Why China doesn’t dominate soccer
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Being talented individual is not enough. They have to play against other equally talented individuals in the highest level professional leagues from the age of 18 to develop tactically and technically. China needs a professional soccer league with top level foreigners or they need to send their best to European leagues. They can do it but it can take several generations.
Soccer is the most popular sport in the world and has most professional athletes by far. Best individuals from all over the world go to play in best professional teams, mostly in Europe and they continue to grow with better opponents and teammates. Talented Brazilians playing in top leagues all over the world a bring all that with them to their national team. Iceland (population little over 300,000) has professional players playing in England, Russia, Sweden, Netherlands ...
For a population of 3 million:
- Pro league with 30 pro teams (each with a youth system with 7-8 teams) + 80 semi-amateur teams (with promotion to the pro leagues)
That's between 10.000 and 20.000 players in the pro system. 100 (or more) each year are sold overseas.
- Very serious amateur league with 8.000 players every weekend in the capital city, Montevideo (any of those 8.000 players could be a pro in a weak national league) plus 2.000 players in the league for smaller cities.
- Teenagers play leagues much like Americans might play high school and college sports, there are probably 30.000 teenagers playing in leagues
- 140.000 players in all the leagues across all the smaller cities.
So that's about 200.000 active players for a population of 3 million - I was one until a few years ago :)
If China or India could achieve that much sports penetration (imagine 200.000.000 Chinese playing competitive soccer every weekend!), I don't doubt they'd be one of the top ranked teams in the world.
https://www.ovaciondigital.com.uy/futbol/mundo-futbolistas.h...
https://www.referi.uy/tierra-fertil-2017-emigraron-107-jugad...
You may have swapped your units there. 150 million coaches would be somewhat excessive for a population of 300 thousand.
I'm happy for their team to go far this tournament as much as the next guy, but what in the world are you talking about?!
18 is too late. I doubt any one in any of the good national teams started playing seriously and tactically at age 18. This is in fact one of the problems with the US - our soccer players start too late.
National teams are just temporary arrangements. Real growth happens in the clubs.
Exactly. Nothing teaches better than having your ass kicked.
A number of high profile spanish players are considering going China for their last active years, so maybe they're on the right way.
It can be summed up as "China doesn't excel at soccer because of authoritarianism and because the sport is not well understood by anyone and central planning doesn't help".
Ok, if you say so. Where's the evidence?
Hmmmm....
From TFA: "West Germany ... won the World Cup in 1954, 1974 and 1990, and reached the final in 1966, 1982 and 1986."
They finished last in their group in Euro 2000, and did quite badly in 2004 (though I don't remember specifics), and those were the results that motivated several changes (or, at least, moved some already-in-progress moves towards centralization forward).
I'm being ironic, the USSR had both very strong club teams and a very strong national team.
It's hard not to be mean to someone who calls it soccer :-), but this betrays an obvious lack of familiarity with the history of this sport.
USSR, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia all had very strong national teams, pretty much until they were dissolved. Clubs from the communist bloc did not dominate football, but put very convincing performances and were routinely represented in the higher stages of European competitions. Red Star Belgrade and Steaua Bucharest won the Champions Cup within a few years of each other -- all this while players trained in sub-par conditions, worked with sub-par equipment, had access to sub-par medical conditions, research and treatment, and were usually unable to play abroad and further their career at the truly major European clubs.
If anything, the quality of football in most ex-communist countries, Russia included, has steadily declined. Poland and Croatia are the only major and steady exceptions (Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Romania enjoyed some brief stints but not much else), and it's probably no coincidence that their national economies are faring better than those of most ex-communist countries.
> ... Champions Cup ...
People in glass houses, my friend :D
Mainly my comment was just a playful "maybe don't get snippy with someone's terminology, nobody's perfect"
Here's why.
