Volume 1: The Road to the European Emperor Chapter 8: You’re just here to make up the numbers!
After getting off the plane, I took a taxi and was exhausted from the long journey.
When the surroundings were almost turning into a forest and there were flocks of pigeons cooing, they finally arrived at the Real Madrid youth team.
This location is not ordinary.
It's not just the position. When he arrived at the stadium, Sun Hao found that the Real Madrid team was different from what he had imagined.
The stadium has been in disrepair for a long time and the equipment inside is quite old.
It seems that the Spanish government does not allocate much funds to basketball.
This is not too surprising, as Spanish basketball had not yet truly taken off at that time.
Let’s not talk about anything else, just three years ago, in the group stage of the 1994 Toronto Men’s Basketball World Championships, Spain was defeated by the Chinese team.
After learning from its painful experiences, Spain has begun the road to revival.
The funding may not catch up for a while, but the ideas are already very advanced.
This can be seen when Sun Hao was brought to the training hall and saw young basketball talents from all over the world.
If you want to improve your basketball skills, youth training is the top priority.
Spain takes an inclusive approach, creating competition by absorbing basketball talents from all over the world, and then improving the level of local basketball through competition.
This is a very smart approach.
After Raul brought Sun Hao to the training hall, he went straight to work with the assistant coach and ignored him completely, just like he did on the plane before.
Sun Hao looked around, put down his schoolbag, and found a place to warm up himself.
His warm-up training was over, but before he started training with the ball, Raul gathered everyone together.
After everyone had gathered and stood in rows, he began his speech.
The first half is full of empty words, but they are also necessary words.
What is happening here is that the people here are young talents from all over the world, the proud ones who will have the opportunity to enter the professional basketball world in the future, this is the cradle of success, etc.
Sun Hao would have said these words in his previous life.
During this time, he carefully observed his teammates around him.
There are all kinds of tall and short, fat and thin players. It goes without saying that the Real Madrid youth team is much more inclusive than that of Guangdong Hongyuan.
During this process, two people made eye contact with him.
One was a guy about the same age as him, and there was a hint of contempt in his eyes when he looked at him.
The other one looked only eleven or twelve years old, and when he looked into his eyes he gave him a very innocent and kind smile.
Sun Hao didn't care. Since they came from all over the world, their personalities were naturally all-encompassing.
At this time, the first half of the polite words were over, Raul began to talk about some necessary knowledge about the Spanish Basketball League, and he also withdrew his attention.
"There are four levels of leagues in Spain now. Our youth team is in the fourth level, which has a total of 108 teams."
Raul's first words surprised him.
Spain has a small population and an even smaller basketball population, but with such a large number of youth teams alone, its future rise is not surprising.
Raul then gave a detailed introduction to other aspects of the league, and Sun Hao also gained a deeper understanding of these 108 teams.
It is not easy to gather 108 youth teams in Spain alone, and the level cannot be guaranteed.
But as he had seen before, Spain has emphasized inclusiveness after its reforms, and the number of overseas players in the league far exceeds that of domestic Spanish players.
The EBA league has been implemented for five years with remarkable results. A large number of young talents have entered the national team training lists of various countries.
Survival of the fittest, the law of competition applies everywhere. This place is even about to become a training base for young talents in European basketball and even world basketball.
The EBA League is the lowest level league, and above that is the third-level Plata League.
The Plata League has significantly fewer teams, with only 24.
This drastic decrease in numbers means that the threshold suddenly becomes higher, and only the best young people can enter the third-level league.
Then there is the second-tier league, Oro, which has even fewer teams, only 18.
The highest level is the ACB League, which is the most well-known La Liga in Spain, with only 17 teams in total.
This is just like the upgrade in a fantasy novel, with a threshold at each level, and screening at each level, and finally only the best of the best can enter La Liga.
Of course, just like the EBA league where Sun Hao is now, the following three levels of leagues are also full of inclusiveness.
Even the La Liga giants Real Madrid and Barcelona have far more overseas players than local players.
After listening to what Raul said, Sun Hao felt mixed emotions.
The good news is that this clearly divided league system is fair and it won’t completely block people out based on their height like in the CBA.
What is worrying is that this system has an unavoidable drawback: seniority-based ranking.
You have to know that the higher you go, the more adult professional players there will be, and the fewer opportunities young players will get.
If he were to be promoted one league at a time, it would take him three years, even if he only stayed in one league for one year.
That is to say, it was only three years later that he reached La Liga.
This is definitely not possible, because the five-year agreement would have expired by then.
He has indeed become a professional player, but the European league is not even of interest in China right now.
