Twenty-Two Goals and a Scandal
Time flew by after the shocking news broke that Fly World Class 11 would be filming overseas.
For the record, I have absolutely no memory of how the shoot that day actually went.
“Th-thank you for your hard work.”
By the time I came to my senses, filming had already wrapped.
“Waaaah! Mom! I'm never playing soccer again—!!”
The players from the opposing team sat slumped on the ground, bawling their eyes out.
And in that moment, I understood. No—I had to understand.
The budding young footballers who had grown up dreaming of becoming players had just been crushed underfoot by the calamity known as an infinite regressor.
This is exactly why I tried not to play soccer back in elementary school.
The eyes on me were ice cold.
The Main PD wore the expression of a man wondering, Is it even okay to air this?
Even my mother, who usually beamed and shouted that her son was the best, managed only a strained smile and a thumbs-up.
Shhhuffle—.
When I took a single step toward the bench, the kids on it instantly retreated two steps back.
...
Even an infinite regressor found that reaction a little hurtful.
So this is what a third-grader's soccer skills look like?
Hwang Hyun-woo, editing the match footage, felt an involuntary shiver run through his body.
Setting aside the fact that the sudden arrival of a genius boy was going to make the show a smash hit, PD Hwang Hyun-woo had serious concerns about the program's overall balance.
It had all gone completely off-script from what he'd originally planned—Joo Jae-rim's overwhelming talent had turned the whole show into a one-man performance.
If the executives at other broadcasting stations had heard what Hwang Hyun-woo was worried about, they would have cursed him out for being a spoiled complainer.
But from the standpoint of the main producer, Hwang Hyun-woo had no choice but to take the current situation seriously.
The moment Joo Jae-rim left the show.
Every regular viewer tuning in now would drop off with him.
If things keep going like this, we're in trouble.
Of course, Jae-rim's departure wasn't the only crisis.
Jae-rim's munchkin-level abilities were also, for viewers, simply too stimulating to sustain.
To keep the show running long-term, he needed a loss sooner or later.
It didn't necessarily have to be a defeat—but at the very least, the matches needed to feel genuinely contested.
So Hwang Hyun-woo invited a fairly well-known soccer academy.
The opposing team, eager to lay eyes on Joo Jae-rim—the recently famous soccer prodigy—gladly accepted.
Right up until then, Hwang Hyun-woo had believed this would produce a reasonably respectable match.
Tweet! Tweet-tweet!
...
But the result that played out was on a completely different dimension.
It was a one-sided rout for Fly World Class 11. Joo Jae-rim had single-handedly demolished the other team.
That didn't mean the day's shoot had been a failure, though.
Whatever fate the dreams of those soccer-starved kids may have suffered, the adults present had watched Jae-rim's play in a daze of awe.
Staring at the monitor, Hwang Hyun-woo let out a low whistle of admiration.
...Wow. The immersion is insane.
The footage ended with Joo Jae-rim in frame, looking straight into the camera.
When he snapped out of it, all fifty minutes of both halves had flashed by in what felt like an instant.
He'd hit play to start editing—and just sat there staring blankly at the screen.
So this is what real talent looks like.
Hwang Hyun-woo murmured in wonder and played the match footage through once more.
With talent like that, forget balance—I'm pushing him to the moon.
And that day, PD Hwang Hyun-woo gave up on balancing the program altogether.
The day Joo Jae-rim left the show—
PD Hwang Hyun-woo decided he would simply pull the plug on it entirely.
PD Hwang Hyun-woo and the OTT platform representative asked everyone who had been at the set that day to keep their mouths shut until the broadcast aired.
It was already written into the NDAs they'd signed, but they stressed it again just in case.
That's how influential they believed Joo Jae-rim's performance would be.
But everywhere you go, there's always someone who can't keep their trap shut—
What happened on the set that day spread across the internet on the back of a single forum post.
Still, it didn't do any real damage to the program.
Because everyone assumed the poster's claims were pure fantasy.
Not only that—the netizens piled on in the comments, mocking the original poster and tearing into him personally—
Unable to contain a flash of rage, the poster uploaded a message doxxing his own identity.
