The God of Football Starts With Passive Skills

Chapter 444 - 94: Transfer Market Opens! The Dortmund Connection! Wang Shuo’s Home Visit! Boss or Husband, Who’s More Important?

After the championship parade, the team organized a grand celebration banquet.

Everyone attended with a date.

Wang Shuo made a point of noticing that several of his teammates’ dates weren’t the same women from their last get-together.

This was actually quite normal, and no one would bring it up.

Dortmund was riding high right now, and the team was getting a lot of attention.

Never mind the starters on the first team.

Remember Letalek?

The young French midfielder who had barely played this season.

He broke up with his girlfriend a while back, and it was widely reported by the media over in France. It even became a trending topic there.

This was why so many players were desperate to join a powerhouse club.

Götze had changed girlfriends, too.

The kid was having a stellar season, and on top of that, he was a regular at nightclubs.

There was one time he went to Dusseldorf to party with some young models, which made him late for training the next day. He was punished internally by Klopp, who gave him a harsh dressing-down, but the story never got out.

Everyone had gotten used to this sort of thing.

However, after dinner, on the way home, Lina Gerk, sitting in the passenger seat, asked a question out of the blue.

"Was the red-light district in Hamburg fun?"

The sudden question startled Wang Shuo so much that he almost slammed on the brakes.

Seeing Wang Shuo’s guilty expression, Lina Gerk, in contrast, broke into a dazzling laugh.

"Who told you that?" Wang Shuo wanted to know. Who had sold him out?

"Heh, you can’t possibly think your teammates are all the ’real men’ they pretend to be, can you?"

’Henpecked?’

The first person Wang Shuo thought of was Subotic.

If there was a ranking for selling out your brothers, that spineless guy would definitely be at the top of the list.

He’d long ago been brought to heel by that "world champion" at home.

"We were just looking! We didn’t do anything!"

"I know."

After a pause, she added with a grin, "They already investigated everything."

She said "they."

Obviously, it was the Dortmund WAGs, that group of wives and girlfriends with too much time on their hands.

Wang Shuo found it a little funny.

It was funny how this group of women, with nothing better to do all day, spent their time scheming how to hold onto their men, terrified that one careless moment would see them snatched away by all the eager groupies out there.

And the methods they used were endless, each woman with her own special bag of tricks.

Actually, being the girlfriend or wife of a soccer star was a pretty tough job.

Sure, the players made a lot of money, but they also traveled a lot for away games and spent even more nights away from home.

When it came to summer or winter training camps, it was normal for them to be away from home for half a month or more.

Especially in families with children, the player would be busy with training and matches, leaving the wife or girlfriend to basically raise the kids by herself, almost like a single mother.

Players are rich?

It’s true, they earned a decent amount, but not as much as people imagined.

For example.

Not long ago, Subotic had secretly come to Wang Shuo to borrow money.

He was currently earning a yearly salary of 1.5 million euros, but that was before taxes.

Based on Germany’s tax rates, after deducting various insurance payments and other miscellaneous expenses, he took home 750,000 euros at most.

That’s still a lot, right?

But if you take a closer look at the numbers...

Once, while he was away for a match, his house was burglarized.

Thankfully, Lisa Ritz wasn’t home at the time, but the incident still gave her a cold sweat.

So, Subotic started thinking about moving to a safer, more affluent neighborhood. He wanted to buy a house and settle down.

The problem was, real estate wasn’t cheap.

Then there were all his miscellaneous daily expenses, plus he had to support his parents and cover other family costs...

When all was said and done, after a year and a half in Dortmund, he really hadn’t saved much money at all.

That’s just how some people are. The more they earn, the more freely they spend, without any careful budgeting.

Back during his time at Mainz, when his salary was low, he couldn’t save money. Now that he was at Dortmund with a higher salary, he still couldn’t save.

The problem was, players have very few avenues for earning money outside of soccer.

They were so busy with matches and training every day that they had no time to think about anything else.

And more importantly, they wouldn’t even know how.

As a result, after earning money at Dortmund for over a year, when Subotic wanted to buy a house, he found he was still flat broke.

That was why he had to borrow money from Wang Shuo.

Wang Shuo generously lent him enough for the down payment on the house.

Then there was the Brazilian center-back, Santana.

He’d been having some issues a while back, right?

The rumor was that his family back in Brazil was having some trouble.

Santana earned a decent salary and was normally frugal, but that couldn’t offset the cost of supporting a large extended family.

You couldn’t call his family leeches, because they had sacrificed a great deal to support his soccer career in the early days.

So it was only right for him to give back to them now.

But with so many family issues, it was inevitable that his training and performance in matches would be affected.

Fans only saw the players on the pitch during matches, and at most, they might know a little about their training.

But Wang Shuo interacted with them as living, breathing human beings.

They were just like anyone else. They had to eat, sleep, and deal with life’s basic needs. They had their own joys and sorrows, and they were bogged down by the same trivial, everyday problems.

His current situation with Lina Gerk was great, for example.

They each had their own careers, and both were busy with their respective work.

Incidentally, Lina Gerk had a really good eye for business.

Her online shop’s business was booming.

If it had become an overnight sensation at first by leveraging the attention Wang Shuo brought, now its success was truly built on her own merit.

The most important factor was her vision.

All her women’s clothing was aimed at white-collar professionals, with even the cheapest pieces selling for two or three hundred euros.