With the success of Meizhou Hakka's rush to the super, Wuhua became the first county-level city in the history of Chinese professional football to give birth to a Chinese Super League team.
In 1956, the State Sports Commission awarded Meixian District the title of "Football Town" based on the long history and development status of football in Meixian District (now Meizhou City). From the 1950s to the 1990s, Meizhou has been an important talent training base for Guangdong football, and has sent a large number of Hakka international footballers to the men's and women's national teams at all levels.
In Meizhou, the famous "hometown of football", Wuhua County is a very important landmark.
In 2013, Yuankeng Village, Wuhua Changbu Town, unveiled the "Birthplace of Chinese mainland Modern Football" (data map).
Wuhua County, formerly known as Changle County, is an important source of Hakka culture in eastern Guangdong. In 1873, two missionaries, Charles Piton of France and Heinrich Bender of Germany, founded the church school Yuankeng Zhongshuguan (later known as Yuankeng Middle School) in the village of Yuankeng in Changbu Town, Wuhua County, Meizhou City. At that time, Yuankeng Middle School was built on a mountain, and at both ends of the lawn playground of the mountain pass, the goal was built with wood, and Bian Dezhi taught the students to play football. Since then, modern football has been introduced to Chinese mainland, and at the same time, it has also created the continued development of Meizhou football in the following 148 years, and Wuhua County has been recognized as the birthplace of modern football in Chinese mainland.
Wuhua people are known for the spirit of "Wuhua Brother hard". On the one hand, it is the "fist hardness" of the Five Chinese, and there have been many "Wu Zhuangyuan", "Wujinshi" and "Wujuren" in history; on the other hand, the Wuhua people are "technically hard" and have always been famous for their abundant stone carving craftsmen. The third aspect is "hard feet", which is the hometown of world football king Li Huitang.
Located in Xikeng Laolou Village, Wuhua Hengpi Town, Li Huitang's former residence is a Hakka-style four-corner tower building.
The main building of the Qiuwang Cultural Park, which is under construction, is the Hakka Dragon House Style Chinese Modern Football Museum.
Li Huitang is a well-known generation of chinese and foreign ball kings in the 1920s and 1930s, is the captain of the Chinese men's football team to participate in the Olympic Games for the first time in 1936, scoring more than a thousand goals in his life. Li Huitang's former residence is located in Xikeng Laolou Village, Hengpi Town, Wuhua County, which not only retains the original appearance of the former residence, but also builds the Ball King Cultural Park, which has become one of the football landmarks in Wuhua County.
In 2009, Meizhou City held a city-wide football work conference to formulate a "ten-year plan" (data map).
Due to the profound football culture precipitation, wuhua county in the people's republic of China after the establishment of the football style prevailed in the folk. In the 1960s, Wuhua County trained its first international footballer, Zhang Junlang. Since then, the county has successively sent a large number of outstanding players such as Zhang Fotian, Wei Chongjin, Wei Faci, Li Pengrui, Li Yunxiang and so on into the Guangdong Provincial Team, becoming an excellent representative of Guangdong football Hakka players.
However, after Chinese football entered the professionalization, Meizhou City was subject to the lag of the football system and the underdevelopment of the economy, and has not established its own real professional team. Such a result has led to the paralysis of Meizhou's grassroots football training system, and many potential young players have left their homeland early to join the youth training system of other clubs in China. The football atmosphere in Wuhua County during this period was also greatly affected.
Until 2010, Meizhou City issued the "Ten-Year Plan for Revitalizing the "Hometown of Football"", which clearly put the formation of a professional football team on the agenda of the "Ten Ones" project. Wuhua Football took advantage of the momentum, meizhou Hakka football club came into being, out of a unique development path from quantitative change to qualitative change.
In 2012, Cao Yangfu, the former head coach of Guangdong Rizhiquan, was idle at home, when he led the team to run ahead for four consecutive years and was depressed. Suddenly, Cao Yang received a call from the Meizhou Municipal Sports Bureau informing him that an entrepreneur from Wuhua County wanted to invest in a professional team in the area. Cao Yang immediately rushed to Wuhua to meet the entrepreneur. This person was Wei Jinping, an investor in Meizhou Hakka Football Club.
Wei Jinping, a Wuhua local, is the chairman of a real estate company and loves football himself. He proposed to Cao Yang that his investment in professional football teams is not for fame and fortune, but hopes to contribute to the football cause in his hometown Wuhua and respond to the call of Meizhou City to revitalize the "hometown of football". Wei Jinping also said that the professional club he invested in was home to Wuhua, but not only represented a certain region or enterprise, but represented the "Hakka family", so he wanted the club to be named "Meizhou Hakka Football Club". At this time, it was 8 years earlier than the Chinese Football Association's mandatory regulations on the neutralization of club names!
Meizhou Hakka Football Club was established in 2013 (data map).
Cao Yang and Wei Jinping hit it off, and he immediately added a surplus of players from various Chinese Super League and Chinese League A clubs in the province to form the Meizhou Hakka Team and began to participate in the Chinese Second Division. Wei Jinping also invested in the construction of a football training base on the banks of the Qinjiang River in Hedong Town, Wuhua County, so that the club could really take root in the local area. After three seasons of hard work in the Chinese Second Division, the Meizhou Hakka team successfully rushed the first division in the 2015 season under the leadership of the veteran coach Qi Wusheng.
