Personally, I didn’t like football until I was about 15 or 16 years old. Actually, I didn’t like it much. I just liked it a little bit, but I didn’t devote myself to it. At that time, the atmosphere was not the same as it is now. At that time, there were no female guns and male stars, and the mainstream was iron-blooded men. Being a man would be tough and hard. Anyone who dared to stretch out his blue finger and casually freestyle would be killed by the people in the street.
The best way to be tough is sports. Therefore, among male students, if you don’t know much about sports, you will look like a soft egg in the eyes of your classmates. If you don’t watch the five major leagues, the Champions League and World Cup NBA, you will definitely develop abnormally. The more you devote yourself to watching football matches, the more you will look like a man. The more excited you are, the more eloquent you will be. It shows that you are professional and exuberant in male hormones. Boys think that with so much performance, girls will look at him more because of his exuberant hormones.
Everything in the world is related to sex, except sex itself.
I didn’t say this, but Wilde, the boring man. You have to settle accounts with him.
I liked football at first, just like joining a pyramid scheme gang. I was dragged in by my head. My roommate talked to me about football all day, walking, eating, sleeping and taking a shit in the bathroom. I was afraid that if I didn’t respond to him, he would be gay with me, so I was forced to learn football knowledge to show that I was normal. I was very man, and I was full of male hormones. Dude, you’d better not mess around, but I have never been very interested.
Really, just like my feelings for Kitahara, I really couldn’t find a better one in those days, so I’ll just try to like it.
If we put it aside now, right, then so-and-so, so-and-so, we will catch a lot of high-quality ones, although I can’t even remember the names.
My age of football enlightenment was Li Jinyu, Zhang Yuning and Li Tie, that is, the Li Tie who had just been fired as the head coach of the national team. He used to maintain the style of F4 in the early 2000s for many years, which was particularly recognizable. After being a head coach, his face was a lot rounder and his hair was a little shorter, but it was still much longer than that of ordinary boys. This shows how much psychological influence adolescence has on a person’s life. I can’t forget Toko Kitahara and Li Tie can’t forget F4’s long hair.
Because the players of that session were highly valued, playing against the weak team was just like playing for fun. Every time Li Jinyu scored a goal, he would learn from Guo Jing’s bow and arrow shooting. POSE was particularly handsome and very rhythmic. Although he lost to South Korea in the first game, he played against South Korea as a whole, and the momentum was fierce. The Korean media all thought that we were mental derangements, and we despised them even after losing, which was different from China people who always liked self-examination at ordinary times.
Because everyone has high expectations for that generation, sometimes when watching the game in the classroom, male students gather around the TV and score a goal, and the students are just like taking drugs. Some smash their desks, some howl like wolves, and some will grab the collars of the students next to them and shake others while screaming, making them twitch as if they were touched by electricity.
There were no entertainment activities in those days, and life and entertainment depended on the ambiguous eyes of female students and sports competitions.
In the 2000s, because a Yao Ming suddenly appeared in basketball, I only watched the NBA. After Yao Ming retired, I didn’t even watch sports events, so I concentrated on earning money to support my family.
Earning money to support the family is actually much more technical and practical than sports competitions. I don’t even want to come out here.
Occasionally, I saw the news of football in China, which basically showed a bloody collapse trend. The more I kicked, the more I collapsed. At the beginning, there were still several people studying abroad in Europe. Later, there were fewer and fewer people studying abroad. Now there is only one Lei Wu left. Now the national team seems to be reduced to the top eight in Asia, and it is often beaten on the face by Syria and Thailand. In the end, the China men’s football team has simply become a domestic emotional trash can and has become the object of collective banter. Since 2002,
Strangely, however, the Super League was extremely hot in previous years, and it was once known as the "sixth largest league in the world". Guangzhou Evergrande even won the AFC Champions League twice. In 2019, the average salary of Super League players reached about 6.5 million RMB. The average annual salary of the most expensive players in Guangzhou Evergrande and Shanghai Shanghai Shanghai was about 12 million RMB, and the worst player in Beijing and Shanghai also reached 2 million RMB.
This phenomenon that the league is hot and the national team is weak happens at the same time, which makes China football look very strange.
So what is the reason that led to this phenomenon?
