The Worst Possible Situation for Jeonbuk Future Motors
Calling Jeonbuk's situation a mess would have been far too kind. It was an absolute disaster.
The glittering glory they'd built under Manager Choi Kang-hoe, dominating the league season after season, had faded by degrees through the regimes of Kim Mu-sik and Dan Petrescu. By 2029, Jeonbuk had become a mid-table side scraping by for scraps.
True, the previous year they'd somehow clawed out a Korea Cup title and a fourth-place league finish—maybe a last dying flash of brilliance, maybe pure luck. Even so, those results were painfully thin for a club that had once ruled the K League outright.
Mirae Motors, Jeonbuk's largest shareholder, knew it as well as anyone. They'd decided this season was the perfect moment to fire the starting gun on a revival.
"They hired Sun Ki-baek—the Korean interim manager who'd torn through the Segunda División last year—as their permanent head coach, and they pushed him hard enough to hand him total control over transfers."
A manager with absolute authority over recruitment. Anyone who followed overseas football with any seriousness would have recoiled and called it insane. That Jeonbuk was willing to swallow even that told you exactly how much this season meant to them.
With support that heavy behind him, the front office must have expected to see the manager's football from the very first match. But as the old saying went—get your hopes up and betrayal is almost guaranteed.
This time was no different.
"A few days ago they met Suwon Oseong in the ACL round of sixteen and got thrased three–nil at Jeonju Castle. Morale's on the floor, all right."
Every kind of support imaginable—and they'd still managed to tank the one competition that mattered most. The league hadn't even kicked off yet, and it was only his first match as manager; maybe he simply hadn't had time to stamp his colors on the side. But a restless front office and restless fans had no patience left for defeat. Worst of all, the hangover from that derby loss had settled over the entire club like a fog.
I let out a long breath and pulled in a deeper one.
"Then again, the novel painted Jeonbuk as even worse off than the real one. So maybe this isn't strange at all."
In most football novels, the protagonist's team was stacked with elite talent. This one was different. More accurately, Jeonbuk was so thoroughly wrecked that "the orphanage run by Yoon Seung-hwan" was the only fair description.
They deleted every player who could have been called an ace—myself included—and filled the holes with absolute garbage.
The squad was split into factions of high-wage veteran seniors and the kids at the bottom. The veterans were locked in a staring contest with a young manager who insisted on discipline, and the young players who should have been banding together were shredded into pieces. Of course, the biggest reason the kids couldn't unite was the existence of a certain Baek Yi-an… but what was I supposed to do about that? Jeonbuk had already been rotting long before I possessed this body.
A team that broken was beyond even me to fix overnight.
"A shit team that can't win unless Yoon Seung-hwan carries the log himself. That was Jeonbuk Future Motors in the novel."
Looking back, I still wondered what the author had been thinking. Was it to set up the classic lone-hero carry narrative? Or just faithful documentation of how Jeonbuk had started collapsing in the 2020s?
"Whatever the reason, the important part is that the second I possessed this body, that future was scheduled for deletion."
I smiled emptily and bounced lightly on the turf, working my legs free.
"After the rondo comes a light practice match to warm up, right?"
Ripping apart a novel I'd once loved with my own hands wasn't exactly a joyful experience. But the author had been the one rude enough to dump me into this body without so much as a by-your-leave, so he'd have to live with the consequences.
"Deep down, that bastard probably wanted to know just how important a defensive midfielder really is. So I'll be happy to show him."
I had no intention of selflessly cooperating with Yoon Seung-hwan and lifting him up. Quite the opposite. I planned to use him like a dog.
A striker who finished the second you put the ball at his feet properly? After an entire playing career spent wishing for exactly that kind of player, I was going to wring every last drop out of him now that he'd dropped into my lap.
I was still smirking when a voice cut across the field.
"Ugh, is this weather even legal? It's only March—why is it already this hot…"
The rondo in the middle of the training ground must have finally wrapped up. A guy came toward me, scratching hard at his scalp with a scowl. His face was flushed bright red and he was fanning himself with one hand, so the heat complaint wasn't an act.
