Spoiler Alert: The Future of Football
The news that Joo Jae-rim had made the matchday squad spread through the Valencia fanbase like wildfire.
At first, fans questioned where the rumor had come from—but before long, they were believing it with everything they had.
After all, this was nothing less than an official announcement from Valencia's club owner himself.
And the reaction back in Joo Jae-rim's home country of Korea was exactly the same.
Despite the unprecedented spoiler incident of a club owner leaking part of his own team's matchday squad, the atmosphere at Valencia's training ground was surprisingly pleasant.
Feels exactly like any other day.
Then again, when it was the owner who'd pulled the stunt—not some player or staff member—what could anyone possibly say about it?
Most people simply let the whole thing slide, as if it had never happened. And the manager was in an awkward position to get angry over it, too.
If the entire starting lineup had leaked, no doubt he'd have flown into a genuine rage and torn the place apart. But all Cristiano Ronaldo had posted on social media was the fact that Jae-rim had made the squad—nothing more.
Then again, Ronaldo went through the whole 'Traitor Incident' back in his Real Madrid days under Mourinho. Even he wouldn't stoop to posting the starting lineup on social media.
I pictured Cristiano Ronaldo's mischievous face.
...He wouldn't, right?
After today's little episode, I couldn't say that with complete confidence.
Anyway, just as training wrapped up and I was about to head home—
"Jaerim, here are tickets for tomorrow's home match. And if you ever need tickets again, just let us know."
"Thanks."
One of the club staff had spotted me and handed over tickets for the following day's match. When news broke that I'd made the squad, my family had tried to buy tickets for the game, only to find them sold out in an instant.
But my parents, absolutely refusing to miss their son's debut, had bitten the bullet and booked the VIP lounge. Then some club employee noticed that our family had reserved it and reported it to the club—and the news eventually made its way to Valencia's owner, Ronaldo, who ended up inviting our whole family to tomorrow's match.
He says strange things sometimes, and sulks at the oddest moments—but he does look after our family in all sorts of ways.
Frankly, I thought it might be better for them not to come, given I probably wouldn't play tomorrow.
But I said nothing of the sort to my parents. Stopping parents who wanted to watch their son's match would have been unforgivable.
Meanwhile, at that very moment—
Korea's sports broadcasting platform was thrown into a frenzy by the sudden announcement of Joo Jae-rim's inclusion in the matchday squad. The moment the news reached Korea, the assignment of a broadcast team began.
This is one we cannot afford to miss, ratings be damned.
This was no ordinary prospect. This was Joo Jae-rim, the football genius who had once shaken the entire nation.
Nobody knew yet whether he'd start or come off the bench—but that hardly mattered.
Joo Jae-rim named to the matchday squad
That single line alone was enough to pull in every football fan in Korea.
"I'm sorry—what? We have no broadcast team available for that time slot?"
There was just one problem: no commentary team existed that could cover the match at that hour.
"Right, everyone's already been assigned to other matches..."
A Premier League fixture airing at the same time as Valencia's had already claimed every available commentator.
It was fundamentally impossible for a Korean sports platform to broadcast every single overseas football match. There were simply too many games—but the bigger issue was that South Korea didn't have nearly as many professional football commentators as one might think.
The cause was that a commentator's salary was pitifully small relative to the intensity of the work. That was why the majority of them ran personal YouTube channels, gave lectures, or wrote books.
"Then just pull a team off one of the other matches."
And so, in the end, the sports platform had no choice but to yank a commentary team from a game it had already promised to its subscribers.
Complaints poured in from fans who'd been expecting those broadcasts, but there was nothing to be done about it.
Estadio Nuevo Mestalla.
Valencia's home ground, built to hold roughly seventy thousand spectators.
As part of its plan to accommodate an ever-growing crowd and grow into an even bigger club, Valencia had begun construction on a new stadium to replace the old Mestalla back in August of 2007.
The result was the very stadium I stood in now: Estadio Nuevo Mestalla.
And here's the truly astonishing part—it didn't open until 2030.
Valencia fans didn't rank Peter Lim as the worst owner in the club's history for nothing. Disasters like this piled up one after another, and that's what earned him the title.
It was also precisely why Valencia fans supported their current owner, Cristiano Ronaldo, so fiercely. Compared to Peter Lim, Ronaldo was a genuinely good owner.
Besides, the Valencia players' opinion of him wasn't bad either. Since he'd been a player himself, he understood the importance of facilities—and in my experience so far, at least, the training grounds were in no way inferior to those of the big clubs.
Not that it mattered much, seeing as the whole place was crawling with Ho-dongsaeng anyway.
"Jaerimi! I kicked my blind date to the curb just so I could come watch you play today!!"
Anyway, the obvious happened: I started the match on the bench.
And barring something special, the odds were high that I wouldn't feature in this game at all. Neither the manager nor the coaches had said a single word to me about playing time.
Normally, when a prospect was set to make his debut, the staff would tell him the day before that he might come on as a substitute, so be ready. At the absolute latest, they'd tell him the morning of the match itself.
That way, the kid could mentally prepare himself for the occasion.
Throw a kid into a match out of nowhere, and there's a good chance he freezes up and can't do a thing.
In the worst cases, debuts like that left prospects with lasting trauma. Which was why a prospect's debut usually took place in a calm, low-stakes stretch of the match—one that wouldn't decide the result.
And I was socially fourteen years old, for crying out loud. The chances of throwing a kid that young into a precious match with a UEFA Conference League qualification spot hanging on it were effectively zero.