A short while later, he received a warning from the site's security team and was forced to delete everything.
Seeing the vanished post, the netizens showered him with mockery all over again.
“Huh? Isn't that kid over there the one from that show?”
The show I'd joined out of a desire to be a good son to my parents was, most regrettably, having a considerably larger impact on my daily life than I'd anticipated.
“Whoa. It really is him!”
Lately, the number of people recognizing me on the street had been steadily climbing.
So I'd been keeping outings to a strict minimum, apart from training.
Since I was still a young child, there was a very real chance of safety issues cropping up.
But before long, the training grounds I used started drawing crowds too.
Someone had posted footage of me training on the internet.
No safety incidents had occurred yet—but I was not the kind of idiot who would complacently assume nothing ever would.
...Looks like I'll have to cut back on training for a while, too. Maybe I should join a soccer academy or something.
And it was at that exact moment that I thought of the set.
...Their training facility was pretty nice. Could I borrow it for a bit on days when they're not filming?
“You're asking if you can use the training grounds on days when we're not filming?”
The Main PD was flustered by my sudden request, but agreed—conditionally.
And the condition wasn't much of a problem at all.
They would install cameras; in exchange, the footage captured could be used for the broadcast.
I gladly accepted the Main PD's terms.
There were security staff on site as well, so this place offered its own measure of safety.
“Jae-rim, it's a bit soon to let you use the facility right away. Could you wait a few days?”
“Yes, sir.”
A few days later.
The Main PD posted an announcement in the group chat.
The training grounds were now open as of today, and anyone who wanted to use them could.
He'd attached the same terms he'd hung on me—clearly scheming to squeeze broadcast footage out of the other cast members however he could.
Frankly, as long as it didn't interfere with my training, I couldn't have cared less.
Who's going to show up for voluntary training when the cameras aren't even rolling?
But my prediction missed by a mile.
Once word got around that I was training at the set—
a kid started showing up at the training grounds to follow me.
His face was familiar enough that even I, who am terrible with faces, recognized it.
What was his name again? Kim Hyun-sung, was it?
A devoted follower-type who bluntly started copying my entire training routine out of nowhere.
Well. It was a bit early for that, but it was something I'd been through plenty of times already.
Young soccer prospects being influenced by a world-class player was nothing unusual.
And unlike the other kids, who were only in it for screen time, this was one who genuinely dreamed of becoming a professional.
Apparently, he hadn't been able to join a school soccer club because of his family's difficult circumstances, and had applied to the program because he wanted to learn the game properly.
A pitiful story, admittedly.
But regrettably, it stirred no particular emotion in me.
In this country alone, there were countless stories just like it.
Then again, he's certainly a bright, unclouded little thing.
Kids from poor households tend to shrink into themselves—but there wasn't a trace of that here. From that alone, I could tell he'd been raised with plenty of love from his parents.
Well. He might look fine on the outside while rotting away on the inside. Who knows.
Just my personal opinion, but if you want to succeed in life, I'd recommend hitting the books over chasing soccer.
Unless you possessed absolutely overwhelming talent, your odds of succeeding as a student were far higher than your odds of succeeding as a footballer.
Anyway.
At first, I tried to ignore the kid.
Sigh. That's not how you do it.
But watching him stumble through the motions with his clumsy form, I simply couldn't resist offering a pointer.
“Hey. Come here. That's not how you do that.”
Kim Hyun-sung had dreamed of becoming a soccer player since he was little.
But because of his family's poverty, he'd never been able to register with a soccer club.
Unless you were affiliated with a professional youth academy, playing the sport cost far more money than people imagined.
He'd even shown a decent talent for the game, which only made the disappointment sting worse.
Then, one day, he spotted an advertisement recruiting cast members for Fly World Class 11—
and Kim Hyun-sung applied to the program as if in a trance.
Fly World Class 11 handed Kim Hyun-sung a handful of precious opportunities all at once.
The most valuable among them was meeting a certain boy.
Secretly, Kim Hyun-sung liked Joo Jae-rim. He wanted to get close to him.