Out of curiosity about the origin of all things, I chose to visit many domestic footballers who have been running around the world for 20 or 30 years and ask them why China’s football has been playing more and more in the past 20 years. Interestingly, everyone’s answers are surprisingly consistent, and there is a relaxed attitude of "You guys have seen through the world of mortals for a long time, so what should you do?".
After synthesizing everyone’s opinions, I gradually figured out the root logic of China’s failure in football.
Before writing this reason, I would like to remind you that, unlike our industrial party, which always feels confident that there is a sea of stars in front of us, most people in the sports and entertainment circles are still a little sad. At least three people in the football circle have used the phrase "China football is the epitome of China society" with me.
But as far as I know, this sentence is wrong.
China football and China entertainment circle are not all the epitome of China. Accurately speaking, they are only the epitome of China’s negative energy. China football circle and entertainment circle are relatively deformed, and they are also deeply related to finance, real estate and other industries. Because the starting industry of money itself is not normal in China, it is not normal to reflect on them. If you want to compare China industrial circle with China entertainment circle, it will be another world.
Back to the main question, why did China’s football (mainly referring to the men’s national team) play so badly?
It’s just that the players who play football are not good.
Then why are the players not good at football?
To put it simply, the fastest growth time of football players’ personal level is in the period of teenagers, but the level of football teenagers in China is not good.
We all know that no matter what line of work, the best person must be a combination of "high talent and diligence", and both of them are indispensable. Moreover, whether it is sports or literature and art, high talent can be seen in adolescence, whether it is Go, piano, writing, running, singing, dancing, basketball, or even physics and mathematics, it is clear at a glance when you are a teenager.
There is a saying in the world of Go, "If you are not a national player at the age of 20, you will be hopeless all your life", which is the truth.
Yao Ming in his teens, James in his teens, and Lang Lang in his teens all showed super-high talent in their teens, and became an industry elite in their adulthood. No one did not show his talent and did not undergo cruel training after the age of 20, and then he suddenly became extremely awesome in a certain field.
Even Tik Tok online celebrity, who was hit by the Universiade, became popular because of one sentence and one thing, and often passed away quickly, because there was no talent to continue exporting.
Including myself, I have 20 years of writing experience to write articles, and I don’t suddenly write things. I started writing novels when I was in junior high school. Every morning, the whole class is waiting for my novel to be updated, and I will circulate it to each other every morning, and the cover of my notebook will end up like oil residue.
If the highest score of football players is 100 points, let’s assume that Pele, Diego Maradona, Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi have a total score of 95 points (fans don’t come to wrangle, thank you), then they should reach the level of about 80 points before they reach adulthood. The league will improve their level, but the space is not as big as expected. The league mainly plays a role in maintaining a high level.
The Super League is very prosperous, but it doesn’t improve the level of China men’s soccer team that much, because they were locked at the level of 50-60 points in adolescence, and the league will make them rise to 65-70 points, but the upper limit is too low.
The Super League is helpful, and we can also pull a group of people out of the league to bully the fishing club, but the Super League is not the core reason that determines the level of the national team.
When you look at the time when international football stars became famous and began to make achievements, they usually started around the age of 18. For example, Messi became famous at the 2005 World Youth Championship, when he was just 18 years old. The next year, Diego Maradona called him his successor. Cristiano Ronaldo also became famous at the age of 18. In 2003, he moved from Sporting Lisbon to Manchester United for 12.24 million pounds, because at this time their total score was very high and they began to dump our players in the same period.
Of course, we have some high-level and good prospects. Don’t believe any strange theories of race and culture. I said that it is hooliganism to talk about problems with culture. We can have talents from all walks of life. How can 1.4 billion people not have a football genius?
In fact, India also has all kinds of talents, but it is buried and there is no platform to play.
However, when our players are teenagers, they encounter two big problems, which make their level stuck in the low level range. One is the lack of excellent youth football teachers, and the other is the lack of a lot of opportunities for practice.
As mentioned earlier, a master must be a combination of "high talent+diligence". High talent needs guidance, or it will be ruined. For example, Yao Ming is a basketball family. This is no problem. Lang Lang studied with Professor Zhao Pingguo at the age of 9 and has always been supported by experts. If he was born in a bad environment, his road to fame would be a hundred times more difficult.
