Call-Up
The past two years had brought a lot of changes for me.
The most visible one was my appearance.
“Huh? Jae-rim looks bigger than his dad now?”
“Come on, I'm still taller.”
“You two stand back to back. I'll judge.”
At Mother's instruction, Father and I stood back to back.
“Oh. Jae-rim really is taller.”
“Aw, that's a lie.”
“It's true! Oppa's bigger!”
The referee of this little game, Mother, delivered her verdict, but Father refused to accept the result.
Was Father 173cm?
Since I was currently 176cm, it was only natural that I'd be taller than him.
Anyway. Over the past two years, I'd grown more than 14cm.
Rapid growth like that is actually bad for a footballer, because you have to adapt to a brand-new center of gravity. In fact, there were plenty of real cases of youth players who'd drawn attention for brilliant dribbling as kids, only to fall to below-average form after suddenly shooting up in height, never finding their balance again.
Not that any of that applied to a grizzled veteran like me. Regaining my balance was easier than eating a meal lying down.
“...I'm not small.”
“Who said you were small? Just that Jae-rim is bigger.”
“Tsk. A man's pride as head of the household...”
“Dad, Dad, oppa earns more money than you. Doesn't that make him the head of the household?”
Taking critical damage from my little sister's words, Father slumped into an OTL pose, and she promptly climbed onto his hunched back.
...So that's why he's been complaining about his back lately.
Aside from that, there were sidelights like being named to the Next Generation list at the youngest age ever—but naturally, I didn't pay much attention to such trivial honors. At this point, even winning the Ballon d'Or wouldn't stir much in me. It was just, oh, that happened, for the sake of my parents' happiness.
Just as dramatically as my height had grown, the world around me had changed too.
First, Carlos Caneda had been sacked over the club's recent slump. Officially it was announced as poor results, but hidden beneath that was a clash with the board. If results had been even decent, the club would have shown patience and watched a while longer—but unfortunately, Valencia currently sat in eighth place.
In that sense, I suppose a sacking over results was fair.
With even a Europa Conference League spot hanging by a thread, the newly appointed Julián Cortés Navarro was working hard to shift the atmosphere, and aggressively calling up youth prospects to the first team was part of that effort.
“Jae-rim, pack your things. You're released from Valencia Juvenil.”
I stared at the manager with a blank expression. I was waiting for the line that came next.
Apparently every club pulls the same prank on promoted youngsters.
Do they seriously think this is funny?
When I gave no reaction whatsoever, the manager continued awkwardly, like a comedian whose joke had just died on stage.
“...You're released to the first team. So report to first-team training from now on.”
“Released” wasn't a word that existed in my dictionary. Suppose I gave an interview to the press saying something like “Cristiano Ronaldo is a defeated man who lost to Lionel Messi”—then I might genuinely get released. Short of such extraordinary circumstances, though, the club making the decision to cut me was, for all practical purposes, impossible.
Honestly, releasing someone over an interview saying Messi is the GOAT would be insane anyway... but knowing Chris, he'd actually do it.
Regardless, I joined Valencia's first-team training in earnest from the following day.
The eyes of the first-team players watching me were not exactly friendly. Apparently they believed the previous manager had been sacked for opposing my call-up.
Whatever.
I decided not to care much about their reactions.
A footballer only needs to be good at football.
All I had to do was show them and prove it.
Finally. He's here.
The boy genius who had once shocked the first-team players had at last been called up.
Valencia's midfielder Rafael Silva studied Joo Jae-rim intently, and once again recalled the feeling he'd had that day.
Jae-rim, someday I wanted to run on the same pitch as you.
That was the sole reason he'd turned down an offer from his dream club.
“Rafael! Real Madrid! The Real Madrid you said was your dream club!”
His agent had screamed at him like he'd lost his mind, but he couldn't bend his client's stubbornness.
Still, it's been a while since training had an atmosphere like this.
Rafael Silva forced his pounding heart to calm and looked around the training ground. An unnameable tension, unlike anything before, now flowed through Valencia's first-team facility—which meant the players saw Joo Jae-rim not as just another promising kid, but as a threatening rival for their positions.
“...Dios mío, that kid is really fourteen?”
And in the training that followed, Joo Jae-rim proved once again that he was no ordinary youth player.
“...Is he a monster?”
Manager Julián Cortés Navarro let out a hollow laugh.
Right up until training began that day, he'd thought it would be difficult for Joo Jae-rim to adapt quickly to first-team sessions.
This is beyond anything I imagined.
But once training started, Jae-rim outperformed the first-team players in the vast majority of drills. At first, it almost looked like the defenders were letting him win—except the faces of the defenders matched up against Jae-rim were endlessly serious.
Then, in the scrimmage that followed—
the instant Joo Jae-rim received the return pass from Rafael Silva—
whoooosh—
a sensual chip shot rippled the net directly.
So this isn't just a PR move to soothe the fans.
In truth, Jae-rim's call-up had been driven less by the manager than by the club itself. Valencia wanted to calm the fans enraged by the team's pathetic results, and the prospect Valencia fans most eagerly anticipated was Joo Jae-rim. Which meant, inevitably, soothing the fans meant calling him up.
