You're Just Making Up the Numbers!

After getting off the plane and taking a taxi, they had traveled a long way.

By the time the surroundings had practically turned into a forest and flocks of pigeons were cooing away, they finally arrived at the Real Madrid Youth Team.

The location was incredibly remote.

And it was not just the location. Once they reached the gym, Sun Hao found the Real Madrid Team quite different from what he had imagined.

The gym was in disrepair, and the equipment inside was quite outdated.

It seemed the Spanish government did not allocate much funding to basketball either.

That was not too surprising. Spanish basketball had not truly risen to prominence yet.

Not to mention anything else, just three years earlier, at the 1994 Toronto Men's Basketball World Championships Group Stage, Spain had lost to the Chinese team.

Having learned from that painful defeat, Spain had already begun its road to revival.

The funding might not have caught up for the time being, but their approach was already very forward-thinking.

Sun Hao could see that from the moment Raul brought him into the Training Hall and he saw young basketball talent from all around the world.

To raise the level of basketball, youth development was the highest priority.

Spain had taken an inclusive approach, bringing in basketball talent from around the world to create competition, then using that competition to improve domestic basketball.

It was an extremely wise approach.

After Raul brought Sun Hao to the Training Hall, he immediately went off to busy himself with the assistant coaches. Just like on the plane, he paid Sun Hao no attention at all.

Sun Hao looked around, set down his backpack, found a spot, and began warming up by himself.

He had just finished his warm-up and had not yet started ball drills when Raul gathered everyone together.

Once everyone had assembled and lined up in rows, he began his speech.

The first half was mostly empty platitudes, though they were necessary ones.

Things like how everyone here was a gifted young talent from around the world, Children of Heaven who might enter professional basketball in the future, and how this place was a cradle leading to success.

Sun Hao could have delivered that speech himself in his previous life.

While Raul spoke, he carefully observed the teammates around him.

There were tall ones, short ones, fat ones, and thin ones. The Real Madrid Youth Team was far more inclusive than Hongyuan.

During this time, two people made eye contact with him.

One was about the same age as him, and a trace of disdain flashed through his eyes when they looked at each other.

The other looked only eleven or twelve. When their eyes met, he gave Sun Hao a youthful, friendly smile.

Sun Hao did not pay either of them much mind. Since they came from all around the world, their personalities would naturally be just as varied.

By then, the opening pleasantries were over. Raul began explaining the necessary details about the Spanish basketball league system, and Sun Hao turned his attention back to him.

"Spain currently has four levels of leagues. Our Youth Team plays in the fourth-tier league, which has a total of 108 teams."

Raul's opening sentence surprised him.

Spain did not have a large population, and its basketball population was even smaller. Yet youth teams alone numbered this many. Its future rise made perfect sense.

Raul went on to introduce the rest of the league structure in detail, and Sun Hao gained a deeper understanding of those 108 teams.

It was not easy to scrape together 108 youth teams in Spain alone, much less ensure their quality.

But as he had seen earlier, Spain's reforms emphasized inclusivity, and the number of foreign players in the league far exceeded the number of domestic Spanish players.

The EBA League had been in place for five years, with remarkable results. A large number of young talents had already entered the Training Camp Rosters of National Teams from various countries.

Survival of the fittest—the laws of competition applied everywhere. This place had practically become a youth talent training base for European basketball and even world basketball.

The EBA League was the lowest-level league. Above it was the third-tier Plata League.

The Plata League had far fewer teams, only twenty-four.

Such a sharp drop in numbers meant the threshold rose dramatically. Only the best among young players could enter the third-tier league.

Then came the second-tier Oro League, which had even fewer teams—only eighteen.

The highest level was the first-tier ACB, Spain's best-known La Liga, with only seventeen teams in total.

It was like leveling up in a fantasy novel: one threshold per level, filtering layer by layer. In the end, only the best of the best could enter La Liga.

Of course, just like the EBA League Sun Hao was currently in, the three higher-tier leagues were also highly inclusive.

Even giants like Real Madrid and Barcelona in La Liga had far more foreign players than domestic ones.

After listening to Raul, Sun Hao felt both pleased and worried.

He was pleased because such a clearly tiered league system was fair. It would not shut someone outside the gates completely over height, like the CBA did.

But he was worried because the system had one unavoidable drawback: seniority.

The higher one went, the more adult professional players there would be, and the fewer opportunities young players would certainly receive.

If he had to climb through the leagues one level at a time, even if he spent only a year at each level, it would still take three years.

In other words, he would only reach La Liga three years later.

That would not do, because by then the Five-Year Pact would already be up.

He would indeed have become a professional player, but the European League received no attention at all back home right now.

He could not exactly run up to Li Yuanwei and Yang Wei and tell them, "See? I'm part of La Liga now. I've gone pro. You've been proven wrong!"