Many children in Beijing can get the top resources in the country after they are born. Being famous in Beijing means being famous all over the country. Therefore, a large number of writers and singers are likely to emerge in Beijing, while a child from Sichuan, Hunan and Shanxi is ten million times more difficult and has to work ten million times harder to reach the same height. Because he has no resources and platform, he can only bite his teeth and die.
Do you say that children in Beijing are born with better talents than those in Shanxi? I don’t believe it.
There has never been any real fairness in this world. We were born to overcome all kinds of unfairness.
By the same token, compared with foreign countries, our football players were led astray in their youth, because we were short of excellent youth football coaches.
Ali Shaw, a Dutch coach who worked in our national team, once said an argument:
"The success rate of youth football training is high, and 70% depends on the level of young football coaches."
The highest level a player can reach as a teenager is not far from his final destination.
Our coaching level from children to teenagers is very low.
Maurines, a Spanish coach, came to Shanghai Shenhua Youth Training Department to work. In an interview with diariosur, a Spanish media, he said that our youth training coach can only play strength and run, and he is very weak in training technical and tactical abilities.
About 20-30 years behind Europe.
Some of our coaches with C-level coaches or D-level coaches’ certificates can’t do a good job of passing the low flat ball with their arches. They can only teach their children to run and shoot, and Spanish children of the same age can already open the space to send a straight ball.
Our youth football coaches are not only of low quality, but also lack of talents.
Like Spain, with a total population of less than 47 million, there are as many as 15,000 coaches with UEFA A-level certificates, 84,300 in Japan, a leading Asian country, and 600 in Iceland, a country with a population of only 360,000, 400 of whom have UEFA B-level certificates.
In China, a country with a population of 1.4 billion, in 2018, there were only over 40,000 coaches registered with the Football Association, only half of that in Japan. There were 11,855 C-level coaches, 2,298 B-level coaches, 985 A-level coaches and 158 professional coaches who could teach children a little.
The number of A-level coaches in our population of 1.4 billion is only 6.6% of Spain’s population of 47 million. There is only one A-level coach for every 1.54 million people in Spain, and one A-level coach for every 3,133 people in Spain.
There are only six A-level coaches in a big city with a population of 10 million, while there is one A-level coach in a community in Spain.
How can you beat Spain?
If you want to beat them, the Spanish coaches should not be collectively angry.
Moreover, the salary of most grass-roots football coaches in China is 5000-8000 yuan per month, which makes people have no motivation to stay for a long time in first-and second-tier cities.
What makes China football change fundamentally is not how hot the league is held, but the emergence of a large number of excellent coaches covering the grass roots, so that these coaches can earn income to support their families and have room for promotion. Then, under the guidance of these coaches, talented children can become world superstars.
Only with Bole can a swift horse be selected and trained. Without Bole, China football would be completely blind.
Then why is China so good at table tennis, badminton, diving and weightlifting, but China football can’t copy their methods?
Because football is the most competitive sport in the world.On the whole earth, the competition of table tennis, badminton, diving and weightlifting is far less than that of football. The competition of football starts with dolls and is basically stereotyped by teenagers. It is necessary not only to be talented and let people pick it out, but also to practice with a large number of people.
Pay attention to this word, it must be "a large wave of people often play", not a small number of people who train hard like table tennis and badminton.
This involves the second problem of diligence in "high talent+diligence". This diligence is not an individual’s diligence, but a group’s diligence based on a large number of grass-roots clubs.
A large number of excellent grass-roots coaches ensure the selection and training of highly gifted children, and a large number of grass-roots clubs ensure the growth of children.
Let’s take Ronaldo as an example.
Cristiano Ronaldo’s father is equipment manager of Andorinha, an amateur football club (that is, a handyman), so Cristiano Ronaldo trained in this club at the age of 7. Because of his good foundation, he was signed by the best local national club at the age of 10. When he signed it, he only spent 22 footballs and two sets of jerseys. After three years of careful training, Cristiano Ronaldo won half of the team’s goals here and was later attracted by Sporting Lisbon. At the age of 13, Cristiano Ronaldo moved to Sporting Lisbon for 1,500 pounds and played at the age of 18.
