Amateur Coach

Amateur Coach is a football-themed web novel by author Fanren, serialized on Qidian Chinese Network from November 2014 and completed in July 2015. The book has 449 chapters and roughly 1.43 million characters, a VIP-signed work in the sports/football category. The protagonist Lin Sen was originally the head of a large medical institution ten years in the future, laden with doctoral honors; after a night's sleep he returns to the 2007–08 season as an insignificant team doctor at Atlético Madrid. As compensation he gains a pair of strange eyes: he can see the various colors above people's heads that represent their condition and emotions, and even see through to where injuries lie. Armed with this "foresight" and his ability to see through injuries, Lin Sen starts as a team doctor whom players brush aside at will and gradually gets drawn into the club's operations and personnel: he sees through Maniche's trick of faking injury to strike, witnesses head coach Aguirre's predicament amid poor results, and recharts his own path at a club that claims to have invested eighty million yet sits mid-table. The novel is structured in five volumes—Afterglow, Dawn, Blazing Sun, Scorching Sun, and High Overhead—chronicling the protagonist's ten-year journey from team doctor toward coaching and management as he uses his special ability to take part in team building and competition, with the final chapter "Ten Years (End)" closing the whole. The work does not pursue dramatic face-slapping and power-ups; its pacing is plain and restrained, with detailed portrayals of the La Liga environment, club operations, and player ecology—one of the more steadily regarded football-coach novels.