 |
| Evergrande's 48 soccer fields - Credit Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times |
QINGYUAN, China — The 48 soccer fields of the vast Evergrande Football School in south China seem barely enough for its 2,800 students.
“Soccer will be my career after I grow up,” Wang Kai, a 13-year-old who has studied at the boarding school for over three years, said after a morning session under the supervision of a Spanish coach. “I want to be the Chinese Cristiano Ronaldo,” he said, referring to the Portuguese superstar.
Grooming the next Ronaldo or Messi has become a national project in China, where the country’s No. 1 fan, President Xi Jinping, is determined to transform the country into a great soccer power.
The main Chinese league is attracting foreign stars from Europe and South America with contracts reported to be worth as much as $40 million a year, the highest pay for any soccer player in the world.
The government will clean up and reorganize professional soccer and build a new generation of players by creating tens of thousands of soccer fields and adding soccer programs in tens of thousands of schools. The aim is to establish a flow of top players eventually capable of winning the men’s World Cup and returning the women’s team to its former glory.
In the main pro trading season last year, the 16 Chinese Super League teams spent about $300 million hiring away promising foreign players, outstripping player spending by the English Premier League by nearly $120 million. Prices in 2017 are likely to go even higher.
But Mr. Xi’s focus is on the long game and the next generation of players. His plan calls for 50,000 schools to have a strong emphasis on soccer by 2025, a leap from 5,000 in 2015. The number of soccer fields across the country will grow to over 70,000 by the end of 2020, from under 11,000. By then, the plan says, 50 million Chinese, including 30 million students, will regularly play soccer.
“Now principals at every school are paying quite a bit more attention to soccer,” said Dai Wei, the athletic director at r. Xi’s old school, the Bayi School. “That was unthinkable before.”
Yet there is deep cultural resistance, even at Bayi.
Some parents discourage their children from committing time to sports, Mr. Dai said, because they have so much homework and face stiff competition on academic exams.
While China has excelled at individual sports that demand intense discipline from an early age, the country has not done as well at group sports, where skills like teamwork and improvisation count as much as personal virtuosity.
The privately run Evergrande school, the world’s biggest soccer boarding school, says its formula of intense training combined with a solid education will show the way for developing young players.
“As more soccer schools are built, there’ll be more and more kids playing, and the stars will multiply, too,” said Liu Jiangnan, the principal of the school, which opened in 2012. “I’d guess that in seven or eight years, half the members of the Chinese national squad will come from this school.”
Parents pay up to about $8,700 a year to send children here, where 24 Spanish coaches oversee training. Students spend 90 minutes a day on drills and also play on weekends. Promising players get scholarships, and children from poorer families get discounts.
But even here, the children come to the game later than their European and South American counterparts, and they often lack solid grounding in teamwork and tactics.
“Chinese soccer has failed before through rushing for instant success,” Mr. Zhang, a widely respected soccer commentator, said in an interview in Beijing,“The problem is that everyone thinks soccer is just about getting results, competition, training, creating stars.”
Mr. Zhang is instead encouraging schools to focus on fun and participation. That approach gives more children a break from the monotony of the classroom and will eventually bring out more future champions than an elitist, top-down approach, he argues.
Some schools are trying his way. On a recent afternoon, the smog that often covers Beijing lifted and the children of Caoqiao Elementary School rushed onto the fields, shouting with delight.
“This morning soccer was canceled because of the smog,” said the principal, Lin Yanling. “But at midday, I notified the kids that it was back on, and they all went crazy with relief.”
 |
Evergrande Football School’s manicured gardens. Credit Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times
|
article edited from The New York Times