He stopped beside me, tilted his head, and asked:
"What's with you, Baek Yi-an? You look completely checked out. Fight with your girlfriend last night or something? Treat A-yoon right, man. Do you know how rare a girl like that is? If I had a childhood friend like her, I'd have gotten engaged ages ago."
"…You're Han Gang-rok?"
"What? Of course I'm Han Gang-rok—you think I'm Han Gyeong-rok? We spent all of middle school together. At least learn to tell the twins apart by the face, man."
Han Gang-rok let out an incredulous little huff and collected himself. The look in his eyes said a so-called friend forgetting his name had genuinely shocked him.
Not that I could help it. Main characters with proper illustrations were one thing. Figuring out who someone was from a few throwaway lines of description was another matter entirely.
And these two are identical twins. Of course they're hard to tell apart.
Still, years of reading the novel hadn't been a total waste. The way he talked was enough to place him.
Han Gang-rok—right fullback who came in on a semi-pro contract same as me. Identical twin brother Han Gyeong-rok is on the same team, left fullback.
Twin fullbacks on opposite flanks, looking exactly the same—the setup had been interesting enough that it stuck. Freshly debuted pros usually arrived tense and careful, but these two had been so brazen from day one that I'd wondered if they were just that bold.
No—they had the guts, all right. They just had so much confidence they completely wrecked their work ethic.
Not the healthiest mindset for a player. Talent, though? Talent they had, which was why I remembered them.
Anyway—if the rondo was over, why drag himself all the way out into the sun instead of collapsing in the shade?
That was when the corner of Han Gang-rok's mouth twisted, and his laughing eyes locked onto me.
"Yo, Yi-an. You hear about this? The day we got stomped by Suwon, some of the seniors hopped straight on a train to a club, and fans caught them on camera. Seniors, in-season, hitting clubs—come on, that's not okay, right?"
What's this? Getting angry that the seniors went clubbing? Unexpectedly professional of him?
"Fuck. If they were going, they should've taken us too. It's not like we even played—our condition was perfect. God damn it!"
Ugh. Fucking knew it.
The sheer state of him dragged a dry laugh out of me before I could stop it. I wasn't disappointed in Han Gang-rok. I'd never expected anything from him in the first place; you can't fall through a floor that was already gone.
I'd known what kind of guy he was from the start. If I'd still been Kang Yun-ho, I never would have gotten close—I'd have shut him out completely. If Baek Yi-an's original personality had been a perfect copy of mine, the ankles I twisted during training might not have been Yoon Seung-hwan's. They might have belonged to the seniors who'd flushed their professionalism down the toilet, and these twins.
That was how little I wanted to share oxygen with this type of person. And yet I couldn't simply ignore them either.
Objectively, they're excellent resources. Two-footed, physical, aggressive defending, high tackle success rate. Sure, they occasionally lose their minds and charge forward like their brains fell out—but if someone's there to put a leash on them, that problem goes away.
Fullbacks were one of Korean football's two great Achilles' heels right alongside defensive midfielders. I'd almost certainly run into these two on the national team. In the original story they'd collapsed right alongside Baek Yi-an, so other players got the call-ups instead—and those seniors were all veterans you couldn't exactly boss around.
A pro shouldn't be thinking about seniority mid-match; he should be thinking about winning. But that only applied in clubs where the chemistry had been built over years. National teams—especially a Korean one hypersensitive to hierarchy and discipline—were a different animal. There was a reason Guus Hiddink, when he took over the Korean national team in 2002, had to order the players to drop the formal speech and talk casually on the pitch.
No matter how much time passed, every country had its cultural quirks, and that hadn't changed even now. And I hated it.
The moment a match started, I wanted to dictate the tempo myself and have the players follow. For that, the fullbacks and center-backs who'd share the defensive line with me needed to be close enough in age that we could actually communicate.
I don't like the state of them right now… but it doesn't matter. They haven't soaked too deep yet. Scrub them raw and rebuild them like new, and we're done.
