Seems pretty weak and unsupported.
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?
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.