The Slingshot Called Experience
Whispers about Joo Jae-rim's call-up to the youth national team had begun to slink through the corridors of Korean football.
“No, seriously, nothing's been decided yet!?”
The Korea Football Association had been suffering from a fever of endlessly ringing phones since the early hours of the morning—and it had all started less than a day after news of Joo Jae-rim's fast-track promotion to Valencia's Juvenil B reached Korea.
Football prodigy Joo Jae-rim, fast-tracked to Juvenil B at the mere age of twelve. It had been a long while since a player had made a name for himself among Korean football fans at such a tender age in the youth ranks.
Still, the prodigy's story set football fans' hearts racing, and they hoped—however slightly, however soon—to see the boy take the international stage wearing the Taegeuk mark on his chest.
“And if he gets injured, who's going to take responsibility for that!?”
Unlike the fans, who were free to simply enjoy watching him play, the Association's position could hardly have been more different. Fast-tracking a player into matches carried far more risk than most people realized.
Especially in international tournaments, where the weight of representing one's nation seemed to push even youth players into rougher, more reckless play than usual. And in Jae-rim's case, this wasn't a fast-track of two or three years—it was a staggering five. At that point, it was effectively a grown man squaring off against a child.
Meaning: a single casual shoulder-to-shoulder challenge, nothing the opponent even intended as foul play, would be enough to inflict a career-ending injury on Joo Jae-rim.
…Absolutely not.
If Jae-rim went down with a serious injury, the vitriol the Association would have to swallow was beyond imagining. The moment that worst-case scenario materialized, the fans would conveniently forget they'd been the ones demanding his call-up in the first place, and tear into the Association for their lives.
For all these reasons and more, the boy's tender age was a burden the Association simply could not escape. So they put out an interview suggesting that his youth made a call-up difficult.
But football fans currently possessed an invincible logic—
From that day on, the Association's officials began scraping excuses together from the bottom of the barrel. No fresh spin was forthcoming, however, and in the end they had no choice but to reach for their weapon of last resort.
That weapon was: burying their heads in the sand.
I was interested in the youth national team call-up, but I didn't have particularly strong feelings about playing in the U-17 World Cup.
If I play, I play. If I don't, I don't.
The FIFA U-17 World Cup, once held every two years, had switched to an annual format starting in 2025. FIFA had gorged itself on Middle Eastern oil money, so the tournament had been hosted in Qatar five years running—but as a side effect, the annual format had successfully taken root.
In other words, even if it wasn't this year, I could play next year or the year after.
They framed the interview as if it were for my sake. But there was one thing I would never forget—
when it came to Korea's countless sports associations, self-preservation always came before player welfare.
Well… at least this time, their interests happened to align with mine.
That said, I had no intention of stepping up to defend the Korea Football Association, either.
Meanwhile, over at Valencia CF's first team, a monstrous rumor was making the rounds—a rumor that a monster who trampled on the dreams of youth players had appeared.
Joo Jae-rim had been known worldwide as a prodigy even before joining Valencia, but the first-division players hadn't paid the rumors much mind. Any La Liga starter had, as a kid, grown sick of being called a 'football wonder child' or a 'football genius.'
But what Jae-rim got up to after arriving at Valencia defied imagination.
“I heard the medical team did the athletic testing on him and just stood there in awe.”
Each rumor was too specific to simply laugh off.
“Word is the Cadete kids were crying their eyes out saying they were quitting football?”
Eventually, curiosity got the better of Valencia CF's senior players, bombarded as they were by fresh legends every single day.
“Hey—shall we all go take a look at the kid?”
When Rafael Silva, the young midfielder who had joined the club the previous season, made the proposal, every first-team player agreed. And so they headed straight for Valencia CF's Juvenil B training ground.
As it happened, a practice match was underway.
“That's him over there, isn't it?”
The Valencia players picked Jae-rim out immediately. There were few Asians in the club to begin with, and Jae-rim stood at least a head shorter than the players around him, making him all the more conspicuous.
“Where, where? Huh. He's smaller than I expected.”
“Definitely not a kid who plays off his physicality, that's for sure.”
In the practice match, Jae-rim dropped deep and dissected the game with surgical efficiency. It was as if he had eyes in the back of his head—the instant he pivoted away from the ball, he delivered a pass of pinpoint precision into the space opening up in front of the runner making the penetrating run.
“…Puta Madre. I couldn't do that even if someone showed me a hundred times.”
Watching a pass that carried, at minimum, three hundred years of accumulated craft, one of Valencia CF's own midfielders let out a groan of despair.
That day, rather than hunting goals himself, Jae-rim actively worked his teammates into the game. The physical gap made it difficult for him to force his way into the penalty box, after all.
Even so, surrounded by opponents two heads taller, he refused to surrender possession, patiently racking up attacking contributions one by one.
Only the goal itself eluded him—until, moments before the end of the first half—
a defender headed a corner kick clear, and the ball floated toward Joo Jae-rim waiting outside the penalty box. Boxed out by his physique, Jae-rim had been patrolling the edge of the area all half. He calmly brought the incoming ball down off his chest, kept his eyes locked on it as it hovered for a heartbeat, and then swung his leg with everything he had.
