![]() ![]() 20,000 football training centres and 70,000 pitches will be set up, giving 30 million students the chance to try the sport.īut until that generation comes through, there is another solution. And it has backing right from the top – President Xi himself is a self-proclaimed football fan who says he would love China to win the world cup. Take a look inside their U17 training with inspiring coach Gao Hong )But China men’s dismal international footballing record might be about to change as aspirations reach an all time high.Įarlier this year, the Chinese Football Association revealed an ambitious strategy to become a world footballing superpower by 2050. (If you’re wondering about the ladies team – they’re currently riding high at 12th. The men’s team is 81 st in the FIFA world rankings, having only qualified for one World Cup and having never won the Asian Cup. The problem is that China doesn’t do so well on an international level. Jia-A has since been replaced by the Chinese Super League (CSL), with the best 16 teams from across China competing in a season running from roughly from February/March to November/December. Paintings from the 7 th century Tang dynasty show women playing a game that looks suspiciously like soccer and China has had a thriving domestic football scene since the 1990s when the National Football Jia-A League, China’s first professional football league, was launched. A staggering 40 world records and over 130 Olympic records were smashed and it was all witnessed by millions of people around the globe. Even I managed to get swept away in the 2008 summer of sport. But now it seems that the Chinese have set their sights on football.Īctually, that’s not quite true. In 2007-2008 I was in China’s capital making documentaries in the build up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It was a time when the whole of China threw its arms around sport in a BIG way. The resulting Games were seen as one of the best ever – Usain Bolt wowed us by breaking the 100m and 200m world records in the iconic Birds Nest Stadium. Michael Phelps claimed a phenomenal 8 gold medals at the Water Cube, China’s National Aquatics Centre. ![]() In all honesty, I really shouldn’t have been so surprised. And the Beijingers were chanting – cheering on Portugal and commiserating with France. A usual Sunday night social had been sabotaged by the Euro 2016 final taking place 8000kms away. ![]() Instead of being packed out with trendy locals, Beijing’s Sanlitun bars were filled with flashes of red and blue. ![]()
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