Supporters cheer for China
China has charted a hopeful plan to rise to the top of the world’s most played and most popular sport – football, and the plan starts right here in the neighboring Guangzhou.
Back in 2014, property tycoon Xu Jiayin decided that this was the time to open doors to what is considered to be the world’s leading football academy. His mind was set and he ensured that everyone was on the same page to move towards his goal.
Xu’s ambition was to prepare and train an all-new generation of young footballers who would be able to make China the next football superpower.
With an estimated cost of around MOP1.5 billion, the Guangzhou Evergrande Football School (GZEFS) is a kind of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts focused on a simple concept: training to be the best of the best.
The candidates are certainly not lacking – currently the football academy has around 2,800 young Chinese players. The large majority are boys, but girls are not excluded and for the time being they number about 200 in the cohort of potential football talents.
Players on a team from Yanbian, China
As for the campus, it took only ten months and a significant amount of money for real estate company Evergrande (who also co-owns local club Guangzhou Evergrande Taobao Football Club) to transform the 67.5 hectares of formerly rural land in Qingyuan, Guangdong province. The new football school has a total of 50 football pitches and a squad of Spanish coaches brought to China through a partnership with Spanish giant Real Madrid.
The academy’s first aim was to find new talent for the local club at Guangzhou Evergrande’s Tianhe Stadium.
The club, owned by Evergrande real estate group since 2010, was brought from the Guangzhou Sports Bureau team and has become the Chinese National Super League winner five consecutive times (2011 to 2015).
At the main gates of the academy lies a 12-meter tall replica of the FIFA World Cup trophy as a reminder of the express wish of president Xi Jingping and the academy’s ultimate goal.
Xi had previously stated that he wanted to see China “qualify for, host and win, the World Cup,” and at Qingyuan those words are the short, mid and long-term goals.
The large amounts of money invested into Chinese football in the recent years are also a reminder that the plan is being taken very seriously. The Chinese professional league has become increasingly more professional, with the signing by local teams of popular names in the world of football. Brazilian, Spanish, German and even Portuguese players and coaches are rushing in to support both professional teams and their training academies.
Zhang Yuning heads the ball during the Russia 2018 World Cup Asian Qualifier match between China and Iran in Shenyang
The country’s transfer record was broken four times in the space of a month during last off-
season, and figures show that Chinese Super League teams spent more over the so-called winter transfer window than their English Premier League counterparts.
Brazilian midfielders Alex Teixeira and Ramires and the Colombian striker Jackson Martinez were just some of the names highlighted by the press – however they are not the only ones, as in addition to players’ transfers, China’s top clubs are also betting their money on youth football.
Some say that on the line is not just the “love for the game.” Rowan Simons is part of the community that has lived and played football in China for over 20 years, and is now a presenter on Beijing TV, an author and the owner of the media and production company – Club Football; he thinks that a good part of the money coming in to China’s football arena serves the purpose of “buying favors” with the president Xi Jinping.
Following the publication of his book, “Bamboo Goalposts: One Man’s Quest to Teach the People’s Republic of China to Love Football,” Simons told CNN: “To a Chinese billionaire, a few hundred million dollars is a small price to pay,” he said, referring to the way the game is being used to “fulfill high officials’ wishes.”
As for the young players, they dream high – as one of the trainees at GZEFS also said to CNN when questioned about his expectations as a football player.
“I hope to make it into the national football team and then make it into the Spanish clubs like Barcelona and Real Madrid,” he said, adding, “Or get into the national team and fight for national pride.”
Spanish coach Sergio Zarco Diaz is one of the European coaches that embraced the challenge to move to China to teach football at GZEFS. About the Chinese youth he says, “technical standard is good but tactics need to be worked on.”
He is now on his fourth year working in China and in his opinion, “standards have improved dramatically but they [Chinese youth] have a long way to go,” he mentioned, saying that “decision making process” is still a “big issue” to be solved. RM
It takes money to become a ‘Chinese football star’
Though there may be significant amounts of money pumped into the system, it is unrealistic to think that the training provided by the Guangzhou Evergrande Football School (GZEFS) will be inexpensive.
GZEFS charges a tuition fee of RMB60,000/year which creates a clear barrier, where either the young players are considered talented enough to apply for a scholarship or they will need a guardian to cover the expense.
Although the school curriculum states that only one in each five classes is dedicated to football training, it is said that football is often the topic in the common curriculum classes.
“When I first came here, I taught using key football terms,” Zhang Liya, an English teacher at the school told CNN. For Zhang and other teachers common subjects should come first. “Then we can train them to be a footballer and maybe eventually they can be a famous football star.”
As any school, the GZEFS has a principal; in this case Liu Jiangnan is the man supervising the school activities.
He is hopeful that China’s football status will rise in the next five years as, in his own words, “China’s current ranking is incongruous with China’s international standing as a world power,” he told CNN.
“And of course, in about 20 or 30 years we will set our sights on the top world rankings,” he added.
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