Do you throw out a rag just because it got dirty? I didn't think so. You wash it as hard as you can first. Only if it's beyond saving do you throw it away.
Throwing things out at the first stain was wasteful.
I'd decided to scrub the filth off this particular rag. That meant putting as much distance as possible between the twins and the parasites currently rotting the team.
"Haa. Filthy hot. For real."
Looking at Han Gang-rok, head down and still fanning himself furiously, I opened my mouth.
"Hey. You didn't hear?"
"Huh? Hear what?"
"That club the seniors went to last time. Word is it's a gay club."
"What the fuck? Gay? Don't bullshit me! The club they went to was called Orgasm—I heard it myself!"
"You think those assholes would come right out and say they went to a gay club? Of course they bluffed. Apparently they actually went to a different place nearby. I heard they even fought over who got to be center when the girl-group tracks came on. That's why they're not even talking to each other right now."
"No way that… wait. Is it? Now that you mention it, the seniors have been kind of awkward with each other lately…?"
His eyes clouded over almost instantly. Dig hard enough and anyone could tell it was complete nonsense. The awkwardness was just the seniors keeping their heads down because the manager—and even the director—had found out. But if the ones hearing it were the twins, they wouldn't bother digging at all.
"Nah, wait—some of those seniors are m-married, right?"
"Guess they left to find true love. Just ignore it and move on. Ask them to their faces and you might get dragged along next time."
"Ugh, fuck. Don't say crazy shit like that, man."
Han Gang-rok wrapped both arms around himself and shot to his feet. His gaze swung toward the seniors cooling down across the training ground—and went ice-cold.
Disappointment sat in that look. But the meaning underneath was different from before. A moment ago the anger had been pure FOMO—seething that while he'd been grinding himself to dust at the clubhouse, those bastards had been out living it up with women. Now it was contempt: the same seniors who spent every day clamping down on the juniors had been at a club fighting over center spots to girl-group songs like complete idiots.
Either way, it worked for me. Plant that seed and the twins would start drifting away from the seniors, little by little, without even noticing.
I carefully hid a satisfied smile and finished loosening up. The moment my stretching was perfect, a coach's voice rolled across the training ground like thunder.
"We've wrapped up most of the drills and position work! Let's finish with a practice match!"
"What are you waiting for? Let's go, Han Gang-rok."
"Ah, shit. What if those bastards start feeling me up during a shoulder charge? Yo, Yi-an—you know how long a ban is if I break a senior's arm?"
The sight of him genuinely fretting over something that would never happen was almost too funny. I swallowed the laugh and headed for the center of the pitch with him.
Practice matches were kept simple. Split into two elevens, each side running the tactics the manager had assigned, raising tactical fluency through a short game. The manager himself stayed out of it; the coaching staff filled the "manager" role for each team. Even then they barely interfered—mostly just monitoring whether the players moved inside the system and whether they understood the detailed patterns drilled into them through repetition. In practice, the players ran things themselves according to the plan.
It can look like neglect, but there's no better way to see how players will actually execute a system on the pitch.
In a real match a manager still directed from the technical area, but a player's view from inside the game was never the same as a manager's view from outside it. Reading the mood of a match and adjusting in a rapidly shifting tempo was never easy, no matter how experienced the squad. Knowing that, the manager had deliberately chosen this format—to train the players' ability to make active decisions on their own, without him stepping in. If a similar situation arose on match day, they'd be able to solve it themselves.
It wouldn't be easy. But train it consistently and the lightbulb moment would come.
Carrying that belief, Oh Hyun-ook—Jeonbuk Future Motors' head coach—watched the field.
"I've been telling you! They're funneling everything through Yoon Seung-hwan! The winger drags the ball on the side, pulls the fullbacks out, and then feeds the center through the gap that opens up! So we set a 5-4-1 defensive shape and plug the intervals that appear when they attack! You get it? Then move! Chun-jae hyung! What are you doing over there?! Stop zoning out and hold your position! That's it—just like that!"
