You're Just Here to Make Up the Numbers!

Chapter 8: You're Just Here to Fill the Numbers!

After getting off the plane and transferring to a taxi, the journey was long and tiring.

By the time the surroundings had turned almost into a forest, with flocks of pigeons cooing everywhere, they finally arrived at Real Madrid's youth team.

The location was anything but central.

It wasn't just the location; once they reached the gym, Sun Hao found that Real Madrid's facilities fell short of what he'd imagined.

The gym was dilapidated from years of disrepair, and the equipment inside was quite old.

It seemed the Spanish government didn't allocate much funding to basketball either.

That wasn't entirely surprising; Spanish basketball hadn't truly risen yet at this time.

For instance, just three years ago, during the 1994 Men's Basketball World Championships group stage in Toronto, Spain had been defeated by the Chinese team.

Learning from that pain, Spain had already begun its path to revival.

Funding might not catch up overnight, but their thinking was already ahead of its time.

This was evident when Sun Hao was brought to the training gym and saw young basketball talents from all over the world.

To improve basketball standards, youth training is the top priority.

Spain had adopted an inclusive approach, fostering competition by absorbing basketball talents from across the globe, and using that competition to elevate local basketball levels.

This approach was quite wise.

After Raul brought Sun Hao to the training gym, he went straight to work with the assistant coach, completely ignoring him just like on the plane.

Sun Hao looked around, put down his backpack, found a spot, and started warming up on his own.

His warm-up ended, and before he could start ball-handling drills, Raul gathered everyone together.

Once everyone was assembled and standing in rows, Raul began his speech.

The first part was all empty talk, but it was necessary talk nonetheless.

Things like: "You are the young talents from around the world, the Children of Heaven with a future in professional basketball, and this is the cradle of success," and so on.

Sun Hao could have recited those lines in his past life.

Taking this chance, he carefully observed his teammates around him.

They came in all shapes and sizes—tall, short, fat, thin. It had to be said, Real Madrid's youth team was far more inclusive than Hongyuan.

During this process, he made eye contact with two people.

One was about his age, and when their eyes met, there was a flicker of disdain in the other's gaze.

The other looked only eleven or twelve, and when their eyes met, he offered a very shy, kind smile.

Sun Hao didn't pay either any mind. Since they came from all over the world, their personalities were naturally diverse.

At this point, the polite opening remarks were over, and Raul began explaining essential knowledge about the Spanish basketball league system. Sun Hao refocused his attention.

"Spain currently has four levels of leagues. The youth team is in the fourth-level league, which consists of 108 teams."

Raul's first sentence caught Sun Hao by surprise.

Spain's population wasn't large, and its basketball population was even smaller, but having this many youth teams alone made their future rise understandable.

Raul then went into detail about the league's other aspects, and Sun Hao gained a deeper understanding of those 108 teams.

Just gathering 108 youth teams within Spain alone wasn't easy, and the quality was even harder to guarantee.

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

The EBA League had been running for five years with significant results; a large number of young talents had already made it into national team training camps across various countries.

Survival of the fittest—the law of competition applies everywhere. This place was even becoming a training base for young basketball talent across European and even world basketball.

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

The Plata League had noticeably fewer teams—only 24.

This sharp drop in numbers meant the threshold suddenly rose; only the cream of the youth crop could enter the third-level league.

Then came the second-level league, Oro, with even fewer teams—just 18.

The highest level was the first-level league, ACB, also known as Spain's most famous La Liga, with only 17 teams.

It was like leveling up in a fantasy novel—one threshold after another, layer by layer, until only the best of the best could enter La Liga.

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

Even the giants of La Liga, Real Madrid and Barcelona, had far more overseas players on their rosters than domestic ones.

After hearing Raul's explanation, Sun Hao felt a mix of joy and concern.

The joy was that this tiered league system was very fair; unlike the CBA, it wouldn't completely shut someone out just because of their height.

The concern was that this system had an unavoidable drawback: seniority.

The higher you went, the more adult professional players there would be, and the fewer opportunities young players would get.

If he had to climb up one league level at a time, even staying just one year at each level, it would take him three years.

In other words, it would take him three years just to reach La Liga.

That was definitely not acceptable, because by then the Five-Year Pact would have already expired.

He had indeed turned professional, but domestic attention in China wasn't focused on European leagues at all.

He couldn't just walk up to Li Yuanwei and Yang Wei and say: "Look, here I am, a member of La Liga, I've gone pro—consider yourselves slapped in the face!"

