[Football] Fall for Me, and I'll Carry You to Victory

You are an ordinary human male teenager, currently an ordinary nineteen-year-old attending an ordinary no-name university in London, England.

You're so ordinary that you would probably melt into the crowd after ten seconds.

The unusual thing about you is that you have a magical family curse: if no one loves you one day, you'll die.

Simply put, someone has to love you for you to live to see tomorrow.

To be fair, this isn't very scientific, but the curse has afflicted your family for eight generations.

Thanks to your tenacious ancestors, who fought hard to stay alive, your family is well known back in the Netherlands as a dynasty of playboys. You could go out for a ten-minute walk after dinner and get pelted with twenty rotten eggs.

Like your ancestors, you have no plans to die young. When you were little, your adorable looks helped you get by: every day, you'd help ten elderly women cross the street and receive their heartfelt words, "What a cute baby, I love you." But as you've gotten older, and now stand 190 centimeters tall, it's hard for anyone to call you "cute."

Do you really have to become a womanizer like your ancestors, changing girlfriends thirty-one times a month?

You've had thirteen years of higher education. You just can't bring yourself to hurt a young woman's feelings like that. But the life you've banked from helping old ladies cross the street at an intense rate when you were a kid is almost gone.

Living while counting down your remaining days is no fun. You're anxious every day, and you failed three required courses in your finals, nearly earning yourself a repeat year.

You lie face-down in your dorm, bawling your eyes out.

Your friend comforts you: "It's fine. So you failed three courses. We're at a diploma mill in the UK. Just pay the school a little extra and smooth things over."

Oh, and one more thing: since you spent so much time hanging around by the roadside, waiting to help old men and women cross the street, your grades are terrible. You had to pay your way into university. With an undergraduate degree from a no-name London university, it's obvious you'll be unemployed as soon as you graduate.

You're miserable: "Why can't thirty thousand people randomly fall in love with me?"

Your friend can't follow this abrupt change of subject. But he has his own way of thinking, which is probably why he can be your friend, and smoothly picks up the conversation: "Thirty thousand is way too many. I can get thirty people to love you."

You look up: "Thirty isn't too few either. So, what do you have in mind?"

Your friend: "The college soccer game this afternoon is one player short. Come bail us out. If we win, everyone in our class will love you."

Seeing you slump back down, he quickly adds: "If you come, I'll love you too."

Friendship counts as love, and one person is better than none.

You went.

You won, and people really did love you.

But wasn't it a little too easy to earn that love?

After the game, your friend hugged you and wept with joy: "For the first time, the first time I've ever won a game playing midfield! Boss, I love you! I'll follow you forever!"

Looking at the thirty days of life you'd easily earned in ninety minutes, you fell into thought. You remembered that soccer fans could be pretty passionate. Maybe... "Maybe I should become a soccer player tomorrow?"

Your friend: ...?

1. Bosses, I'm back again. This is still my favorite kind of growth-and-leveling story, and the main text is in third person this time, so please enjoy!

2. The protagonist is a Dutch center forward. He stays with Leyton Orient and doesn't transfer. He plays for the Netherlands national team. The timeline runs roughly from 2010 to 2014.

3. 1v1 pairing with Kane, mostly everyday life. OOC is inevitable.

4. You know how the championship glory goes.

Theme: Hard work pays off