Losing 5-0 at home to a top European or South American side is understandable. Having a population of over a billion, and very good sports infrastructure, and losing to Palestine 5-0 is incomprehensible for me. Can anyone chime in as to why China is so bad at soccer? As I understand it there is a domestic professional league with outrageous salaries for former foreign stars.
you can’t just engineer world cup glory from the top down.
You may be able to. It’s a shit ton of corruption in Chinese football system as well. There are always 20 genius football players that are born to be out of 1.4B, but the system is too corrupted to recognise these geniuses.
Haha not early. Kids been playing soccer for ages, they do until life happens upon them and they quit. To study, to play basketball which is much cooler for them, and because they see their national team being an embarrassment
However I think that at the club level fan support have increased in the last decade
Ok so what the hell is going on? It’s over a billion people, if just 1 out of 100000 kids liked the game they should have a decent team that doesn’t lose to a country that’s been at war for like a decade and has a couple million people at most
Do they just stop playing in lieu of other activities? Is it uncool by the time they’re in their teens? Do the high school girls only date basketball players and football players are nerds?? Seriously, what’s up?
Like others have mentioned, it’s a multifaceted and systemic issue related to lack of proper institutions and infrastructure for team sports in general, corruption, big egos, and a culture that emphasizes studying and education over athletics and physical fitness.
I can write an essay about it. If anything they don’t have high paying foreign players anymore, the professional league went thought a lot and the money is not there any more.
Lack of grassroots system, 90% of kids will quit football to study once they reach junior high. The talent pool get very small and they can hardly create a comprehensive competition structure with enough teams to match making.
Plus the education bureau, FA, private clubs and sports bureau all trying to take control of youth football.
Corruption, from professional to grassroots level, no need further explanation.
Almost no Chinese players are willing to play overseas. Some of the players in the national team could be good enough to play in 2nd or 3rd division in Europe, but the money is better in China so they rather stay.
The professional league don’t generate enough money to substain. It’s a little better now but a few years back many clubs closed down because the owner stop putting money in, including the league champion sunning
Also recently the Chinese Super League is getting poorer. Guangzhou Evergrande used to be one of the most elite AFC Champion teams, but they went bankrupt recently.
Their previous HC (as recent as 2023) openly talks about fixing matches when he was in the CSL and his selection policy was based on favors with CSL HCs and whoever bribes him the most
Some of the CSL teams should just die. Some teams are decently profitable and decently run but they struggle when other teams can just splash millions to get Brazilians.
Cos the standard outside of China (especially Europe) is much higher. As a player the level of competition is important for growth.
Your second question is a good question.
About 15 years ago there were a huge influx of money into the league, primarily driven by real estate company. Because of that it significantly changed the salary structure of Chinese football, most clubs were running in losses but things were ok until the rich owners stop injecting cash.
Now the salary structure is already more reasonable, but still quite high in proportion to the club earning capacity
It’s surprising to me that a forward seeing country like China funds football for like a decade and then gives up on it. It’s not weird imo that after 10 years of pushing it, they’re not there yet, it takes a bit more time.
Do you think kids quitting comes because they prefer other sports by junior year or it’s purely the lack of infrastructure that propels the change over a teens life?
The investment in professional football is failing, but China did also invest a lot in youth training. The first generation of youth players coming out from that reform period should be now 18-21 years old, so in a few years we will see if there are at least something good coming out of the investment.
No- they just simply quit all sports and study. A typical high school students will spend 12+ hours study, they just don’t have time for any other things
Nr 2 is a major major one. If you look at the background of the players, there’s very few who’re actually just good at football. Most are sons of wealthy and powerful officials.
Team sports are much less preferred as it affects study time for more than just one or two students. Team sport also goes against their philosophy of sport development as it’s much harder training team based sports, as the Chinese system focuses on producing elite athletes at its field of choice(e.g swimming, table tennis, badminton or gymnastic), as you can see from example, it is much easier training an individual to perfect the required technique, physical attributes and execution, but team sports require different training philosophy to induce teamwork, chemistry and collectivity, which are much harder to perfect for a squad of 20+ squad a football requires, lastly, soccer just isn’t as loved as other dominating sports, and therefore lacks infrastructure for development, even football pitch is a problem as it takes up way too much land area, where in places such as Shanghai and Beijing, a squre foot would cost an arm and a leg for an average person.
Source: am Chinese
China realised it could dominate certain individual sports at the Olympic stage by identifying potential talent very young and investing a relatively modest sum in coaching and facilities. This tends to work only in individual and less commercialised sports, not ones like soccer or basketball which typically grassroots club or collegiate infrastructure. China can churn out divers, gymnasts or speedskaters with ease. But it’s inconceivable for it to compete in the near term with tiny countries like Croatia in soccer or Lithuania in basketball.
Can anyone chime in as to why China is so bad at soccer?
