You can call my writing terrible, but don’t you dare say Xingye’s Shaolin Soccer is bad!
The day Lin Ran is kicked out of the provincial team, he thinks his soccer career is over.
That is, until he awakens the [World Cup System], whose spirit turns out to be Gao Qiu, the great villain from Water Margin!
“Kid, want to prove you were right? Want to make it to the World Cup? Then juggle the ball a hundred times for this old man!”
Starting on the muddy fields of amateur leagues, he gathers a group of equally discarded good-for-nothings:
A skinny beanpole hauling cement on construction sites, a chubby cook flipping woks in a kitchen, a severely nearsighted librarian...
Everyone laughs and calls them a ragtag bunch, but on the pitch, they bring Chinese kung fu to the game.
Their team is called Wudang; their style is Shaolin. The name keeps things low-key, while their play does the face-slapping.
From county teams to provincial teams, from the Chinese Super League to the AFC Champions League, until they finally stand on the World Cup final pitch
They’re down 1–20 at halftime, and the whole world is waiting for them to give up.
Lin Ran wipes the blood from the corner of his mouth and says to his brothers behind him, “Play the card. Activate the Karma Realm.”
[This book pays tribute to Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer. When kung fu truly draws its sword on the soccer field, it’s time for the sleeping dragon of Chinese football to wake!]
