King of the Green Pitch

This is a male-oriented web novel about football competition, by Dubu Qianjun, completed in January 2010 on Qidian with 387 chapters. The story begins in an ordinary rural family in Heilongjiang: the parents of young Zhang Baoku die unexpectedly, and the four siblings depend on each other, so poor that even his tuition is hard to scrape together. By chance, the pocket money he earns from playing football, along with the ability he shows on the pitch, turns football from a hobby into a "job" that can supplement the household income. He then leaves the village middle school and moves step by step toward the professional stage, starting from domestic school and youth competitions and gradually reaching European league clubs. The novel interweaves two threads—club matches and national-team internationals: both Ajax's run through the Champions League group stage and clashes such as Newcastle versus Barcelona; the later part depicts the 2030 World Cup, where Zhang Baoku's Chinese Dragon Team reaches the final for the first time and contests the title with Spain at the Bernabéu. Overall it is an inspirational story of a village boy growing into a football superstar, incorporating training, matches, dressing rooms, on-pitch tactics, and family responsibility, with the passionate style and fast-paced gratification typical of Chinese competitive web fiction around 2010.