Two big reasons I haven't seen anyone post yet.
The Chinese don't allow slide tackles in casual games due to the potential for injury. There's a culture of if you injure someone, you pay for their injury. In my first game there I absolutely cleaned someone out as a keeper coming out to claim the ball and the other team all bumrushed me and it nearly came to blows. The rule had been explained to me but I thought goalkeepers had to be exempt, I learnt my lesson .I assume it's different for players on the professional track but at a casual Sunday League level they essentially play with different rules.
Everyone wants to be Kobe, Messi, Ronaldo or Iverson. Applies to both basketball and football, there isn't much pride taken in excelling at say left back or a defensive midfielder in Chinese culture, so the Chinese teams we played were nearly always dribbling far too much and just generally fairly selfish. Focus on personal highlights as opposed to winning. Chinese men in particular are pretty awful at team games across tons of sports, the women are better in fairness, and I'd be amazed if this mentality wasn't a core reason. They basically punch below their weight in every sport involving 5 or more people playing together
Absolute rampant corruption, many coaches and people in the football association had been arrested for bribery where the outcome of games between the clubs were predetermined so they could make money from the bets. Also the Chinese athletic training system basically makes the kid only focus on the one sport and not develop any other skills that would be useful for him/her to have a backup plan to integrate into the society if becoming an athlete won’t work out, so the risks are simply too high for the vast majority of parents to send their kids to play the sport professionally.
Theres a million reasons why for China (bribery, corruption, greed) but Palestine should be respected as a ridiculously good football hotbed for a country of its size and troubles. They were ranked in the 80s (putting them among the level of UAE, Oman, Iraq, Syria and Jordan) and almost made the World Cup while their hospitals, stadiums and training pitches were being reduced to rubble
To be fair. This team isn't China's A team. A few of their starters end up playing in Asian games instead.
But still it's a terrible result. This team seem like a mix match of older known CSL players and a few upcomers.
Coach Shao Jia Yi is probably under a lot of pressure, the last time this type of result happened, the coach was fired, so its possible the players lost it on purpose but there's no other explaination other than they had food poisioning or some other bizaare circumstances.
And... to top of it off, this happened during the Chinese national holidays period...
The Chinese have long been accustomed to defeats in football, but they are extremely angry about defeats in table tennis, as the players who lost the men’s team table tennis gold medal are now facing the Chinese public’s fury, which is nothing short of apocalyptic.
Because there’s so many people, you can’t really have football fields everywhere. Therefore children never get a chance to play football on their free time.
You don’t need football fields everywhere for kids. Parks will do. The amount of times I played as a kid with shoes / trees / shirt as the goalpost is too many to recount.
One or two kids bring a ball, the rest came around and joined over time, you don’t need to prepare it either. Just have common spaces where kids can play
Palestine is better side than you think. Soccer in the arab world is fanatical and everyone plays. Though China should be better given their size. The same goes for the US.
Even it sounds like crazy, China is still the best football team among the world's Chinese population. Hk Macau Taiwan Singapore Malaysia Canada America and everything… you can't name one successful footballer who is Chinese today. So maybe it's not about corruption or education system blah blah, maybe Chinese people just don't know how to play football and don't really like it. Watching on TV is very different between playing it personally. I'm a football fan but I never played it in my leisure time.
Syria is an occasional Japan, SK killer in the WC qualifers, and Kyrgyzstan came very close to drawing Uzbekistan and Iran, twice in the WC qualifiers. China would never pull a close 2-3 game against Uzbek or Iran in current form. Their actual skills are better than what the FIFA rankings suggest.
My lecturer at university said 'chinese people are terrible at all sports. They are only good at ones where the training is just doing the same thing hundreds of times every single day to a point of extreme boredom'
And when you watch the Olympics it kind of checks out.
This is a huge reason, not usually talked about compared to youth culture, training and coaches, money, team sports, etc. Chinese love volleyball, basketball, even e-sports, so its not all just a team sports issue.
Chinese do their best not to stay prolonged periods in direct sunlight, since it wrinkles and damages the skin. They go to the beach after sundown. And when they do, most women and even men wear a one piece or body suit. Sunbathing and tan lines is not a thing in China. The women wear full face masks and umbrellas when hiking, even to go to the corner store. Being too tan is looked down upon, remnants of lowly peasants working in the rice fields.
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Because more money, prestige and fame is involved, the best players won't get in. The selection rules would be "tweaked" to allow "preferred" players in.
The Chinese women’s team gets the highest investment in the world according to FIFA, ranks third among the four Asian countries with professional leagues, and would get destroyed by any professional team in Europe. Is that decent for you?
