Football Systems Engineer

Chen Ran, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering at Xi'an Jiaotong University, happened to watch a video of a low-level football league in the middle of the night when he was anxious about autumn recruitment - in the first round of the 2025 Hunan Super League, the Zhuzhou team narrowly defeated Hengyang 3:2 in an away game. This "amateur" team, composed of company employees, high school students, and teachers, impressed him instantly with its tenacity and cooperation in the muddy and rainy battle. Having been appointed by a top research institute in Wuhan, he made a decision that made his father, a serious engineer, furious: he signed a contract with Zhuzhou's "Xinghuo Heavy Industry" just to get closer to that stadium. However, the reality is another strict assembly line. After joining the company, he discovered that no one from this large factory with 10,000 people participated in the competition, and football was regarded as a "high-risk non-standard project." Faced with his father's doubts, the rules of the workplace, and the difficulty of building a team from scratch, Chen Ran began to use the "systems thinking" and engineering methods instilled by his father to open up a compliant "trial production line" for his fanatical dream - writing project reports, optimizing risk management, and balancing work training time. From the special selection to the start of the league, from the running-in of friendly matches to the baptism of the finals, Chen Ran must not only learn to maneuver on the green field, but also complete a precise life adjustment between reality and dreams, the expectations of his parents and self-realization. He ultimately proved that the greatest systematic engineering is to steadily produce a miracle called "love" within a framework called "reality".