Because Joo Jae-rim had never once treated him differently over the color of his skin.
“Are you a goldfish? I just showed you. How do you fail at that?”
That said, Joo Jae-rim was rude to absolutely everyone except his family.
After the Fly World Class 11 broadcast aired,
Joo Jae-rim's popularity became a full-blown craze.
YouTubers began popping up, babbling about exactly how immense Jae-rim's talent really was.
“Pfft, one look and you can tell this is staged.”
And among them, inevitably, came those claiming the footage of Jae-rim's exploits had been doctored.
But the moment the next broadcast dropped, the conspiracy YouTubers had no choice but to vanish.
PD Hwang Hyun-woo, having abandoned editing altogether, had committed the lunatic act of airing the full, uncut match footage.
What the broadcast revealed of Joo Jae-rim was shock and awe incarnate.
The boy had scored twenty-two goals single-handedly, effectively blowing the match to pieces.
“Wow... I concede. This is just completely insane.”
“Look, how am I supposed to call THAT staged? I do have a conscience, you know.”
PD Hwang Hyun-woo's mad gambit had shut even the copy-paste conspiracy YouTubers up for good.
Meanwhile, at that very moment—
the higher Joo Jae-rim's popularity climbed, the hotter the fury burned in one particular person.
The parent of the student who had been on the receiving end of Jae-rim's fist back when he was being cursed out and struck first.
Worse still, her son had led the bullying campaign against Joo Jae-rim at school, only for the wind to blow back in his face—until he finally refused to attend school at all.
Grr... my son hasn't come out of his room since.
Looking at her boy entombed in his bedroom, the student's mother finally lost her composure and tipped off the press.
“Nobody knows how violent that demonic child is. Everyone in this country is being deceived!”
She poured every ounce of the rage in her heart out in front of the reporter—
Why is this reporter just... believing everything I say?
By the time she came back to her senses, the incident had spiraled far beyond her control.
...W-well, it wasn't a lie, at least. He did hit my son. That part's true.
The assault controversy surrounding Joo Jae-rim had broken out in the middle of filming for Fly World Class 11.
“PD-nim! We've got a problem!”
Hwang Hyun-woo was about to snap at the youngest PD, but swallowed his anger when he saw the panic on the kid's face.
“What is it? What happened?”
The youngest PD whispered quietly, low enough for only Hwang Hyun-woo to hear.
“...For now, bring Jae-rim and his mother in. Let's confirm the facts first.”
He could say this because of the trust he'd built watching Joo Jae-rim on set—the boy was simply not the type to swing a fist rashly.
I heard the full story of the controversy from the Main PD.
Perhaps my mother had already looked into it beforehand—she showed no great sign of shock.
Her expression's still grim, though.
Well, of course. No parent could look cheerful with their child caught up in a scandal.
Carefully, I patted my mother on the back to tell her not to worry.
To be honest, I'd known something like this would happen eventually.
But I felt no regret about throwing that punch. Not even now.
It's not like a bit of hate mail is going to end the world.
This was the composure of a man who, on the sole grounds of being a naturalized citizen, had been dragged before the entire nation as a traitor and slandered down through his ancestors' generations.
In any case, while my mother and the Main PD stepped out to talk—
I searched the controversy on my smartphone.
The scandal was bigger than I'd expected.
A backlash against my popularity, huh.
With a controversy this size, the program's side would probably need to consider dropping me to distance the show from the mess.
...It can't be helped. I can't let this hurt everyone else. I'll leave the show.
The moment the Main PD walked back in with a grave expression, I offered my resignation on the spot.
“Since I've caused trouble for the program, I'd like to step down from the—”
“Jae-rim! What on earth are you saying?! Quit the show over something like THIS?!”
But the instant I declared I was leaving, the Main PD cut me off with an aghast, rock-solid refusal.
“...Let's just move the overseas shoot up a little.”
Even the OTT platform representative pretended not to hear me and pivoted to a different topic entirely.
Watching all of this unfold, I honestly couldn't tell whether to laugh.
...Isn't this exactly the kind of controversy that warrants getting dropped?