You miss the point entirely. Along with Saudi, Chinese mens’ football clubs are noted as still being retirement cash-cows. Yet the mens’ team is a complete joke compared to the relative success the women’s team has achieved. No one said the women’s teams are not funded lol. The reason football funding even got switched to the women’s game in China was because the CSL spent stupid money pre-covid on international players and completely mismanaged them all. They were (still are) expensive laughing stocks. Your data is also not the Chinese women’s team, it is Chinese clubs - which are large-part jokes given how the CSL is run.
CSL clubs were retirement cash cows before COVID.By your logic, the women’s team is a complete joke compared to the success achieved by the Paralympic football team.The data show how much CWSL clubs spent each year, with 56% of their spending going toward player wages. That means Chinese female players are among the highest-paid in the world.
China does play cricket, they got beaten by Malaysia and Nepal at the Asian Games.
Hong Kong would be a better team to follow though, they do actually win some games and got to the quarter finals at the Asian Games (before running into the real cricket nations).
As a Chinese, I am glad that they can bring joy and comfort to the Palestinian people 🥳
Now back to business, this is China C team but even so, this shows how bad Chinese men's football is. The core reason, is the lack of the ladder of professional players. I believe right now there are about 8000 registered U16 men's players in China, about the same as greater Madrid, population of 7 million? Since almost all national players come from the U16 team, when you see team China, think it as a regional team from a population of 7 million. This will explain a lot of things
This is not a C team lmao. U23 only looks good because they play against U21 and U23 teams. They would get thrashed by Vietnam or Thailand's A team pretty hard if the U23 were China's A team
Joy was brought, intentionally or unintentionally, Palestinians could use a tiny little sliver of happiness watching their team play. Thank you for the sentiment
i grew up in the UK. was never a big football fan but spent a lot of my free time kicking balls around in the street, local park or school. chinese kids just don't have time for football. they have way too much homework. they can barely 'hang out'. it sucks but their education system needs serious reform.
It’s very competitive the education system and kids do a load of classes in the evenings to keep up, but football is now one of those extra classes and it’s probably a top 3 sport in terms of popularity there after basketball and badminton. Wife’s little cousin is doing classes now and his technique is awesome for such a young lad.
The future generations will be better I’m sure, given the amount of money their government is pumping into it!
yeah but i still feel that they don't have the free time to just hang out and kick a ball around. after school football practice is cool and ive seen it in some primary schools i've taught in. but i feel like when the kids get to middle school their studies take on more importance and they don't have the time for sports.
also when i was in the primary schools i noticed they werent allowed to kick a real soccer ball around on break times and at lunch. the kids had like balls made of screwed up paper. kinda sad.
Alright so clearly no one here is watching the Asian Games which are happening at the same time.
The squad playing Palestine was a severely weakened team with all the top young players (under 23 yrs old) at the Asian Games (plus 3 top over age players).
China’s u23 squad made it to the semis and won the Bronze medal match. The players on that team make up some of the strongest China has seen since our only ever World Cup appearance with them also making the U23 Asian Cup final this year too.
I doubt we’d have seen this scoreline had we had our first squad.
What I found it interesting as well is that I don't think Chinese hate football and it looks like it is popular in China. In the High speed train, you can see still recap of some World cup games (Even though it was over) and you see ads from Mbappe or Messi around. People are wearing football Jerseys. While I don't expect them to be european good level, it is so surprising they can be so bad, especially they have the infrastructure and probably money to have a decent team. And their women chinese team is decent.
Yes. Chinese are very good in individual sports likely for the same reason they're good at academics. They understand the requirement and can practice independently over and over again until theyre perfect.
I think team sports actually require more art/expression than individual sport which can be more mechanical. In fact, if the government didn't suppress golf, they would probably be the best at it.
Is there a good write up somewhere about why China is so lousy at football? I wouldn't expect them to be elite, but it's not like they ignore sports development.
There's no soccer selection system, there are very few soccer classes for teenagers, and a lot of soccer fields end up being used for running and dating. Soccer teams never get any results, so everyone's just given up on the sport
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More accurate phrase should be China sucks at soccer but good at everything else. Diving, fencing, badminton, women soccer, women volleyball… China literally is the Olympic superpower just behind US.
I’ve been to multiple cities on this trip and seen kids playing.
I’m getting downvoted probably because of the corruption comment, I hasten to add that is what native Chinese tell me so I can always be corrected on that if there is indeed no corruption in the leagues!
Even it sounds like nonsense, China is still the best football country among the world's Chinese population. Hk Macau Taiwan Singapore Malaysia Canada America and everything… you can't name one successful footballer who is Chinese today. So maybe it's not about corruption or education system blah blah, maybe Chinese just don't know how to play football and don't really like it.
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u/Mad2828 2d ago
Losing 5-0 at home to a top European or South American side is understandable. Having a population of over a billion, and very good sports infrastructure, and losing to Palestine 5-0 is incomprehensible for me. Can anyone chime in as to why China is so bad at soccer? As I understand it there is a domestic professional league with outrageous salaries for former foreign stars.