A Forty-Year-Old Hiding His Age (8)
Contrary to Kang Doin's expectations, Lucho, the manager of Real Madrid C, was not a racist.
He actually held rather fond feelings toward Korea, thanks to his one and only thirteen-year-old granddaughter, who loved manga about Korean idols slaying demons.
Of course, the fact that his granddaughter had given him a soft spot for Korea had no bearing whatsoever on player selection. Skin color, naturally, mattered even less to him.
"Where do you feel most comfortable playing?"
That Lucho had pulled Kang Doin aside after watching him impress at training and asked him this question was itself an acknowledgment of the sixteen-year-old striker's ability.
Though it was also true that when word first came down that this Korean boy would be promoted to the C team, Lucho had opposed it fiercely, citing concerns about adaptation.
"I can play out wide, but I'm most comfortable as a central striker."
"Is that so?"
Talking to him face-to-face like this, the boy turned out to speak fluent Spanish. The fact that he didn't bother using honorifics with his manager wasn't much of an issue.
All that mattered was whether they could communicate.
And Kang Doin could communicate smoothly with both the coaching staff and the players. With that, both of the reasons Lucho had opposed the promotion evaporated.
Too small a sample size?
He'd proven himself in team training.
Adaptation concerns?
He spoke Spanish, so he could adapt just fine with the C team.
End of story. With every objection removed, Lucho had no reason left not to use him.
You play the players who perform well in training... wasn't that just basic common sense?
"Then I'll plan around you as a central striker for now. That work for you?"
"Sí."
"Good. Go on back out there."
Watching Kang Doin nod and jog back onto the field, Lucho smacked his lips.
Nearly five years at the helm of Real Madrid C had given him a curious gift: the ability to judge, from training alone, how much a player would produce in an actual match.
The gift was called a gut feeling.
It wasn't always right, but his gut had rarely been wrong. So he trusted it quite a bit.
And in Lucho's judgment, that sixteen-year-old striker was what you'd call a future star.
Quick feet, decent height, clean first touch, sharp movement off the ball, comfortable with both feet, and a good shot on top of it all.
At this point, it would actually be abnormal to expect him not to deliver in matches.
Granted, a real game and a training session were very different things. But given what the young striker had shown against C-team players in practice, it was only natural to assume he'd claim the starting striker spot before long.
For the manager of Real Madrid C, that was a development to welcome with open arms. No manager anywhere in the world greets the birth of a young star with anything but joy.
And yet the reason he clicked his tongue in mild regret was that a hundred euros was by no means a trivial sum of money.
"That's why he just shoved the banknotes at me without a word..."
Life with the C team — for all practical purposes Real Madrid's third squad — was going more smoothly than I'd expected.
The manager I'd assumed was a racist seemed perfectly willing to use me. If he weren't, he wouldn't have asked where I preferred to play.
Whether he was a genuine racist or not, I couldn't say. As long as it cost me nothing, his personal ideology was none of my business.
At the end of the day, I'd take a manager who at least said "konnichiwa" to my face and started me in matches over one who left me to rot on the bench while respecting my dignity.
Simple logic. Being the target of racism stings a little and then it's over. Rotting on the bench tanks my market value.
Losing your market value has always meant death for a footballer, and a footballer who's lost his value has no future.
So the value had to go up. Driven by that singular conviction, I poured sweat out at the training ground again today.
"The more I look at you, the stranger it gets."
Nico was there too, of course, as always. He'd muttered that the moment my left-footed mid-range strike from outside the box curled into the corner of the net.
"What's strange?"
"I was thinking about why I only just now learned a striker like you exists."
"Keep sucking up like that and nothing's coming out of it."
"I'm not joking. We definitely played Korea at the last U-17 World Cup, but I have zero memory of seeing you out there."
Nico screwed up his face like he was wringing his brain for the memory, but of course wringing wasn't going to produce one. I'd never played a U-17 World Cup in the first place, so how could he remember?
"I was never called up to the U-17 national team."
"What?"
"I've only ever been picked for a youth national side once — the U-15 team, last year. And I sat on the bench the whole tournament. Never played a minute."
A starter had gone down injured and I'd gotten the call-up by dumb luck, so it was a perfectly natural arrangement — but Nico had no way of knowing any of that, and his eyes doubled in size.