Most sports clubs around here used to be very diverse in terms of sports, on account of the Party insisting that the working class has to practice sports and on account of there not being much entertainment. It would be routine for the same club to have a football team, a basketball team, a handball team and a hockey team, all playing at the highest domestic level. Red Star Belgrade or Dynamo Moscow would, at one point or another, have several teams participating in some sort of "Club Champions' Cup" (e.g. in 1986, Steaua Bucharest football team won the Club Champions' Cup, and the handball team came in third in the handball Champions' Cup)
Consequently, for most of this period, we did not take "club" to mean footbal club. This still persists today, in fact -- it was only around 2000-2005 that most clubs disbanded everything but their football teams, or football-only clubs began to be founded, so except for folks who are now in the 13-18 age group, everyone grew up with "club" meaning "an organization that organizes and maintain a great diversity of sporting events".
(Ironically enough, the party press experimented with an augmented version of the cup's name, which would be translated roughly as "European Football Club Champions' Cup". Suffice to say that did not turn out to be too popular. It took two lines of a narrow newspaper column to print it and there was no way you could pronounce it after the third beer or so).
"European Cup" didn't catch up, either, probably because it would inevitably attract the question "which one?" It didn't help that "European competitions" wasn't a useful term back then: there were various regional competitions as well, such as the Balkans Cup, and less important European competitions, such as the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, so in order to refer to the UEFA Cup, the Champions' Cup and the Cup Winners Cup, we'd say "European cups".
Consequently, everyone here called in "the Champions' Cup", or "the European Champions' Cup". That's how me, my friends or my parents' friends from (what used to be) Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland and the Czech Republic called it. Unfortunately, my Russian isn't exactly top notch, so I can't say much about the USSR, but I'd be surprised if they called it anything else.
Good stamina is a prerequisite for being good at soccer / football. Players run 5-10 miles per game and a lot of that is intense bursts of speed with lots of changes of direction and agile footwork -- which is incredibly tiring. A team gets a limited number of substitutions and there are no timeouts / breaks other than halftime. So you have to be in good shape, and that's definitely a skill that comes with practice
Technique / "touch" is also critical and can be developed. The most immediately striking easily observable difference btw pros and less skilled players is that pros touch is just impeccable -- the ball just goes exactly where they want it. It's like a part of their body. That comes with drills and repetition.
If you are in good shape and have a good touch, you'll be better than most players up to probably a US division 3 college level (you can also be good at this level sacrificing touch for intelligence / game sense, speed, or another attribute). But beyond that you need to either have freakish skills / athleticism and good game sense or just really good game sense
you'll be better than most players up to probably a US division 3 college level
If you really love the game, this sounds like a fairly satisfying career peak. A reasonably healthy player should take comfort in knowing it's achievable through effort alone.
As I've gotten older I've found that having decent ball control and stamina makes up for me being slower and less agile, and helps me enjoy casual pickup games with younger players. Instead of jogging I'll do dribbling exercises for a cardio workout. I love playing soccer but its harder to play as I get older, and these exercises enable me to keep playing casual pickup games
Interestingly enough, China does have a fairly decent women's soccer team (~17th in the world), so they must be doing something right.
If the people don't play a sport, why try to force it on them?
In places like China, Indonesia, and even the US, rightly or wrongly, the people are not really very big on football. (In China, the government is attempting to prop up football unilaterally, but it is having limited success).
Now maybe this aversion cultural, maybe its economic, whatever. But I'm not seeing why the Chinese people should be pushed into football when they have an obvious preference for other activities?
The US has a great women's team in part because lots of women play soccer, and in part because their aren't that many other competitive sports for them to play on a professional level.
The US has an OK men's team mainly because there are enough athletes left over after football, basketball, baseball, and hockey take their cuts to field a somewhat competitive team. They didn't qualify this time around, but they have qualified for seven of the last eight World Cups, so they're doing something right.
In both cases, it has little to do with how much money is spent (if that were the case, the US would dominate the sport) and more to do with how many top athletes decide to play the sport with kids AND stick with it as a profession once they become adults.
They claim it's an "amateur" sport in china. Which is just this side of ridiculous.
Even basketball is growing faster than football in China. This despite the government propping football up. Which is not an indictment of the Chinese, just pointing out that the people there, left to their own devices, would just as soon do something other than play football.
