looked at me and gave an answer so simple it almost startled me.
What was it?
“He probably thought it was spam. A prank email.”
“…Come on, no way.”
“If it were me, I’d think it was a joke. I only found this out while researching him, but even with decent results in the Bundesliga second division, that kind of salary isn’t easy to come by. And he was only a coach, right?”
Still, there was a difference in scale between the Bundesliga and the K League. Five hundred million won in Korean currency was a figure that sat at a reasonably unburdensome level, wasn’t it? And the sponsor was Hanul, of all companies.
“Do-a. If someone emailed me offering nearly three times what I was making and telling me to come work for another company, what do you think I’d assume?”
“…What would you assume?”
“Phishing. And if that company happened to be on an entirely different continent, even more so.”
“Korea isn’t some backwater country…”
“What did I just say? The important part is that it’s overseas. Overseas. From that coach’s perspective, he could easily take it as a joke.”
“…You really think so?”
Then there was no choice.
I would have to use the most reliable method known across every age and every land.
“Unnie, what’s on my schedule this week?”
“Nothing special this week. Aside from the Hanul Invest meeting, you can treat it as completely free.”
“Right? Then we’ve got time.”
I immediately held up my phone. The moment Yu-gyeong saw it, her expression crumpled.
“Do-a? I’m only asking just in case, but you’re not seriously…”
“I am seriously, Unnie Yu-gyeong. Pack your bags right now.”
I showed her the phone.
“Tell the Hanul Invest staff it’s an overseas business trip and that they should just submit the meeting in report form. The place can run that much without me now, can’t it?”
On the screen were two plane tickets to Germany—both first class.
The instant she saw those first-class tickets, Yu-gyeong nodded at once.
“I shall carry out your command, Chairman.”
“Pfft, what is that?”
“I’m completely serious.”
She was an endlessly amusing person, Unnie Yu-gyeong.
Anyway… Fine. How dare he ignore a scouting message from Hanul?
The most reliable method of all time: go meet him in person. Also known as the three visits to the thatched cottage.
I would show him just how terrifying that could be.
A scouting offer had arrived by email.
The sender was Seongjin Hanul FC, a second-division club in Korea’s K League.
The terms were extraordinarily generous. A three-year contract with a salary of five hundred million won plus extras—enough to count as an average wage even inside the Bundesliga second division.
And so I was certain. This was false. It had to be false. It was clearly a lie.
At first the name Hanul had tempted me. Hanul was one of the handful of companies that ranked not only in Korea but across the entire world.
Every expensive appliance in my house was a Hanul product. The phone I used for personal calls was a Hanul phone as well.
Precisely because it was Hanul, I grew more wary and more convinced it was a fake.
Some malicious person had to be using that name to mess with me. If I had been Korean, I would have seriously considered reporting it to Hanul itself.
I had no intention of playing along with a prank like this. What I needed to do right now was build tactics and test them. Until someday, until someone recognized me, I had to keep honing myself.
Rather than open spam mail like that, I would eat actual spam. And rather than eat garbage like that, I would settle for sausages from the butcher.
Anyway, the match I would watch today… hmm.
2018. Korea versus Germany would be good. This email was a kind of connection in its own way, and analyzing why we lost that day might prove quite useful. That match had marked the beginning of German football’s dark age.
Plenty of analyses already existed, but football always revealed something new when you looked again.
For that reason I sat quietly on the sofa and began watching the match.
Knowing the ending already, I smiled bitterly as I tracked the players’ movements and the way they coordinated. I also watched the fighting spirit of the Korean players trying to stop them.
If we had possessed that kind of fighting spirit, would things have been different?
There was no way to know. Football had no “if,” and while that fighting spirit was clearly a variable, it was an uncontrollable one. The effect of fighting spirit could not even be empirically proven.
Even so, I knew. In football, fighting spirit and will could draw out a mysterious power that nothing else could replace. That mysterious power must have been what carried Korea to victory.
When the first half ended, I stood up in frustration to grab a drink…
—Ding-dong~ Ding-dong~
Someone was ringing the doorbell. It was ten in the morning—quite early. A delivery, perhaps?
The moment I opened the door, the person I saw was…
Truly, seriously, one of the most beautiful people I had ever laid eyes on.
Glossy brown hair and a confident smile, a figure that could drive men wild, and a clean, simple office look.
“Is this the residence of Mr. Marco Feltner, by any chance?”
“Yes, I’m Marco Feltner… and you are?”
“Nice to meet you. Marco Feltner—I’m Han Do-a, the representative of Hanul Invest.”
The representative of Hanul Invest?
…Wait a second. The parent company of Seongjin Hanul FC was definitely…
“Hanul… Invest?”
It had been Hanul Invest.
“Since you didn’t reply, I caught the first flight out yesterday. I’m sorry for coming so early, but would it be all right if we stepped inside and talked for a moment?”
“Ah… ah, yes… please come in…”
“Excuse me. Oh, should I take off my shoes?”
“I’ll bring out the guest slippers.”
“How kind of you. Thank you.”
The woman who entered with a small smile—this “Han Do-a”—and the woman who appeared to be her secretary both seemed to have good manners woven into their very bones.
They were more polite than anyone I had ever met. I did not know much about Eastern etiquette, but I could tell these were people who had been thoroughly well educated.
That offer had not been a lie? It was real?
They valued me enough to come find me in person after I had dismissed it as false and not even bothered to reply?
In the middle of that dizzying realization, there was only one thing I needed to do.
For now, I would listen to what they had to say. On my side as well, I had truly, truly many questions.