Messi’s experience is similar. At the age of 5, he started playing football in amateur grass-roots clubs. His father was the coach and taught him personally. From then on, he was promoted to the old boys Club in Newell. At the age of 11, he needed treatment because of dwarfism. Newell dared not spend the money. At the age of 13, Messi was taken to the youth training camp in La Masia, Barcelona, Spain by coach KUKA, and he also got treatment opportunities. Since then, he has become famous in Barcelona.
In fact, Japan is learning from the model of "a large number of excellent coaches+grassroots amateur clubs" in Europe and South America, which makes Japanese football play stronger and stronger in Asia.
Reporter Miao Yuan once interviewed Japanese youth training coach Chiba Taishin, who used to be a professional player and worked as a youth training coach for 20 years after retiring. According to his reaction, many football teachers in Japan are volunteers, playing with their children when they were young. In junior high school, children can train three times a week and play once. In middle school, Japanese football will form a three-legged team, a social team and a professional echelon, with a large number of campus and social players. The level of the top 32 social teams in China is close to professional.
In the 12-15-year-old echelon of professional teams, only 1% of the outstanding talents are selected from these teams. Because there are a large number of grassroots units, excellent seedlings come up.
Chiba Taishen also said a very important point: children should master basic football skills at the age of 10-12, and improve their understanding of football after the age of 12, and combine skills with football understanding.
I doubt very much how our scarce football coaches, and most ordinary coaches, can make our children in China master basic football skills at the age of 10-12.
With grass-roots clubs and enough students, we have to let them fight at this time.
An interesting point is that the vast majority of football powers in the world are actually not vast countries, and the football level of countries with large areas is actually not outstanding, like that of China, the United States and India.
Why is it easy for a small country to practice strong football? It is because regional confrontation can often be organized without making the young players so tired.
Even in countries like England and Italy, which we don’t think are so big, teenagers and Italian C try their best to compete in different districts. When amateur clubs compete, the driving distance is guaranteed to be within one or two hours, so as to try to go and return on the same day without wasting everyone’s time and energy on the bus.
An hour or two’s drive is too extravagant for China. In the past, it would have been enough for Shaoyang to drive to Loudi to compete. Even if there is a high-speed train now, we have to change trains when we get off high-speed railway station. Our Shaoyang team wants to pick Changsha, and it will take four or five hours to change trains, so the little players will be exhausted.
Therefore, it is best to divide a province into several small areas, so that young people in small areas can confront each other more, and let them experience the beatings in the world and the pressure and happiness of growing up from an early age.
Then some people may object to this view and say Brazil? People are as big as Brazil, and a state is quite a country in Europe. How can people do so well?
Brother, Brazilians are actually suffering. It took them nearly 50 years to complete the national league, and it was only in the 21st century that they made their living mainly in coastal states, relying on state leagues. Small-scale regional confrontation is the basis for their talents to flourish.
We look at how the world’s football powers have risen, and soon know where the main vein of football development lies.
After the World War II in Germany, Herbega, the coach director of the Football Association, planned to "train 100 excellent coaches first, teach 100 people for every one, and train 10,000 coaches."
Ten years later, the Federal Republic of Germany won the World Cup in Switzerland in 1954.
Up to now, Germany has turned the German Football Association into the largest single sports association in the world, with 24,481 clubs, 145,000 teams and 7.17 million registered players.
But among the 7.17 million registered players, only 1,500 people finally make a living in this line. These 1,500 people are really one in a million.
So how can China beat the Germans?
If you want to beat them, German coaches should not be collectively angry.
By the way, the salary of German youth coaches is five to ten times that of ordinary people. Think about the salary of China youth coaches of 5,000 to 8,000 yuan, which is really invisible. That’s why youth coaches try to ask for bribes from players.
Let’s take a country with small boobs as an example to see how Icelandic football has become strong. The case of this country is more representative.
Iceland has a population of 330,000, so it’s normal that people can’t beat others. All of them have to go to work, and the weather is cold. There are few football fields in China, so it’s difficult to get a team out. Everyone understands, but the Icelandic Football Association has made great efforts to strengthen itself. In 2000, it began to build nine large indoor football stadiums all over the country, and every school and village also built football fields. By 2015, a total of 179 standard football fields and 128 football fields were built.
