China football superpower by 2050

[banana]

About time too surely for a country of it's size and other athletic successes?

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-36015657

 

 

Other targets include having at least 20,000 football training centres and 70,000 pitches in place by 2020.

 

20,000 training centres  

[Zen Archer (Raconteur)]

Finally, somewhere the old firm can f**k off to.

[RandomGuy.]

Have you seen clips of their youth academies? Its like an army camp. Surely they're just going to overtrain their youth and completely kill any natural talent?

[P45]

Bunch of Fan Zhiyis.

[Enigma]

Have you seen clips of their youth academies? Its like an army camp. Surely they're just going to overtrain their youth and completely kill any natural talent?

It's what the excel in. They've done it in loads of Olympic sports. Get the young and train, train, train.

[Sergeant Wilson]

It's what the excel in. They've done it in loads of Olympic sports. Get the young and train, train, train.

I think they will excel. You can count on that.

[Leicester Saint]

Have you seen clips of their youth academies? Its like an army camp. Surely they're just going to overtrain their youth and completely kill any natural talent?

Ah, the Scottish method...!?

[TheScarf]

I think they will excel. You can count on that.

 

It's a formula Scottish football would do well to adopt.

[banana]

It's what the excel in. They've done it in loads of Olympic sports. Get the young and train, train, train.

 

They do very well training individuals in individual sports, a team game is a different kettle of fish. I'd still expect them to produce higher quality players out of this venture, should it actually be implemented properly.

[Nakamura]

I don't think they ever gave team games a real chance. I know that their basketball youth system is basically "pick young tall kids and train them for the next decade, ignore all the other 99.999% kids who didn't get selected intiallly."

 

It's a very closed system, it's a country with a billion plus people, but in team sports they act like a small country, because nearly all kids are isolated from organized team sports, while small minority is trained hardcore in sports schools.

 

Based on what I've read, they are trying to reverse that with football and make it their first team sport with trully massive participation. I think an even bigger change than all those 70,000 pitches and 20,000 training centers is that they will put football into schools, so all kids get to play it, instead of just a few thousands of superkids in sports schools. They will even have a school football exam.

 

(The exam will be optional, thank god... I was a fat kid in school until I hit puberty, and it made me feel sorry for all the fat Chinese kids when I first read about that exam.)

 

In general, China is all about sports participation now. Their recent mantra now is to get people involved into various marathons, bicycle rides, etc, keep the nation healthy. 

 

But the thing with China, it can all change when this current president goes away, and then maybe they will have completely different priorities. Maybe their next mantra will be how they are a super technological nation, and they will focus on aviation sports. 2050 is very far away. But if they do keep this committment, I think they can be very good.