Do I seriously risk it and field him?
But in the manager's head, won over completely by Jae-rim's ability, a different plan was already taking shape.
Valencia's first-team training was, all in all, not bad.
“Fourteen... he's fourteen? Heeheehee, no way, there's no way that kid is fourteen. Yes, that's it—this is clearly the Orientalism from novels. Looks like a child on the outside, but inside he's a footballer aged several hundred years!”
“...Hey, this bastard's lost it. Someone take care of him.”
Half the souls of Valencia's defenders seemed to have left their bodies, but since that was a perfectly natural thing to experience once when facing me, I didn't pay it much mind.
“Here.”
“Gracias.”
I accepted the water Rafael Silva handed me and gave my thanks.
“Oh, right. We haven't introduced ourselves yet, have we? I'm Rafa—”
He'd spent the entire day watching me like I was some kind of curiosity.
“I know. Rafael Silva.”
“Huh? You know my name?”
Of course I did. This guy would become quite famous. And back in the early days of my regression, he'd taught me how to pass properly.
Well, I was a lot older then than I am now.
Anyway, the man had some strange look on his face, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“What. Buzz off.”
The sharp tone wasn't an accident. It was because I remembered the era when I'd been learning passing from this guy.
“Ah, sorry, sorry. I heard you're bad at remembering people's names.”
I answered Rafael Silva in my head.
Because there's no value in memorizing them.
Did you know the probability of a youth player successfully debuting on a professional stage? A mere one to three percent. And that's only for academy-affiliated players; for ordinary youth players it's around 0.001 percent. Memorizing the name of every single one of those people? That's a waste of resources. I regress infinitely, but I'm still human, and human memory isn't infinite. They're connections that would vanish the moment I regress anyway—and unless someone truly mattered, forgetting names quickly was the better choice for me.
Not that I can control my memory at will. There are plenty of moments I want to forget but can't—the dark chapters of my past lives.
Regardless, I didn't bother sharing any of that opinion with Rafael Silva. Fortunately, my social skills hadn't shattered to that extent.
But from that day on, the atmosphere at Valencia's training ground began to flow in a strange direction.
“Jae-rim, you know my name?”
“...Marcos Alvarez.”
“And me? Me?”
What is this, exactly?
When I didn't answer, they started snickering and teasing each other.
“Aw, too bad. Lucas, you'll have to try harder.”
“Shut up! Jae-rim, you seriously don't know me?”
“...I know. Lucas Peña.”
“See that, you punk?”
“Yeah, no. My name came out instantly—yours took a while.”
I barely managed to hold back a sigh.
Phew... is it because Valencia's a young team?
It felt like being stuck in a den of overgrown children.
March 22nd.
Valencia's manager, Julián Cortés Navarro, announced the squad list for the next day's match against Rayo Vallecano.
Needless to say, my name appeared on neither the starting list nor even the bench.
Despite my heroics in training and scrimmages, apparently it wasn't enough to catch the manager's eye.
Well. Can't be helped, I suppose.
Fourteen years old—far too young for a professional debut. The manager, too, probably had no choice but to consider public opinion. The call-up had come earlier than expected, but the debut itself would likely take time.
Tap. Tap.
As I headed home after training, Rafael Silva came up and patted my shoulder.
This kind of thing is just pointless pity.
It was clearly meant to comfort a prospect disappointed at being left off the squad.
“I know.”
I answered after one short sigh. I had no need for sympathy.
“Uh...?”
“I know I'm not lacking.”
“R-right...”
·
·
·
Rafael Silva stared blankly after Joo Jae-rim as he walked away, leaving only his curt reply behind.
“...No, I was going to say it's on my way home, so I'd give you a ride.”
Two days before the Getafe match, I was summoned by the manager.
“You'll be on the bench list for the Getafe game.”
“Sí.”
At last, against Getafe, my name had made the bench.
“Jae-rim, I doubt it'd be you of all people, but just in case—I'd rather you didn't post anything on social media or the like.”
“Sí.”
I nodded absently at the manager's words.
How old do you think I am?
I'm neither that young nor that stupid—certainly not stupid enough to brag on social media over making a matchday squad.
For the record, I hadn't told my parents about the bench call-up either.
Making the bench doesn't mean I'll actually play.
The odds of not stepping onto the pitch were far higher. Father would probably only find out after showing up for work at the Valencia clubhouse the day after tomorrow.
Bzzzz—
But that evening, the news of my bench inclusion spread across the entire globe—
because Cristiano Ronaldo had posted on his social media that I had made the matchday squad.
...Is this bastard insane?
I quietly closed my eyes and exhaled a long breath.
Of course, Ronaldo hadn't mentioned my appearance outright. But anyone looking at that post could connect the dots.
“Dad, DAD!!!”
“...What? What is it?”
“Oppa's playing in tomorrow's match!!”
“What? Really?”
“A friend of mine said he asked on Ronaldo's post whether our oppa was playing, and Ronaldo replied in the comments that he is!”
Listening to the commotion outside my room, I came to a realization about the fundamental flaw Valencia carried as a club.
The team's single greatest problem was none other than Ronaldo himself.