Moreover, since 2000, Iceland has trained 600 professional football coaches like crazy, 400 of whom have the UEFA B-level coaching certificate, which is equivalent to one professional coach for every 100 young men of the right age. In addition, due to the small space, they can often be pulled together to engage in confrontation, and the level has risen steadily.
By the European Cup in 2016, the Icelandic team began to make achievements, with two draws and one win in the group stage, killing England in the quarter-finals and successfully reaching the quarter-finals.
Think about what it would be like if China could reach the quarterfinals of the European Cup.
But it took Icelandic people only 16 years.
So you see, as long as we start from the roots in a down-to-earth manner, we can start football.
Therefore, everyone should understand a truth. In the most competitive sports subdivision industry in the world, football must start with dolls, and there must be a large number of amateur bottom clubs+youth leagues+fierce confrontation in small areas+a large number of excellent grassroots coaches, and then an excellent adult top league and an excellent national team can be established.
The result of the national team is the final result, and the national team is not the cause of the matter.
Then why is the foundation so poor? The Super League has been quite lively in the past few years, and even won the AFC Champions League?
This question is relatively simple.
The Super League looked prosperous in the past few years because of its interests.
Many companies go to the Super League, and their purpose is not football at all, because all football clubs in China are losing money. The poor income of Chinese football clubs is simply not enough to plug their teeth, but how can they do business at a loss?
This is the same as opening a five-star hotel. I usually love to explore the business model and find that most five-star hotels in China are unprofitable. Hotels that invest 10 billion yuan can earn up to 100 million yuan a year, and the input-output ratio is too low, and most of them are still losing money. Five-star hotels in Shaoyang are extremely well built and the cost is so high, and there are few guests at all. I don’t know how they maintain it. It is a bad business here.
It was not until later that I learned that a five-star hotel is actually a part of the infrastructure. If you build a five-star hotel, the local government will try to make it up for you in the land or other places, so that you can earn money from other places.
Chinese football clubs also mean the same thing. Bosses vote for football mainly to earn money from local governments, finance and other places, but they are not interested in football.
So you asked him to spend ten years building a youth training system. How could he have this idea? I don’t even know where it is five years later. I’m crazy. Why did I invest so much money to build a youth training system?
If the boss insists that I build an echelon, then I’ll just build an inspection to cope with it. Anyway, we can’t do a ten-year talent training plan that consumes money and energy.
Therefore, in the first year when Lippi coached the national football team, he reflected that China professional clubs didn’t even have a complete echelon construction. How many years have it been?
A senior person in the sports field told me that when Jiangsu Suning scored well, Jiangsu Sports School directly gave the echelon to Suning, and then Suning directly dissolved it.
You can pay attention to one thing. Chinese football clubs especially like to smash foreign aid with deep pockets, but they don’t train local young players. First, because it is easy to make achievements, they can quickly smash an AFC Champions League with money and get recognition from the top. Second, buying directly in the peripheral market, large transactions can generate huge amounts of money flow, and everyone in this link, from the general manager, translators, brokers and coaches, is eager to get kickbacks.
Since in China, the club can’t build a youth training echelon for his special motivation, why can’t we learn from South America, Europe and Japan, and build a large number of amateur clubs at the bottom? Let China players raise their level to 75-80 points when they are young, and then keep a high level in the league. How many stars with 85-90 points are there?
This problem is much more complicated, and it involves more economic chains.
If we compare Japan and Germany, we lack a large number of well-trained excellent coaches, and we can’t keep these people struggling in their posts for decades, and a football market has not formed.
If we compare South American countries, we lack a large number of volunteers. Many parents in South America are free volunteers in amateur clubs. They have fun by themselves, and they also take their children to play together. They can often play all night on the court.
These two points are difficult to achieve in China.
Training a large number of excellent football coaches requires a long-term 10-year plan, which requires administrative power. After the training, these people have to be prevented from changing careers easily, and there is a shortage of volunteers. In fact, parents in China are very busy, and they are not on the same level as Europeans, Japanese and South Americans.
China is now the fastest-growing economy in the world. Everyone needs to keep up with the big forces economically and make a determined effort to earn money. Because if the class leap cannot be achieved now, it will be several times more difficult for the later generations to achieve it. Everyone is working hard to earn money. Where can they spare time to volunteer at the football field?
