Once it was China, not Saudi Arabia, on a multi-million pound recruitment drive to buy in the world's best football talent. In just a few years though, the Chinese Super League's big-money plans have imploded.
Buy clubs in Europe -> send Chinese youth players to these clubs -> inject money into domestic clubs with star players -> expose domestic players to a higher level of play
Something like that, but then they realised it takes many decades for grassroots investment to take effect at the professional level, and by then all they’d have achieved is making foreigners stupidly rich with no guarantees that Chinese born players will ever be as good. It’s better to just invest in grassroots football and wait, it’ll be a lot cheaper, more rewarding, and politically much more popular.
Japan’s development of football started way earlier. Their top flight J-League was started in 1992 compare to the CSL started in 2004.
Japan also has a great system to develop new sport talents by having annual school tournaments. From prefecture level to national level, and it starts in middle school.
Japan also has anime which inspired many kids to play sports. Like Captain Tsubasa, which inspired many kids world wide.
Alongside that, corruption is a huge problem in China which hindered the chance of proper development too. Pooh wants to development football in China and the only way to do it is to throw a large sum of money into different provinces and municipals to have the infrastructure to play. The more chance that the kids get to play, the higher chance to find someone good. However those money get skimmed by multiple layers of officials, coaches and so on. The guy who was hired as a coach at municipal level, might just be the brother or cousin of the local official, who has zero sport experience, but got the job because of nepotism.
That’s pretty much the difference between China’s football development vs Japan’s football development.
What was the strategy of Chinese football?
Buy clubs in Europe -> send Chinese youth players to these clubs -> inject money into domestic clubs with star players -> expose domestic players to a higher level of play
Was this the strategy?
There is no long-term strategy, politicians are appointed to be the president of Chinese FA, each person has a few years time and different ideas.
Something like that, but then they realised it takes many decades for grassroots investment to take effect at the professional level, and by then all they’d have achieved is making foreigners stupidly rich with no guarantees that Chinese born players will ever be as good. It’s better to just invest in grassroots football and wait, it’ll be a lot cheaper, more rewarding, and politically much more popular.
Isn’t Japan successfully doing this? At least for the first two steps. Of course they have much better players than China.
Japan’s success is entirely different.
Japan’s development of football started way earlier. Their top flight J-League was started in 1992 compare to the CSL started in 2004.
Japan also has a great system to develop new sport talents by having annual school tournaments. From prefecture level to national level, and it starts in middle school.
Japan also has anime which inspired many kids to play sports. Like Captain Tsubasa, which inspired many kids world wide.
Alongside that, corruption is a huge problem in China which hindered the chance of proper development too. Pooh wants to development football in China and the only way to do it is to throw a large sum of money into different provinces and municipals to have the infrastructure to play. The more chance that the kids get to play, the higher chance to find someone good. However those money get skimmed by multiple layers of officials, coaches and so on. The guy who was hired as a coach at municipal level, might just be the brother or cousin of the local official, who has zero sport experience, but got the job because of nepotism.
That’s pretty much the difference between China’s football development vs Japan’s football development.