As coaches take notes, teenagers dribble soccer balls through a course of cones on Ritan Middle School’s gleaming artificial field in eastern Beijing, part of a massive program to promote soccer as a pillar of China’s rise to global prominence.
The 14-year-old boys and girls were being scrutinized under a newly added section of Beijing’s high-school entrance exam, which beginning this year includes an elective soccer skills test in addition to such standards as Chinese, mathematics and English.
While the skills tests comprise only a small part of the placement exam, the fact education officials tweaked a notoriously rigid standardized test is one sign of how thoroughly the country is mobilizing under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s drive to overhaul the game domestically and turn the Chinese team into a World Cup winner by 2050.
Photo: AP
The soccer revolution spans from schoolyards to the top professional league. Local officials tout how thousands of high schools are becoming government-designated soccer “priority” schools. Cities announce hundreds of soccer complexes being built every week.
Chinese clubs are paying record fees to woo stars away from Europe and boost interest in the domestic league. And in the past year alone, Chinese investors have spent US$3 billion to buy stakes in European clubs, with the stated aim of bringing soccer know-how back to China.
“We have talked about soccer under several top leaders, but until now, there has never been this will,” said Pang Xiaozhong, former director of the Institute of Sport Science, an arm of China’s state sports program.
“It is unprecedented,” he said.
Boosting China’s standing in the game is part of Xi’s push to raise China’s global prestige. With the national men’s team ranked No. 78, a turnaround would be nothing short of cathartic. While the women’s team has often found international success, China’s men have qualified for only one World Cup, bouncing out of the 2002 competition without scoring a goal.
Decades after China’s government successfully created a Soviet-style sports juggernaut, emphasizing highly technical disciplines such as diving, the question is whether the sports-by-diktat approach can work for the world’s most popular game. Unlike sports such as gymnastics, in which elite state academies develop selected prospects from a young age, commentators say soccer success will require a huge player base and vibrant, structured youth leagues — all of which China is trying to create practically from scratch.
In May, the cabinet issued a 50-point plan that called on local and provincial governments to promote soccer by setting up school programs, creating amateur leagues, offering tax breaks for pitch construction and recruiting foreign coaches with the goal of establishing 70,000 new fields and producing 50 million school-age players by 2020.
In a top-down system under which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) still issues five-year economic plans, this state-led mix of infrastructure investment and mass grassroots mobilization is precisely what Beijing sees as needed to bring home a World Cup trophy.
“In China, the role of the government is always the biggest and most effective,” Pang said. “Soccer is something we can grasp if we are methodic.”
Although the government has not released cost estimates for its development plan, analysts say hundreds of millions could be spent over the next five years on facilities alone.
What has been made public, however, is the US$300 million this year that Chinese Super League clubs have splashed out recruiting star European players and managers.
Jonathan Sullivan, director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham, said there is no reason to doubt China could become a regional soccer superpower. However, he warned there were similarities with the government’s approach to economic planning that, despite its successes, can lead to inefficiency or graft. One example is the wave of interest that followed the 2002 World Cup run, which quickly fizzled out when the domestic league was hit by rampant corruption scandals.
“The leadership sketches a hugely ambitious and yet ambiguous vision and people lower down the chain — government bureaus, provincial governments — and those hoping to curry favor, especially in business, pick it up and run with it,” Sullivan said. “The problem is everyone often runs in different directions.”
As China’s most powerful leader in decades, Xi’s personal influence on the promotion of soccer has been enormous.
The president makes no secret of his love for the game which he picked up as a child playing alongside the scions of other CCP leaders at the elite Beijing 101 Middle School.
A 1983 exhibition match between China and English club Watford was said to have left a particular impression on Xi. China was then just opening up to the outside world after decades of Maoism, and when Watford trounced the Chinese national team, Xi left the Beijing Workers Stadium fuming, childhood friend Nie Weiping recalled in an interview years later with state media.
“He felt hurt watching the match,” Nie was quoted as saying. “But he has continued to always follow Team China.”
Those presidential concerns appear to be having a direct effect at the grassroots level.
On the leafy Ritan Middle School campus, extracurricular director Xu Fuxing described how the public school’s budget has risen 25 percent since Xi’s administration made sports an educational priority.
The campus recently resurfaced an artificial field and Xu has hired youth soccer academy Huawen to train its students.
Even small measures such as Beijing’s new soccer exam have encouraged kids to try the game and, as Xu said: “It symbolizes much more to come.”
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