It is impossible for him to run up to Li Yuanwei and Yang Wei and say to them: Look, I am a member of La Liga now, I have become a professional player, you have been slapped in the face!
This method is too low, what he needs is another kind of compulsory voice.
He doesn't need to say anything himself, the other person will be able to hear it even if he covers his ears.
Just like he had planned before, to become an NBA rookie.
"Coach, can we skip levels?"
After Raul finished speaking, Sun Hao raised his hand and asked again.
This is a normal problem for him, he doesn't want to waste so much time in the lower leagues.
Or simply put, he simply doesn't have that much time.
But after he asked the question, he caused a burst of laughter.
It was like he had just asked a stupid, foolish question.
"Who do you think you are? You're already a genius just to be able to enter the Plata League, and you want to skip levels? A genius among geniuses?"
The person who spoke was a person behind Sun Hao, and his tone was full of ridicule.
Sun Hao looked back and found that it was the person who had looked down on him before.
This caused another round of laughter.
The youth team does not have a limit on the number of players like the other third-level leagues. The smaller teams have twenty players, and the larger teams have almost thirty players.
There are 108 teams, which means that there are at least two to three thousand people in the EBA league.
However, the third-level league has 24 teams with a standard of 15 players, which only has 360 people.
This is a ratio of nearly one out of ten, which is extremely difficult.
If you go up a level, the difficulty will be like a power function, then a quadratic function, a quartic function...
This is not a question of whether it is difficult or not, it can be said to be almost impossible.
After Raul came to his senses, he also laughed.
Sun Hao is really a bit whimsical.
But he nodded anyway.
"In theory, it is possible. Last year, Barcelona had a young man named Pau Gasol. It only took him one year to go from the youth team to La Liga."
When talking about Gasol, these young players couldn't help but show respect in their eyes.
He was a legend of the La Liga youth team, a monster inside who once scored 40+20 in a single game.
Sun Hao nodded after listening. He actually forgot about Gasol. Gasol was only two years older than him and was 17 years old at that time. He should have been in the first team.
Gasol's talent is evident as he jumped three levels of leagues in one year.
Sun Hao's question became a small episode in the opening remarks. Raul didn't pay much attention to it and then arranged for the players to start training.
First is the warm-up and basic training without the ball.
Spain's basketball reform also put a lot of effort into training methods, combining the characteristics of American and European basketball to achieve twice the result with half the effort.
After the basic training, the next step is ball training.
Ball training can be divided into non-confrontational and confrontational training.
In the non-confrontational training, Sun Hao's performance was outstanding.
Whether it's dribbling or shooting, he is at the top of the team's training camp.
The difference in Raul's attitude before and after made him realize the competition he faced here, and he no longer held back.
The penultimate part is a one-on-one confrontation with the ball.
It was at this stage that Raul deliberately let Sun Hao play against the person who teased him.
He did this on purpose.
Before the start of the new season training camp, he went on a solo trip around the world to search for outstanding basketball talents around the world.
China is his last stop.
He originally didn't want to go to this stop because in terms of basketball strength, Asia is the worst, and the only advantage is height.
It just so happens that the selection criteria for Chinese basketball is height, and those talents with advantages have long been absorbed by China's CBA league.
But because he was still missing one person, he finally went to China.
He happened to be there that day, and happened to catch a provincial final, so he went over to take a look.
Then, by chance, he met Sun Hao in the final, who barely met his selection criteria, which led to a series of events that followed.
As for the conditions he set for Sun Hao.
Free food and accommodation are the conditions that the Spanish Basketball Association will give when recruiting overseas players;
Guaranteed playing time is just a blank check.
This is the same as the Bucks' original promise to guarantee Yi Jianlian's starting role.
In competitive sports, whether you can play depends on whether you are strong enough.
No one will really ask for anything, or can get anything, because of a blank check.
This is also the reason why he has not been very interested in Sun Hao all this time.
A 15-year-old Asian player whose strength barely meets his requirements.
Another way to put this situation is that he chose this person basically just to make up the numbers.
Why would he pay more attention to it if it's just to make up the numbers?
The reason why he chose to let Sun Hao face off against that person at this time was even simpler.
Sun Hao's question just now was a bit fanciful, and he wanted Sun Hao to face the reality.
Because Real Madrid is a top team in Spain, every player they recruit is the best among young players.
It is like a top student in an ordinary class in the first year of high school, who is assigned to a key class in the second year of high school. He will then realize the gap between himself and his peers.
You may be outstanding in your original place, but here, you are just an ordinary person.
It might even be the last one.