That approach was too lame. What he needed was another kind of unavoidable voice.

A voice they would hear even if they covered their ears, without him having to say a word himself.

Just as he had planned before, he needed to become an NBA rookie.

"Coach, can you skip levels?"

After Raul finished speaking, Sun Hao raised his hand and asked.

To him, it was a perfectly normal question. He did not want to waste so much time in lower-tier leagues.

Or rather, he simply did not have that much time.

But the moment he asked, laughter erupted around him.

As if he had just asked an unbelievably stupid question.

"Who do you think you are? Getting into the Plata League already makes you a genius, and you want to skip levels? A genius among geniuses?"

The speaker stood behind Sun Hao, his tone full of mockery.

Sun Hao turned and saw that it was the same person who had looked at him with disdain earlier.

That prompted another wave of laughter.

Unlike the other third-tier leagues, youth teams had no fixed roster limit. Some teams had twenty players, while others had nearly thirty.

With 108 teams, that meant the EBA League had at least two or three thousand players.

Yet the third-tier league had only twenty-four teams, with fifteen players as the standard roster size—just 360 players.

That was nearly a one-in-ten ratio. The difficulty was anything but small.

And if one wanted to skip even further upward, the difficulty rose like an exponential function—squared, raised to the fourth power...

This was not a question of whether it was difficult. It was practically impossible.

After snapping out of it, Raul laughed too.

Sun Hao really was thinking too far ahead.

Still, he nodded.

"Theoretically, it's possible. Barcelona had a young player named Pau Gasol last year. He took only one year to go from the youth team to La Liga."

At the mention of Gasol, the young players' eyes unconsciously filled with respect.

He was a legendary figure among La Liga youth teams, an interior beast who had once put up 40+20 in a single game.

Sun Hao nodded as well after hearing that. He had actually forgotten about Gasol. Gasol was only two years older than him, seventeen at the time, and should have just made the first team.

Skipping three leagues in one year showed just how extraordinary Gasol's talent was.

Sun Hao's question became a minor interruption to the opening speech. Raul did not dwell on it and continued arranging the players' training.

First came warm-ups and basic off-ball drills.

Spain's basketball reforms had also put effort into training methods, combining the strengths of American and European basketball to achieve twice the results with half the effort.

After the basic drills came ball-handling training.

Ball drills were divided into non-contact and contact training.

In the non-contact drills, Sun Hao's performance was eye-catching.

Whether in dribbling or shooting, he ranked in the top tier of the Training Camp.

Raul's change in attitude before and after made him realize the competition he faced here, so he stopped holding anything back.

The second-to-last segment was one-on-one contact drills.

It was during this segment that Raul deliberately matched Sun Hao against the person who had mocked him.

He had done it intentionally.

Before the new season's Training Camp began, Raul had taken a solo trip around the world in search of outstanding young basketball talent.

China had been his final stop.

He had not wanted to go there, because in terms of basketball strength, Asia was the weakest. Its only advantage was height.

Yet China's basketball selection criteria focused on height, so those talented players with that advantage had long since been absorbed by the CBA.

But because he was still one person short, he went to China in the end.

That day, he happened to catch a provincial final being held locally, so he stopped by to take a look.

And by chance, he saw Sun Hao in that final. The latter had barely met his selection standards, which led to everything that followed.

As for the terms he had offered Sun Hao.

Room and board were standard conditions offered by the Spanish Basketball Association when recruiting overseas players.

As for guaranteed playing time, that was merely an empty promise.

It was just like the Bucks' promise to make Yi Jianlian a starter.

In competitive sports, whether one got to play still depended on whether one was good enough.

No one would really demand anything based on an empty promise, or rather, there was nothing they could demand.

That was why Raul had not thought much of Sun Hao throughout the trip.

A fifteen-year-old Asian player whose ability had only barely met his requirements.

Another way of putting it was that he had chosen this player mostly just to make up the numbers.

If he was only there to make up the numbers, why would Raul pay him any extra attention?

And his reason for matching Sun Hao against that player now was even simpler.

Sun Hao's question had been somewhat unrealistic. Raul wanted him to see reality clearly.

Because Real Madrid was a Spanish powerhouse, every player they recruited was among the best of young players.

It was like an outstanding student from an ordinary first-year high school class getting placed in an elite class in the second year. He would then realize the gap between himself and his peers.

You might have been exceptional where you came from, but here, you were just an ordinary person.

You might even be at the bottom of the class.

P.S. Thanks to Cat Who Can't Code for the 10,000 reward.

Thanks to Uchiha Sponge, Mud Under Spring, Like a Salted Fish, Book Friend 2020021180709676, Meet One Till White Hair, and Trainee for Two and a Half Years for the rewards~ Muah~

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