Why? Soccer is by far the most popular sport in China for quite some time now.
I think you need to spend a generation or two to also get the systems right, tho.
We don't think of it as a sport, because it doesn't necessarily fit our western view of sport. But you'd be hard pressed to say that football or basketball is more popular than martial arts as an athletic pass time in China.
However almost all Chinese I know have at least some interest in soccer. Of course they bet on European teams in lack of having own strong teams. But they are more into it than most Europeans I know (who mostly only care in special seasons like World Cup).
In fact, I'm CERTAIN that hip-hop, yoga, or jogging all have a bigger hobby base in the US than hockey, or basketball, or NFL football. If by "hobby" and "serious effort" you mean personally engages in activity twice a week or more. That doesn't make any of them necessarily more "popular" than hockey, or basketball, or NFL football.
Just because it isn't played daily, doesn't mean it isn't a pass time. Martial arts tournaments are enormously popular.
It's arguably even worse in China. Because football is being propped up by the government. Which means even where the government is, let's say, "subtly to strongly urging" people to interact with football, they are still choosing to interact with basketball, martial arts, ping pong, etc instead. Without the government backing, football would fade quickly. Not so for table tennis, or basketball, or boxing. (Which all maintain their popularity with no government intervention.)
My counter point to this is Hockey and the USSR. Hockey is also a free flowing game that relies on team discipline and individual creativity. The USSR was an amazing hockey machine.
It comes down to cultural reasons. USSR's people liked hockey and the USSR supported hockey monetarily. The USSR finds success in hockey. Brazil's people like soccer and Brazil+Brazil's private teams supported soccer monetarily. Brazil finds success in soccer. China's people don't know what they like yet. The people have just started to have have free time because of the recent economical liberalization. China has only started to support soccer monetarily. So it's reasonable to expect that China doesn't play soccer well. They could be better in the future as long as they have the time and culture change it needs.
Side note: I don't know why England sucks. The people love it, god awful amounts of money are spent on soccer/football. But thank god they haven't figured it because the world would not hear the end of it...
I wonder if it just comes down to how they practise it and the level of dedication - similar to how this feature alludes in the case of cricket: http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/653673.ht...
The people called out in this story are all super stars, and have more power in a sense than the coaches of their teams. Much like Lebron James is in basketball.
But if you look at other teams, like Spain, in which there is less dependence on a single player, and more on the team play, my guess is that part of that is due to the coach pushing for more passing, more calm control of the ball. Not to say they don’t have individually great players on the team, but they clearly play as a team, and not individuals.
The article might be right that to excel in Soccer one needs to be more free in expression and experimentation. My theory on why Brazil excels, is that socially the sport is played almost all the time by everyone... and it’s a great sport for low income areas, ball, field, game. In the US, we rarely did pickup games of soccer, even though many of us played in the neighborhood, because most of the other kids wanted to play American Football...
Because soccer is not popular, it doesn't make you as much money or respect as other sports. Strong athletes will overwhelmingly choose sports better for them in the long run.
Elitist. For some reason, in the US, soccer is expensive. Leagues are expensive, classes are expensive, etc. It is squarely an middle to upper middle class sport. This cuts off a huge part of the population. I cannot tell you why because everywhere else, soccer is for everyone and a lot of famous players come from poor backgrounds. When the game was invented, it was a working class' game.
Soccer starts too late. There is no progression from childhood to pro like there is everywhere. The best clubs and teams of the world (and even the ones that aren't so good) have special programs for K-12 kids (e.g. Barcelona has been training Messi since he was 13). Most soccer players I know didn't start playing seriously until high school or even college.
Or go to a park and practice ball skills, solo. Ex-England captain Wayne Rooney was famous for having done that for hours at a time as a kid.
I'm not actually a particular soccer fan and quite enjoy basketball, but it's definitely not true that soccer has higher kit, space or numbers requirements to get in a game as a kid.
This is what we did. A great way to spend summer when you are teen.