Therefore, we can make a comparison. Either developed countries have perfect wages and benefits, or South American countries, whose economies are flat and often harvested by the United States, have perfect amateur clubs at the bottom, and such clubs are not for profit. China is now in a special historical stage. Many people have just become urban citizens from rural areas, and a large number of high-quality young people are still seizing emerging jobs such as the Internet and finance. They are all buying the first car and the first suite in their lives and have no time to participate in football grassroots projects in person.
Everyone has the opportunity to change their destiny, and it is not football’s turn to grab time for the time being.
I think that if China’s economy stagnates one day or becomes a developed country, football will be much better than it is now.
You may be tempted to ask, then why did China’s football and basketball, which were good in the past, fall into this state now?
Because it used to be a national system, this system has been scolded for decades in my impression, and it has produced many drawbacks, saying that it is a waste of people and money, which is the wrong way of socialism in the past, but in fact, the national system also has its excellent side. In the past, good players were actually selected from sports schools at different levels and then practiced hard behind closed doors. In 2002, that wave of players was actually the last performance of players trained by the national system.
After that wave, the level of players became worse and worse, because the old system was overturned, but the new system was not established, and the bottom-up basic population such as South America and Europe was not established, so they played worse and worse in the past 20 years.
It is not anyone’s fault that a new system has not been established, but it is decided by the stage of China’s times.
We have seen that some small countries, such as Qatar and Viet Nam, can often abuse the men’s soccer team in China. In fact, they have just set up a team with a little meager funds, and the government has stepped forward to set up a youth training center, which has achieved results in a long time.
The children in China, without government organization, received expensive and wrong guidance in their teens, but after the technology was formed, they couldn’t play with the small professional guidance.
It’s a bit like people are using the national system that we don’t use to attack the unhealthy market system that we haven’t formed.
Of course, because this country also lacks the bottom operating system in South America, it can only bully China at most, and it is very difficult to go any further.
"Usually our poor youth football population is just making up the numbers." A big shot in the circle sighed and said this to me.
In fact, in all areas of deep competition, the sports circles in China have encountered the same problems as football.
For example, in basketball and volleyball in China, the results are getting worse and worse. Only the middle of the women’s volleyball team was saved by Lang Ping. That’s because the competition of women’s volleyball in the world was not so fierce. Lang Ping saved a group of teenage girls in time and caught up with them through a lot of hard training.
If nothing unexpected happens, the three major events in China, regardless of men’s and women’s events, are all due to the fact that the new system was not established when the old system was transferred to the new system, which is an inevitable historical trend.
The former China Women’s Football Team, the 2002 China Men’s Football Team, and the former Yao Ming, Wang Zhizhi and Li Na were actually trained from the old system. They were the beneficiaries of the old system. Now the new system has not been built, and China’s special historical stage has made the three goals worse and worse.
Those leagues that look like red fire can’t hide the failure of our construction at the bottom of this fierce global competition.
Finally, give some advice to China football:
1. Learn from Germany and Iceland, establish a football coach training system, and strive to have thousands of professional coaches in each key city.
2. Through market-oriented operation, these coaches are guaranteed to survive and stay, and there is still room for salary increase. (This is the hardest)
3. Without thinking about doing a good job in football all over the country, we should set aside one or two key provinces, decentralize coaches in these provinces, divide these provinces into different small regions, and launch fierce youth leagues in each small region. If possible, it is best to set up three teams, such as youth training centers, youth training points of football associations and cooperative schools of clubs, like Germany, to select outstanding talents from them.
4. Choose a leader with a long term for about ten years, and be patient to do it.
If it really doesn’t work, it’s ok to engage in the previous youth training system.
Of course, in fact, football is a sport and entertainment, and it is not so important in essence. As I said before, "earning money to support the family is actually much more technical and more practical than sports competitions." Now our country focuses on aerospace, the belt and road initiative and the prosperity of the whole people. Compared with football, football is really insignificant. No matter how well you play it, there is no chance to raise your head and speak in the face of the powerful economic and technological gap.
If football scores can be exchanged for the improvement of the living standards of the whole people, I believe that people in Brazil’s slums must raise their hands in favor.
We have a wider sea of stars and dust, and we can take it slowly in the back.
According to the present situation, football in China may still linger for a while, but it doesn’t matter. The best chance to plant a tree was ten years ago, and the second best chance is now.