"…What? It's only been fifteen minutes. He reads their entire attacking pattern after a few attacks and builds a defensive shape on the spot? That kid?"
Oh Hyun-ook let out a short, disbelieving laugh as he watched Baek Yi-an explaining furiously in the middle of a group of players still scowling from the goal they'd just conceded.
At first he thought he'd misheard. Baek Yi-an's bib team hadn't been told how the opposition would attack. All the coaches had given them was that the other side would use a 3-2-4-1. The detailed tactics, the build-up patterns—those they were supposed to figure out while playing.
And yet after a single attack, the kid had not only read the intention but designed a defensive structure to counter it?
How? And it's not even nonsense. He's describing exactly how to pin them down…
It made no sense. It shouldn't have been possible. Maybe after a long stretch of play—but the match hadn't even hit fifteen minutes. And an eighteen-year-old who'd only just debuted on a semi-pro contract was the one doing it?
He was too stunned to speak. For a moment Oh Hyun-ook could only marvel at judgment that sharp—even if it belonged to the other team. Then the pitch started serving up shock after shock.
"Huh? What—when did he—?!"
"What are you doing?! You're just going to let their volante step up free? Press him! Don't give him time!"
"Why is that kid so fast?!"
"Three of you on him and you still can't win the ball—what are we supposed to do with that?!"
"We're trying! He just slips out! He's fast and we can't do anything about it!"
What the hell is this kid? The analysis report we got before the call-up didn't show anything near this level.
A prospect freshly called up to the first team on a semi-pro deal was shutting down first-team veterans who'd been grinding through the league the previous season. And it wasn't just defending.
Even in the most basic build-up phases, Baek Yi-an parked himself in positions designed to make the opposition uncomfortable. The second the ball entered midfield properly, he began strangling the entire team.
Thud!
"Argh!"
"Why does he keep—!"
They were even running a 3-2-4-1 to create a numerical midfield advantage with four central players. And still it was their own side getting dragged under. Was it because the players didn't understand the 3-2-4-1 well enough? Maybe—but that wasn't a real answer. From where Oh Hyun-ook stood, the numerical advantage was clearly being created.
Which left a simple explanation.
Baek Yi-an… he's the hub. Everything runs through him.
Even when a numerical superiority formed, he broke the press. When that wasn't possible, he used teammates actively to escape. He contested the midfield, joined attacks—and still handled his primary job of protecting and organizing the back four without a hitch.
That was enough. Oh Hyun-ook barked out a helpless laugh.
No need to watch any more.
The team was already tangled in the net. Without a tactical adjustment, all that remained was getting thoroughly beaten.
"Hey! Second ball—cut it out!"
"Ah—!"
BOOM! Thwack!
"Yes, Yi-an! How the hell do you plant a long shot from there, you bastard?!"
"Whoa—I did not see him hitting that first time…"
When Baek Yi-an's second-ball strike ripped straight into the net, Oh Hyun-ook could only shake his head. A truly hopeless situation—and yet his mouth was full of nothing but a smile.
Better than I expected… We knew he was good from the youth levels, but did he take a real step up after the semi-pro contract? The analysis never showed this.
A resource who might become the core of the team someday had just announced himself right here. And a defensive midfielder, no less—the scarcest position in modern football. Finding talent there meant a lost practice match was completely irrelevant.
"I wonder how the manager saw it."
The awe faded; Oh Hyun-ook turned toward the man watching from behind.
"…"
"Judging by that reaction, the manager's satisfied too."
He snorted at the sight of Sun Ki-baek staring at the pitch with eyes sharp enough to kill. To a stranger it might have looked like the manager wanted to murder a player for a mistake. But Oh Hyun-ook had spent years at his side. He knew better.
That look meant nothing of the sort. From the start, Sun Ki-baek's gaze had been locked on Baek Yi-an.
"…"
"At this rate, next season's starting lineup might already be changing."
And when the manager looked at a player like that, it meant only one thing: a resource that fit his heart perfectly had just appeared.