Sister, I Want to Hear You Sing

To be perfectly selfish, Taylor doesn't really care what kind of results Arsenal ends up with.

She just wants to see her boyfriend play happily and enjoy himself on the pitch.

Whether he achieves anything or not—that's not what she cares about.

Li Yufei also knew what his girlfriend was thinking. After all, back when he first chose to pursue a professional football career, Taylor's first reaction was: "Football? What's that?"

To a Chinese person, that might seem like a baffling question.

But for a native-born American, it's not strange at all.

Because on American soil, conservatism runs deep. Many Americans only care about their own little patch of land and have zero interest in the outside world.

As citizens of the world's number one superpower, they carry a natural sense of superiority.

America is the beacon of world civilization, and they are God's chosen people.

They just need to mind their own backyard—as for the rest of the world, they can't be bothered.

Football is wildly popular worldwide, the number one sport on the planet?

Who cares?

What the hell does that have to do with Americans?

Keep in mind, even though the United States hosted the 1994 World Cup, on American soil, football is practically a niche sport.

Li Yufei remembered seeing an annual ranking of TV program ratings in the U.S. from his past life.

In the top 100 highest-rated programs in America for a single year, American football alone took up seventy-five spots!

All the remaining programs combined only accounted for twenty-five!

And out of those twenty-five, the MLB World Series and the NBA Finals each took one spot, both ranking near the bottom.

The rest were mostly entertainment shows like talk shows.

As for football?

Sorry, even a match featuring Messi's Inter Miami barely pulls in a fraction of the ratings of the hundredth-ranked program...

Even the 2022 Qatar World Cup final couldn't crack the top 100 annual ratings list in the U.S.

That's the cold shoulder football, the world's number one sport, gets on American soil.

By comparison, although China is also a football desert, the ratings and viewership for major football tournaments are definitely not low!

Every year on China's domestic ratings chart, matches involving the Chinese National Team always rank in the top ten!

And it's common to see several spots in the top ten taken up by national team games.

As for the World Cup, that quadrennial global spectacle, the Chinese people still manage to "participate" in spirit.

Even if the tournament has nothing to do with the national team, the Chinese love for joining in on the excitement remains intact.

Plenty of armchair fans and pseudo-fans who never pay attention to football on a daily basis still jump into World Cup discussions.

From that perspective, the football atmosphere in China absolutely crushes that of America, another football desert.

Li Yufei had lived in the U.S. for so many years that he rarely heard people around him casually chatting about football.

American football, baseball, basketball, and hockey were their true loves!

If it weren't for his past-life memories, living in such an environment for so long might have meant he'd never cross paths with football in this life.

Hearing Taylor's concerns now, Li Yufei stroked her soft, delicate hand and explained gently:

"That won't happen. This time, the club's transfer targets are all young players, around my age."

"They're not yet capable of competing with me for a starting spot. It's more about investing in the future."

Only after getting her boyfriend's reassurance did Taylor breathe a sigh of relief.

She knew that her man, just like her, was someone who took his career very seriously.

If her goal was to become the Pop Music Queen, then her boyfriend's goal was to become the Football King.

Both had ambition, and both had the ability to achieve their goals—that was the essence of this relationship between two power-driven individuals.

Taylor asked herself: if she were dating a man with no career drive, they'd probably break up before long.

Because their attitudes toward life would be completely different, their values mismatched!

People with incompatible worldviews can only come together briefly—they can never last.

Unless one of them gives in along the way...

But with Taylor's personality, she would never give in.

As for Li Yufei, knowing her boyfriend as she did, his pride meant he wouldn't give in either.

They love each other deeply and always consider one another, but when it comes to their careers, there's no room for compromise.

In the end, the only option was to part ways and seek new love elsewhere.

Things are fine as they are now—Taylor can focus on writing songs, releasing albums, holding concerts, and doing everything she can to win awards while boosting her commercial value and fame.

Li Yufei can also play football well, rack up results, earn personal honors, and land endorsement deals.

Occasionally, they can pull off a cross-industry collaboration to stir up some buzz for both sides—what a great arrangement.

When they have free time, they can live like a normal couple, holed up in their shared little home enjoying a blissful life together, ignoring the storms outside.

Just thinking about it makes that kind of life feel worth looking forward to.

"Sister, sing me a song from your new album, okay? I want to hear it."

Faced with her boyfriend's coaxing request, Taylor let out a chuckle. She didn't refuse, but instead teased him:

"Little brother Fei, if outsiders saw the proud, confident star striker on the pitch acting spoiled with his girlfriend in private, they'd probably drop their jaws in shock."

Li Yufei wasn't ashamed of it—on the contrary, he took it as a compliment and climbed right up the ladder:

"On the pitch, they're all a bunch of rough guys. Why would I bother being polite with them?"

"Only by crushing them will those simple-minded, muscle-bound fools fear me when they see me and dare not mess around."

Taylor shook her head helplessly, reached out to ruffle Li Yufei's hair a few times, then went to the music room to grab her guitar.

Two minutes later, Taylor played for Li Yufei on a guitar that wasn't one of her endorsed models.

Even though Li Yufei didn't know much about guitars, looking at this one—its body gleaming under the light, with a spruce top and maple back and sides—he could tell it wasn't cheap!

"Sister, what about that shiny silver guitar of yours?"

Li Yufei remembered that during Taylor's tours, she used a very eye-catching silver guitar. It stood out so much that it left an impression on him.

What he didn't know, though, was that the guitar wasn't actually silver—it was custom-set with over three thousand crystals, which only made it look silver under the stage lights...

Hearing Li Yufei's description, Taylor immediately knew which guitar her boyfriend was talking about.

"Oh, you mean the Swarovski custom guitar? I didn't bring it—it's back in Nashville."

"What, does Fei want it?"

Li Yufei quickly waved his hands. Come on—what would a tone-deaf music idiot like him do with a guitar?

He was just asking out of curiosity, nothing more.

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