Written by | Li Jianli
Over the past many years, I have been asked the two questions that my friends around me have asked the most, one is why China can't play football, and the other is why 13 out of 1.3 billion people can't play football.
The second question is relatively better to answer, football population and total population is not a concept, after years of media science, most people should know that China's registered football population is only a few tens of thousands.
The first problem is relatively more complex. Because in China, football is not only football, it is given more meaning.
On the night of the first day of the Chinese New Year, the national football team habitually dropped the chain. It is more infuriating to lose to Vietnam than to lose to Japan. Vietnam tore off the last fig leaf of Chinese football.
Over the past decade, the two countries have followed their own different paths.
First of all, Vietnam, in 2007, Vietnam's domestic Jia Lai Hoang Ying Academy and Arsenal established a cooperative academy, since then Vietnam began to pay attention to youth training, adhere to the road of ground control play, coupled with the arrival of South Korean coach Park Heng-suk, Vietnamese football for more than ten years as a day of hard work, on the right road has gradually blossomed.
In 2016, Vietnamese football reached the final four of the Asian Youth Championship and won the ticket to the World Youth Championship, and in 2018, Vietnam U23 won the asian cup runner-up. In 2021, for the first time in the history of vietnam's adult national team, it entered the World Preliminary Round of 12 in Asia.
What has Chinese football looked like in the last decade? Jinyuan football swept through the whole of Chinese football, false prosperity, various strange policies of the league, and the fiasco of the national brand echelon in various competitions.
In 2016, when Vietnam entered the top 4 of the Asian Youth Championship, China's U19 group was eliminated, and in 2018, when Vietnam won the second place in the U23 Asian Cup, China's U23 group stage was eliminated. In 2019, Hiddink's olympic team lost 2-0 to Vietnam in a warm-up match in Hubei.
In the past 2021, what has Chinese football looked like again? The interests of the national team are always put first, at the expense of league and youth competitions. The league has only played 22 rounds for two consecutive years, and more than half of the matches are played in a high-intensity consumption of 3 days. The Youth League from U13-U21, the 2021 season did not play more than 10 rounds throughout the year. The 2020 Youth Super League was completely cancelled, and the 2021 National Youth League was cancelled for various reasons.
Everything has a reason, and losing like this already feels very calm. If you fall behind, you will be beaten, and this sentence is quite appropriate everywhere. Chinese football has been poor and weak for many years, and Li Xiaopeng said after the game, "The rise of Chinese football is sooner or later, but it takes the efforts of generations of people." I agree with him in the second half of the sentence.
The first half of the sentence is also based on respect for the foundations of football. Football looks simple, you treat it the right way and he will give you the best feedback. In a hurry, if you don't respect the laws of football, you can only get negative feedback in the end. In the past many years, Chinese football has learned Brazil, Germany, Britain, Croatia, three years to change a road, has been going back and forth on the old road, driving backwards, changing the road, in order to achieve results, but ignored the most fundamental football laws. Chinese football really should think clearly about what it wants and stick to it.
After losing to Vietnam, I saw some media people write that they hoped that this game would be the "Sino-Japanese War" of Chinese football, but the problem was that there were too many tragedies in the history of Chinese football, and no one had ever learned a lesson from the tragedy and introspected on our problems.
After experiencing the Doha massacre, Japanese football has been thinking bitterly for more than 20 years, insisting on walking on a correct path and becoming a first-class boss in Asia. As for Chinese football, we should reflect thoroughly.
It is very likely that Chinese football will still stage repeated scripts and stories in the future, and it may be forgotten after losing to Vietnam in a few days. If this continues, perhaps in the future, the second half of General Fan's sentence "After losing Vietnam and losing Burma" will also come true.