That kind of approach was far too low. What he needed was another kind of forceful voice.

One that would be heard even if the other party covered their ears, without him having to say a word.

Just like he had planned before—becoming an NBA rookie.

"Coach, can I skip levels?"

After Raul finished speaking, Sun Hao raised his hand and signaled before asking.

To him, this was a perfectly normal question. He didn't want to waste that much time in lower-tier leagues.

Or to put it bluntly, he simply didn't have that much time.

But as soon as he asked, a burst of laughter erupted.

As if he had just asked a stupid, foolish question.

"Who do you think you are? Making it into the Plata League is already a feat for a genius, and you want to skip levels? A genius among geniuses, a prodigy?"

The speaker was someone behind Sun Hao, his tone dripping with mockery.

Sun Hao turned his head and saw it was the same person who had looked at him with contempt earlier.

That remark drew another round of laughter.

The youth team, unlike the three-tier leagues, had no limit on roster size—some teams had as few as twenty players, others nearly thirty.

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

Yet the three-tier leagues, with 24 teams and a standard roster of 15, only had 360 people.

That was a ratio of nearly ten to one—no small difficulty.

If he wanted to skip levels on top of that, the difficulty shot up like a power function, squared, then to the fourth power...

It wasn't just a matter of difficulty; it was almost impossible.

Raul came back to his senses and laughed along.

Sun Hao really was letting his imagination run wild.

But he still nodded.

"Theoretically, it's possible. Last year, Barcelona had a young man named Pau Gasol. He went from the youth team to La Liga in just one year."

At the mention of Gasol, a look of involuntary respect appeared in the eyes of these young players.

He was a legend of the La Liga youth team, an interior monster who had once scored 40+20 in a single game.

Sun Hao nodded after hearing this. He had forgotten about Gasol—Gasol was only two years older than him, now seventeen, and should be about ready for the first team.

Jumping three league levels in one year—Gasol's talent was plain to see.

Sun Hao's question became a small interlude in the opening remarks. Raul didn't pay it much mind and immediately arranged for the players to start training.

First came warm-ups and fundamental drills without the ball.

Spain's basketball reform had put effort into training methods as well, combining the characteristics of American and European basketball for twice the result with half the effort.

After the fundamentals, the next step was ball-handling drills.

Ball-handling drills were further divided into non-contact and contact drills.

In the non-contact drills, Sun Hao's performance stood out.

Whether it was dribbling or shooting, he was in the top tier of the training camp.

The shift in Raul's attitude before and after made him realize the competition he faced here, and he held nothing back.

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

It was at this point that Raul deliberately had Sun Hao go up against the person who had mocked him.

He did this on purpose.

Before the new season's training camp began, he had taken a solo world tour, scouting for outstanding basketball talent everywhere.

China was his last stop.

He hadn't wanted to go there at first, because in terms of basketball strength, Asia was the weakest—the only advantage was height.

And China's basketball selection criteria were exactly that: height. Any talented players had long been absorbed by the domestic CBA league.

But because he was still one player short, he ended up going to China anyway.

That day, he happened to catch a provincial final, so he dropped by to take a look.

And coincidentally, in that final, he saw Sun Hao, who barely met his selection criteria. That led to everything that followed.

As for the conditions he had set for Sun Hao...

Room and board included—that was the standard offer the Spanish Basketball Association gave when recruiting overseas players.

Guaranteed playing time was just an empty promise.

It was the same as when the Bucks had assured Yi Jianlian he'd start.

In competitive sports, whether you get to play depends entirely on how strong you are.

No one would actually demand anything based on a hollow promise, nor could they get anything out of it.

That was also why he hadn't been particularly impressed with Sun Hao all along.

A fifteen-year-old Asian player whose strength barely met his requirements.

To put it another way, the guy he'd picked was basically just there to fill a slot.

A filler—why would he pay him any extra attention?

And the reason he'd chosen to have Sun Hao go up against that person right now was even simpler.

Sun Hao's question just now had been a bit too fanciful; he wanted Sun Hao to face reality.

Because Real Madrid, as a Spanish powerhouse, recruited only the cream of the crop among young players.

It was like the top student in an ordinary first-year class—when they got sorted into the advanced class in second year, they'd realize the gap between themselves and their peers.

You might have been outstanding where you came from, but here, you're just an ordinary person.

Maybe even dead last.

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