Since the 2016 season, Meizhou Hakka team has always been based in Wuhua County, and has adopted a strategy of steady investment and steady development in the environment of "Golden Dollar Football". Through continuous internal potential, cultivate new talents, introduce cost-effective internal and external assistance, and hire foreign coaches suitable for their own style. Among the registered players of meizhou hakka team over the years, Guangdong players have maintained a third of the number, and Guangdong players also account for nearly half of the current main lineup. Preserving the seeds of professional football for local players in Guangdong is the biggest contribution that Meizhou Hakka Club has made to Guangdong football in the past 9 years.
Cao Yang served as the general manager of Meizhou Hakka Football Club for 9 years, which is also a record in the history of Chinese professional football.
After the first four seasons of the first four seasons, meizhou hakka team went to the fifth place in the central league last year. This season, under the tide of "de-gold yuanization" in the Chinese Super League, Meizhou Hakka Club has unanimously locked in the goal of rushing to the top under the consensus of investors and coaching staff. In the end, after four stages and 34 rounds of fierce fighting, the soldiers of meizhou Hakka finally completed the mission of overtaking. In this way, Meizhou Hakka not only became the first team in Meizhou to rush to the top professional league, but Wuhua County also became the first county-level city in the history of Chinese professional football to have a Chinese Super League team.
In 2018, the Meizhou Huijun women's football team also completed the overtaking at the Wuhua County Stadium (data map).
In the 2018 season, Meizhou Huijun women's football team also rushed to the women's Super League here in Wuhua County. At the end of 2020, Meizhou Hakka Football Club signed a co-construction agreement with the Guangdong Football Association to jointly build the Guangdong Women's Football Team and help the team participate in the Women's Super League and the Women's Senior Division of the 14th National Games. In the 2021 season, Guangdong Meizhou Hakka Women's Football Team won the third place in the National Women's Football Championship and the fourth place in the National Women's Super League, which is also the best result created by Guangdong Adult Women's Football Since 2002.
After 9 years of tempering, Meizhou Hakka Football Club has not only made double-line efforts in men's and women's football, but also formed a good youth training system. At present, Meizhou Hakka Club runs its own football school, with multiple echelons from U13 to U19, and has established a dragon from material selection to training and even sports and education integration with sports schools, football characteristic schools and Jiaying College in Meizhou. At this year's provincial championship, the Meizhou Hakka Club echelon won the championship in three categories of men and women, and the total result was second only to Guangzhou and Shenzhen. At next year's Provincial Games, Meizhou Hakka Club undertook the formation of four groups of the Meizhou Men's Football Project.
Wuhua Hengpi Football Town.
Wuhua Olympic Sports Center is the highest county stadium in the country.
Under the successful leadership of Meizhou Hakka Club, Wuhua County has also continuously carried out a phased football layout in accordance with the "Ten-Year Plan for the Revitalization of Meizhou City's "Football Town"" in the past 10 years. The Wuhua County Government set up the Wuhua Youth Football Development Fund to create a cultural tourism zone in the hometown of the king of the ball, forming a series of special football events and activities, polishing the signboard of the "hometown of the king of the ball", and launching the spirit of "Wuhua Brother hard".
The Wuhua Olympic Sports Center, which invested nearly 1 billion yuan to build, was put into use in 2019 and became the home of the Meizhou Hakka team's Chinese First Division this season, and will also become one of the home stadiums of the Meizhou Hakka Super League in the future.
The Wuhua County Government and Meizhou Hakka Club also jointly invested in the construction of Wuhua Hengpi Football Town, which has hosted many key national and provincial football competitions such as the China League One, the China Champions League, the FA Cup, the Governor's Cup, and the Xiaojia A in the past two years, and has become a very important southern event host center in Chinese football.
At the same time as Meizhou Hakka rushed to overtake, Wuhua County is also hosting the 2021 Guangdong Province "Governor's Cup" football tournament high school and vocational middle school group three categories of events, which is also the first time that the "Governor's Cup" has been hosted in a county-level city.
At present, Wuhua County will also focus on building a large-scale comprehensive football cultural park that integrates citizens' fitness, entertainment, cultural exchanges and football competitions.
The Meizhou Hakka team that successfully overtook the 2021 season (data map).
With the meizhou Hakka club rushing to surpass, Guangdong football will have four Chinese Super League teams next year, recreating the grand situation of Guangdong having four A-team teams at the same time in the 1996 season. Wuhua County has entered the core territory of Chinese professional football from a small mountainous county, and will further promote Meizhou to revitalize the "hometown of football" and even create a new chapter of "China Football Special Zone" in the future.
Li Huitang wrote in his famous football book "The Root Collection of Ball Gardens": "Advocating football must be considered from the aspect of popularization, not seeking deformed development, if China suddenly produces eleven outstanding super talents, vertical and horizontal, playing all over the world and five continents, if everything is not on track, it may not be possible to immediately enrich the country and strengthen the army." ”
The history and reality of the development of football in Wuhua County and the enlightenment brought to Chinese football may be condensed in this sentence.
Text/Guangzhou Daily, Xinhuacheng Reporter: Zhang Zhe
Photo/ Guangzhou Daily, Xinhuacheng Reporter: Zhou Wanqi (In addition to the data map)