"Is your country insane?"
"Who is?"
"Korea! How do they not pick a striker like this? Or did you commit some crime back home or something?"
"Hardly."
In my glory days as a World Cup hero drowning in endorsement deals, I'd been investigated a few times over tax evasion suspicions, but I was never actually arrested.
And even that never happened in this timeline.
I shrugged.
"I was just... bad at football back then. I was a lot shorter than I am now, and my life wasn't exactly set up for me to focus on the game."
"I literally cannot picture you being bad at football."
Neither could I, honestly.
To go back to the days when I couldn't play, I'd have to rewind at least to elementary school, and in my memory that was a good thirty years ago.
Racking my brain for whatever I could dredge up, I did recall one thing: though I was right-footed, I practiced left-footed shooting every single day on the logic that I wanted to strike the ball like Messi.
Come to think of it, the fact that I could use both feet freely the instant I regressed might owe itself to those elementary school days. I'd been drilling the feel of my left foot since I was a kid, after all.
That said, it remained an immutable fact that my childhood self was hopelessly bad at football.
All dreams, no skill. Looking back, every bit of it was childish nonsense.
"Well, shame you missed the last U-17 World Cup. Facing you on the other team would've been fun."
"Did your conscience take a direct hit? Do you have any idea how many places we are in the FIFA rankings?"
"What? The ball's round, isn't it? You never know till you play. And Korea's a pretty decent team anyway, no?"
"So what was the score when you lot faced Korea at that U-17 tournament?"
"...Five to one, was it?"
Even after I kicked him hard in the rear, Nico just kept chuckling.
"Or hey — why don't you just join Spain, Doni?"
"Join what, Spain?"
"Yeah. Just play alongside me."
On the surface, a tempting offer. Dig an inch deeper, though, and it's anything but simple.
I knew better than most, because Saudi Arabia had once offered me naturalization.
You had to have lived in the territory for at least five years after turning ten, made three or fewer official appearances for a senior national team, and at least three years had to have passed since your last senior competitive appearance...
Complicated doesn't begin to cover FIFA's national team switch regulations. The difficulty level matched — or exceeded — the rules governing a youth player's international transfer.
By the time Saudi came knocking, I'd already made more than thirty appearances for South Korea, so naturalization was dead on arrival. And when I think of the figure the Saudi side had dangled back then, I still bleed tears of blood.
Damn it all.
"I haven't even lived in Spain for a year yet. Under FIFA rules, I'd have to clock at least five years before it's even worth considering."
"Five years, huh... How old would you be by then?"
"I'm sixteen now, so probably around twenty-one."
"Then no problem at all. In five years, come play for Spain with me."
"Why would I?"
Maybe if he showed up with a briefcase of cash like the Saudis did. Short of that, I had no reason to throw away my image in Korea to play for Spain.
International results?
Unfortunately for him, even playing for Korea I'd reached a World Cup quarterfinal. Quite unlike Spain, where anything short of the title was considered failure, Korea treated a round of sixteen as national-hero territory and showered you in endorsements. No reason on earth to grit it out until twenty-one and switch passports.
"No need to decide in such a hurry. Keep playing in this country long enough and you'll grow a patriotism you never knew you had."
Apparently that answer was hard for a seventeen-year-old with no worldly experience to swallow. Was rejecting a chance to join the Invincible Armada really that offensive to him?
Besides, I never said I'd keep playing in Spain.
It was questionable whether Spain even performed well at international tournaments in the first place. At least in my memory, they never won a World Cup — not once, all the way until I turned forty.
In fact, the main characters in the round-of-sixteen match when I was twenty-eight — the match where they conceded a hat trick to me and single-handedly made me a national hero of the Republic of Korea — were the Spanish.
That was also the beginning of the beautiful feud where Nico and I traded curses and racism back and forth.
Still, rattling off a story only I could know would earn me nothing but a psychiatric referral, so I exercised my right to remain silent. It was a half-joke on his end anyway; there was no need to rebut it seriously.
"Just imagine it. You and me, out on the pitch in Spanish shirts."
"......"
"The stands packed, the clock running down. And then you take my pass and score. And that goal wins the World Cup final."
"......"