Today I'll just sit back, do a little sightseeing, and head home.
"I'm telling you, that kid is not a normal prospect? Damien was right—he's got to be a hundred-year-old footballer wearing a fourteen-year-old's skin."
"Lucas, quit yapping and hand over the ten euros."
Marcos Alvarez plucked ten euros out of Lucas Peña's hand.
The two of them had placed a bet on whether Joo Jae-rim would show nerves or not—and naturally, the winner was Marcos Alvarez, who had wagered on 'Joo Jae-rim will stay perfectly calm in front of seventy thousand fans.'
"Hey, double or nothing. Bet on whether Jaerimi stays this calm at away games too. This time I'm putting my money on 'cool as a corpse.'"
"No thanks? Why would I?"
As the two grown men bickered like teenagers going through puberty—
Hoo... interesting.
The sight of Joo Jae-rim sitting on the bench with a perfectly blank expression piqued manager Julián Cortés Navarro's curiosity.
The match between Valencia and Getafe kicked off.
With a UEFA Conference League ticket on the line, everyone had expected a bloodbath—but instead, the two teams drifted along in a tedium nobody had bargained for.
"The first half is behind us and the second is underway, and yet the balance remains unbroken—still nil-nil."
The Valencia–Getafe match had drifted past the first half and into the second, and still the deadlock at nil wouldn't break.
"Boss, who should we send to warm up?"
Manager Julián Cortés Navarro's thoughts sank deeper and deeper.
"..."
And at that very moment, as the manager mulled it over, a figure caught his eye: Joo Jae-rim, watching the match with an utterly indifferent face.
—That boy is already ready.
His conversation with Cristiano Ronaldo surfaced in the manager's mind.
And soon, he made his decision.
"Jaerimi, get him ready."
Just this once, let me trust the eye of a legendary player.
"Yes, sir! ...I'm sorry—yes?"
The coach, who'd answered with full bravado, froze and asked again in genuine bewilderment.
Even the coaching staff hadn't seen Joo Jae-rim's substitution coming.
Meanwhile, at that very moment—
In the VIP lounge, Cristiano Ronaldo watched the match slip away minute by minute, growing more and more anxious.
His own hubris was the root of it all: he'd written that SNS comment certain that Jae-rim would feature. Now that it looked like the boy wouldn't make his debut today, the greatest showman on earth felt like the biggest liar in the world.
In fact, comments calling him a fraud were already raining down on his page—the disappointment of Korean fans over Jae-rim's scrapped debut had turned into full-scale comment terrorism.
Dammit. I should have pressured the manager harder.
But before long, Ronaldo's emotions flipped in an instant—
Because Julián Cortés Navarro had sent Joo Jae-rim onto the pitch.
Having let out one enormous roar at the news of Jae-rim's entrance, he immediately pulled out his phone and posted yet again.
And as the likes came flooding in—
Ronaldo's 'feeling happy-aldo' smile deepened all the more.
"Look, the Valencia bench is stirring—valencia looks like the side to make the first change."
"That's right. For Valencia to reach the UEFA Conference League, they absolutely must win this match. They need a game-winning substitution card—"
"Wait—?! Just as I'm saying this, Joo Jae-rim!! Joo Jae-rim is warming up!! Excitement isn't just building in Korea—expectations are sky-high here in Spain as well! Which is probably why they're giving his warm-up extra long coverage!"
And a short while later—
"Right before coming on, he's having a word with manager Julián Cortés Navarro. I wonder what they're saying to each other?"
Having finished his warm-up, Joo Jae-rim stepped onto the pitch.
"The 25th minute of the second half! The Republic of Korea's Joo Jae-rim enters the match—and in doing so, takes the youngest debut record away from Lamine Yamal!"
"Jaerimi."
The manager came up to me right before I stepped on and asked a question.
He'd rambled on at length, but the gist of it was: are you confident?
When I told him I'd finished preparing for this moment back when I was still implanting myself in my mother's womb, he burst out laughing.
Not a joke, by the way.
For an ordinary prospect, a debut carries a weight all its own.
Unfortunately for me, it was merely one of the thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of matches I'd played across my lifetimes.
"Pass it!"
The moment I entered the match, I called for the ball.
Had I been an ordinary prospect, they almost certainly wouldn't have given it to me. Nobody hands the ball to a wet-behind-the-ears kid who's just been subbed on in his debut.
But Valencia's midfielder Rafael Silva crossed the pass to me without a flicker of hesitation—
Yeah, the man can definitely pass.
I secured Rafael's pass cleanly and looked up the field.
Come to think of it, did these guys actually scout me?
Getafe's players weren't pressing up to close me down. Instead, they seemed to have dropped their line and packed in tight.
But dropping that deep just makes me want to shoot, you know.
One of the most common explanations for why modern football has become boring is the decline of the long-range strike. With the rise of sports science and ever more detailed tactics, everyone had come to believe that carrying the ball into the penalty box before shooting was simply more efficient than blasting away from distance.
But that logic only applied to ordinary footballers.
Take enough long-range shots—an absurd, mind-boggling number of them—and at some point, the feel just comes to you.
Oh. This one is going in. Without question.
Besides, I carried experience on an entirely different plane from the average player.
A Getafe player, sensing something ominous, sprinted over to press—
Too late.
I planted my standing foot firm, and swung my right leg through the ball.
Thwaaang—
The shot, struck dead on the laces, tore through the air.
And the ball, of course—
Swish—
slipped past the keeper's outstretched hands and rippled the back of Getafe's net.