As for practicing ball skills, the very nickname Pele was from the sound of the can Pele played instead of ball - his family was too poor to have soccer ball.
Over here (Uruguay) there's a whole cottage industry of five-a-side soccer fields, many workers play it after office hours.
Edit: as a side comment said, poorer people usually cordon off a stretch of road and play there, that's also very very common (especially during the day when there's no much traffic). Two rocks (or logs, or bundles of clothes) can serve as goalposts.
I was only ever a mediocre player, mainly relying on speed - which also got me in just about every school team (small high-school, small market town). At Uni our team did come 2nd in the intra-University cup.
Why did I do all that rather than basketball (a sport I've really enjoyed playing), pervading culture would probably be the main reason (which in turn means availability of fields/courts, etc.).
After Uni I took up volleyball because that was the social sport played at my workplace; now I do karate because that's the sport my kids are doing.
tl;dr You can play football without a football and with 1+ players.
1) Latino immigration and their inherent interest in soccer
2) Pigskin Football is plummeting due to concussion fears
3) Steady rise in popularity of the sport, especially as a social/hipster rebellion to old guard leagues like the NFL
4) MLS, for better or worse, seems stable and can provide some degree of professional support for players. That will attract more athletes and keep athletes in the sport
I think the US will rise to the level of the less talented Euro nations that qualify, like maybe Denmark or Iceland.
Pay to play: for youth development, the player's family has to be fairly well off. This is pay for either an academy, or going to a D1 college team, paying for travel, etc etc
Limited coaching talent: not very many soccer coaches play or even watch soccer regularly. This leads to an emphasis on agility and strength rather than skills and strategy. Agility and strength work out pretty well if the team you're facing has the same focus, but if you're playing against a team that has drilled and nurtured intelligence it will end badly for you.
To have elite running speed you need to have a higher torso/leg ratio, basically long legs and a high center of gravity.
There are regional differences around the world with torso/leg ratios. China is on the lower end, much of Africa is on the high end.
A low center of gravity is actually a good trait in 'soccer' as everyone knows that knows a thing about the game.
Poor post, ok. Racist, no.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/wh...
That would be on my shortlist for among the least important talents for team success.
I think Poland was the #4 FIFA ranked team. Wow was the athleticism gap pronounced for Senegal.
At the regional scale, those also tend to be the most competitive and popular leagues, enabling breeding grounds of diverse playing styles. There's diversity even in how those leagues are managed and organized.
Compared to popular US sports franchises, which according to the article and my understanding (non-american), football(soccer) leagues around the world are much less centralized.
I don't know about China now, but growing up in Asia in 90s I'd say it is hard to foster the type of rivalry/diversity/competition needed to adapt to football(soccer).
Investing in youth academies will be the best path to achieve a comparative level to some european leagues.
It would be interesting if they are already doing this and for how long, because we don't see any significant results yet.
Also, Australia has 5200% less people than China, so not a great comparison. A better comparison would have been India, who have a comparable population but a heavy focus on cricket.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/23/football/barcelona-iniesta-ja...
In the US, I hear, soccer is reasonably popular as a female sport, so the talenf pool is larger.
- 15th in rugby https://www.worldrugby.org/rankings/mru?lang=en
- 6th in tennis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITF_Rankings#Men
- 4th in hockey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IIHF_World_Ranking
- 2nd in volleyball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIVB_World_Rankings
Another one would be handball, ranked 38th - http://www.ihf.info/en-us/thegame/rankingtable.aspx?month=7&...
They are investing heavily, buying loads of European youth football trainers, scouting their own youth at great rate and building their league up pretty fast.
You heard it here first: they will host the World Cup football in 2030 or 34 and will be contesting for the highest rank.
I'm above average in UK but playing basketball or volleyball my height was always a major disadvantage. I realise you can improve your jump game (plyometrics ftw!) but still ...
Which sports is the author referring to other than American Football? I played volleyball, and the coach had little control over the way a serve would play out other than which players were on the court.
I mean this pretty clearly refers to Baseball as well.