"Tell me that doesn't give you chills just picturing it. All you have to do is choose, and Spanish blood can flow in your veins too."
Spanish blood, my ass.
The only thing flowing through my veins is Saudi crude.
The Tercera Federación.
Rendered phonetically in Korean as "Terse-ra Pe-de-ra-sion," this league was Spain's fifth division.
It was also the lowest tier among the semi-professional leagues run by the Royal Spanish Football Federation — known for short as the RFEF.
From the sixth division down, it was amateur football in all but name.
Attention and interest were correspondingly thin. The league was so unpopular that average attendance rarely broke a thousand.
But die-hard football fans exist everywhere. Real Madrid's third squad had its own devoted supporters, every bit as passionate as those who cheered the first team.
That was why several hundred spectators had packed into the small stadium at Ciudad Real Madrid, where Matchday 30 of the Tercera Federación was underway.
"Keep this up and we'll draw!"
"Damn it!"
"Change the striker already!"
They were few in number, but their desperation for a win was no different from the first-team faithful's.
And in that sense, the state of the match gave the crowd every reason to be furious.
Real Madrid C, sixth in the group, against CD Navalcarnero, eighteenth.
Past the fifty-sixth minute of the second half, the score remained deadlocked at nil-nil.
Drawing with the league's worst team — at home, no less — was enough to enrage any fan, and remembering that only a top-five finish earned a spot in the promotion playoffs was enough to send them over the edge entirely.
They needed three points by any means necessary, and here they were, deadlocked with the bottom club. How could they not be furious?
Just as the fans' patience was stretching toward its limit, the ball rolled out of play and the referee halted the match for a substitution.
"Oh — they're swapping the striker!"
"Who's coming on?"
"The number's... hang on, let me see..."
At the first substitution of the match, every eye in the stands turned naturally toward the bench. Anyone would do. They prayed only that somebody, anybody, would break this hellish silence of zero.
The moment came: the number 9 starting striker came off, and on went a number 30 with a face that still looked barely out of boyhood.
"Number 30? Never seen that number before."
"The name's... Doni?"
"One of the kids called up from the youth teams?"
Unlike the established squad members, who wore numbers 1 through 25, players promoted from the youth sides took the next number after 26.
In other words, the black-haired boy stepping onto the pitch was a product of the academy system.
Naturally, the home end began to buzz.
"Never heard of him. You know anything?"
"Looks Asian to me. Japanese?"
"Do Japanese people have names like that?"
"It's his registered name — might have nothing to do with his real one."
Back-and-forth arguments flew in every direction.
He's Japanese. No, Chinese.
They bought a youth player from Korea in January, I heard.
Why would they even buy from there?
Any FIFA sanctions for that?
Isn't he just some Chinese kid who came for a trial?
And so on.
A few had accurate information; most were running on guesswork. Considering the club deliberately restricted information about its youth players to shield them from public scrutiny that could stunt their development, that was only to be expected.
Truth be told, the fans couldn't have cared less whether the rumors were true.
All that mattered was whether the young striker now coming on could shatter this silence of zero.
Number 30, Kang Doin, answered that question with a resounding yes.
"Huh?!"
Sixty-one minutes into the second half. Loitering at the edge of the opposition penalty box, hunting for his moment, Kang Doin detonated the offside line in perfect sync with Nicolás's pass.
It happened in a blink, too fast for the defenders to react, and the crowd rose to its feet at the sight of a goal-opening chance.
Reaching the box in what felt like a heartbeat, ball at his feet, Kang Doin was the calmest attacker on the pitch.
The instant his low drive split the corner of the net, the stands erupted.
"Dios mío!"
"The kid's completely insane!"
"Vamos—!!"
An unknown young striker had appeared and scored the first goal of the match less than ten minutes after coming on.
His nationality, his age, who he was — none of it mattered anymore.
What mattered was that the boy had put the ball in the net for this team's victory.
"Doni—!!"
"Yes! No idea what country you're from, but I'm remembering that name no matter what!"
"Start the next match! You'd better start!"
The stands of the small stadium at Ciudad Real Madrid shook with cheers aimed at number 30.
The crowd was still small, it was true.
But Kang Doin's existence was, unmistakably, beginning to make itself known across Madrid.