Oriental Football King

Oriental Football King is a long football-competition novel by the web author Longmenke. Serialized on Zongheng Chinese since 2014, it runs over two thousand chapters and roughly 7.4 million characters, and is now complete. The protagonist, Dongfang Chen, is a web writer specializing in sports fiction. After a night's sleep he wakes up having transmigrated into a parallel world, becoming the most famous "Fang Zhongyong" of Chinese football—a teenage prodigy once regarded by Sir Ferguson as a supernova, dubbed "the King" by the English media, and seen by hundreds of millions of fans as the hope of Chinese football. Alas, precocious in youth, mediocre in maturity: he never established himself in the Premier League, and after drifting back home could only scrape a living in the lower leagues. A generational talent had fallen before ever taking flight, to the lament of countless people. But the transmigrated Dongfang Chen possesses a clear head "from the future" and a thorough knowledge of football's trajectory. He rebuilds his career from zero: knocking again on the doors of English clubs, clawing back a starting place inch by inch amid doubts, boos, and media disdain, fighting his way from the English leagues back to the Chinese Super League, then returning to the Premier League to join a powerhouse, competing with his club in league, cup, and Champions League matches, and being called up to the national team to fight for a World Cup berth. With match after match as its skeleton, the novel shows how the protagonist seizes fate by the throat and redeems on the green pitch the talent once betrayed, completing a comeback from "fallen prodigy" to "generational football king," while giving voice to fans' fantasy of a Chinese player standing atop the world.