Thwack—
The ball rocketed skyward with vicious end-over-end spin—and then, at some invisible tipping point, it plummeted, curving as if sucked by gravity into the top-right corner of the goal.
Even after scoring a wonder goal that left every jaw on the pitch hanging, Jae-rim wore the same placid expression as he jogged through his celebration. The watching Juvenil B manager clutched his head in both hands, picked up his smartphone, and dialed the Juvenil A coach.
It seemed, apparently, that the boy was beyond anything he was qualified to coach.
“…Alright, lads. Back to training.”
And so another legend was added to the growing book of Jae-rim myths: the day the shell-shocked first-team players, having witnessed his match with their own eyes, voluntarily reported for extra training.
When the practice match ended, I moved up from Juvenil B to A.
Valencia CF Juvenil A. There is a reserve side called Mestalla, but that's an adult reserve team, so setting it aside, Juvenil A is the highest step in Valencia CF's youth pyramid.
In the past, players usually passed through Mestalla before debuting for the first team, but these days it's become more common to jump straight from Juvenil A to the senior squad.
Not that any of that concerned me for the time being. At my current age, a professional debut was out of the question.
La Liga technically imposes no minimum age for senior debuts, but at my age, the injury risk of first-team football was simply too great. Even now I was essentially getting by on experience alone—there were moments when the difference in physique made itself faintly, annoyingly felt.
If the club hadn't instituted a rule forbidding hard tackles on me, I wouldn't have been able to play with the leisure I currently enjoyed.
Experience alone really can't shrug off a physical gap.
I thought it every single time. I missed my prime-era body.
Back then, I could just run straight at defenders and they flat-out couldn't keep up.
Anyway.
The footage of my goal in the practice match was edited and released on Valencia's official YouTube channel, where it blew past a million views in no time. Thanks to the buzz that had followed me since my transfer, the training ground—doubling as the match venue—bubbled every day with crowds hoping to catch a glimpse of me.
And Wednesday, when the UEFA Youth League kicked off, was no exception.
Today was the day of the youth Champions League.
For the record, its official name is the UEFA Youth League, a competition with a respectable pedigree dating back to its founding in 2013.
The league-phase draw is tied directly to the senior UEFA Champions League. From the senior team's perspective it's nothing particularly important, but qualifying for the Champions League comes bundled with a UEFA Youth League spot—a ticket for the youngsters' development.
Valencia had finished fifth last season, but thanks to Real Madrid and Barcelona's strong Champions League campaigns, the club had secured a berth through the extra allocation.
The Youth League's league-phase fixtures mirror the senior team's Champions League draw. If Valencia's senior side draws Arsenal, Valencia's youth side draws Arsenal's youth side, and so on. Because they face the exact same opponents, fans are notorious for their moral victories: when the seniors lose but the kids win, the fans shrug it off with, 'Well, our youth pool looks way better than yours.' When both lose, it's a full-blown catastrophe.
Doesn't matter. With me on Valencia, there's no way we lose.
The one difference from the senior competition was that while the adults play eight matches in the league phase, the youths play six. Presumably out of consideration—too many matches at a young age can burden a player's development.
From the Round of 32, reached after the league phase, through to the final, the tournament is a single-match knockout, with home and away decided by draw. And from the semifinals onward, matches are held at the Colovray Sports Centre in Nyon, Switzerland—right across from UEFA headquarters.
“Valencia, mi escudo y leyenda! (Valencia, my shield and my legend!)”
Anyway.
With the senior team having lost their Champions League opener, the fans' hearts burned hot with hope that the youth side would claim victory at home in the UEFA Youth League.
As for me, I started the match on the bench, not in the starting eleven.
Youth leagues see players transfer following their parents far more often than professional circuits, so registration rules are comparatively lax—submitting the squad list a mere day before kickoff was enough to make me eligible.
The reason I began on the bench rather than in the starting lineup, for the record, was none other than concern over injury.
It had been less than a month since I joined the club, and already they were treating me like 'the treasure of Valencia,' handling me with kid gloves in no uncertain terms. Valencia had unilaterally imposed a minutes restriction on me, physically preventing me from playing beyond it, and after every training session and every match, I was marched to the medical center for mandatory examinations.
Frankly, I was used to this. Every club that had ever signed me had taken similar measures—the only difference was degree. Looking back on my lives, Valencia sat squarely in the middle of the fuss spectrum.
The worst offender was Manchester United, wasn't it?
The level of fuss seemed to scale with a club's results.
Regardless. Twenty-fifth minute of the second half.
I finally stepped onto the pitch as a substitute. Valencia were already leading 1–0.
“Jae-rim!!”
“Waaaah—!”
Even so, the moment I came on, a roar erupted from the Valencia fans watching the match.
Right before sending me on, the Juvenil A coach had drilled it into me, over and over: absolutely no reckless dribbling into traffic.
Incidentally, the average Spanish player isn't all that tall, so I'd never really stood out before—but the English, it seemed, were clearly taller on average than the Spaniards.
…Why does that one look like a telephone pole compared to everyone else?
Among them, one kid in particular caught my eye—a specimen boasting truly monstrous physicality.
On raw physique alone, this was David versus Goliath.
But that was fine.
Just as David had his sling, I had a weapon of my own—experience.