La Liga Debut
The first half ended with Real Betis leading 1-0.
The locker room atmosphere could not have been good—everyone had assumed they would win this match, and now they were losing it.
"Puyol, you're going to have to dig a little deeper in the second half."
Looking at the dejected Barcelona players, Coach Frank Rijkaard passionately drilled into them everything they needed to do after the break.
"Rafael, don't push up so high. Drop deeper and play from there."
As the coach fired off instructions with that intensity, the gloom in the room melted away. Fierce resolve began to burn in the Barcelona players' eyes.
"All right. Second half—let's show them what kind of team we are."
Infected by their coach's fire, the Barcelona squad steeled themselves and headed out of the locker room.
The second half began.
Whether Coach Frank Rijkaard's words in the locker room had taken hold or not, Barcelona came out sharp from the restart, battering Real Betis's goal with one crisp attack after another.
They created chance after chance without converting—until the sixty-second minute, when a counter fell into Barcelona's lap.
Joaquín, holding the ball in midfield, forced a pass he had no business forcing. Carles Puyol stepped in and cut it out cleanly.
Puyol didn't hesitate. He immediately fed the ball forward to Iniesta, who was waiting ahead of him. Iniesta didn't trap it—he let it run, turning the defender behind him into a statue.
Having made a fool of one defender, Iniesta drove the ball forward at speed and, in an instant, was at the edge of the Real Betis box. He lifted his head, checking where his teammates were.
Hmm… better just hit it myself.
The Betis back line's eyes were drawn to the attackers making runs on either side of him rather than the man on the ball—and in that split second, space opened in front of Iniesta for a clean strike.
Who am I even supposed to mark—!
The angle was there. Iniesta didn't hesitate. He struck it clean, and the ball left his foot with no spin at all, curling on a trajectory no goalkeeper could read before it was sucked into the net.
Iniesta sprinted toward the stands for his celebration and launched into a roaring roar of his own.
"I scored!"
Iniesta shouted, his thinning hair gleaming under the lights, and the Barcelona fans answered with a wall of noise.
"Hooooooooooooo!"
Iniesta felt that roar with his whole body.
This is good.
The moment the ball hit the net, the air in the stadium seemed to vibrate. The cheers rolled through the entire ground right after. He could feel on his skin that every bit of it was a message aimed at him.
I'm glad I started playing football.
Because of football he had met so many different people, found a girlfriend, made friends.
"Brilliant, Iniesta!"
Puyol came charging in and snapped him out of his private thoughts. Puyol always smiled when he looked at Iniesta. Even at his young age, the kid kept producing something big in the moments that mattered most—just like now.
CuleDoctor was feeling a complicated mix of emotions. After all, how furious had she been when Barcelona conceded first against a Real Betis side everyone expected them to beat comfortably?
But true to form, Barcelona had looked like a completely different team the moment the second half started, and they had equalized early enough that she was happy again.
Even so, Park Jieun couldn't fully enjoy the joy. Her current boyfriend—and future husband—Lee Junho still hadn't set foot on the pitch.
Of course she knew it was only natural; he had just been called up to the first team. That didn't stop the disappointment from creeping in.
I wish he'd come on.
That was when a familiar face appeared on the television screen.
Huh? No way… for real?
She thought she might have been mistaken, but the commentator's words confirmed it for her.
Lee Junho was about to make his appearance.
I clicked my tongue in regret.
If I had known I was going to play today, I would have told Jieun to come watch. Well—I had been certain I wouldn't get on the pitch, and then suddenly I was, so there was nothing I could do about it.
And it wasn't only me. Messi was waiting on the touchline for his own debut as a substitute.
"Hoo… I'm nervous. You too, Junho?"
Nervous? Of course I was. This wasn't some backwater league—this was a La Liga debut, one of the five biggest leagues in the world. Claiming you weren't nervous would have been almost impossible.
Maybe someone with a completely different mental world from the rest of us could pull it off. I was not that person, so the tension was inevitable.
"Yeah. Me too."
Messi let out a small sigh of relief at my answer and kept going.
"Still… knowing you're here makes it better."
Same for me. Facing a debut alone would have been harder on the nerves than doing it together.
While Messi and I were steeling ourselves, Barcelona's coach Frank slipped between us. I tilted my head, expecting him to say something, but no words came. He simply shoved both of us hard between the shoulder blades.
He hadn't said a thing, yet it felt like he had given us more strength than any speech could. Messi and I walked onto the pitch as substitutes.
I stepped onto the pitch.
The first thought that hit me was how enormous it really was. From the outside you never noticed, but once you were actually out there the pressure was no joke.
Countless eyes were on me, and the weight of that was something I couldn't put into words. The noise from the stands filled every corner of the ground.
In that unfamiliar environment, the match restarted. As soon as I began to move, the roar that had been hammering my ears faded away, and I locked onto the game alone.
The moment my focus snapped into place, the ball came to me.
I took it in midfield and did what I had done a thousand times before—I dribbled. Against my half-formed fear that it wouldn't work, the defender couldn't stop me. I carried it all the way to the edge of the penalty area and struck it from distance.
Whoooosh.
The ball left my foot and screamed toward the top of the goal. The Real Betis keeper managed to react, but the shot was simply too fast—he never got a touch, and it buried itself inside the net.
Once my goal went in, Barcelona found their composure and began to carve Real Betis apart. In the end Betis couldn't contain Messi either and conceded another.
After that it became a one-sided slaughter. Two more goals flew in just before the final whistle, and the match finished 5-1.
Messi and I had each scored once. We had both made successful debuts.