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\n

FIFA is expecting record-breaking revenue<\/a> from the 2026 World Cup. But it\u2019s still leaving a lot of money on the table \u2014 or more specifically, Chinese yuan.
Despite the expanded field in this year\u2019s tournament, China\u2019s men\u2019s national team still failed to qualify. FIFA is now talking about expanding again to 64 teams in 2030, with the implicit hope of pulling in the Chinese team and its massive market of soccer-obsessed fans.
The running joke in Chinese online soccer forums is that the men\u2019s national team may still not qualify, says Hong Kong University Professor Xu Gouqi, who wrote a 2008 book on the role of sports in China. \u201cChinese are not allowed to discuss many things in social media,\u201d Xu noted in an interview. \u201cBut you can criticize the Chinese men\u2019s football team with no consequences. It\u2019s still a safe place.\u201d
In fairness, the men\u2019s team has not given its fans much reason for optimism over, well, the last century. The squad was an Asian powerhouse back in the 1930s, but has only qualified for the World Cup once, in 2002, when it failed to score a goal in losing all three of its games.
It\u2019s not for lack of trying. Xi Jinping rode to power in China fresh off helming the wildly successful 2008 Beijing Olympics, and he\u2019s keenly aware of how sports are intertwined with China\u2019s sense of identity on the world stage, says Xu. One of Xi\u2019s early promises: rebuilding the men\u2019s national team to put it on a path to winning the World Cup by 2050, which is aligned with the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s long-term blueprint for turning the country into a fully-modernized global superpower.
So far, it hasn\u2019t been going great.
In the Asian qualifying tournament for the 2026 World Cup, the Chinese men\u2019s team got pummeled 7-0 in one game against regional power Japan, while losing to Indonesia and tying Singapore (neither of which qualified, either). There are currently no Chinese men\u2019s players playing in the top tiers of any of Europe\u2019s professional leagues, a key metric of elite talent.
Experts detail a number of reasons for the failures, including corruption and the CCP\u2019s top-down approach to athletics. At a fundamental level, it comes down to the lack of grassroots participation, says Rowan Simons, a U.K.-born, Beijing-based author of a book on soccer in China and founder of ClubFootball Beijing. \u201cChina still needs to concentrate on building the football culture that is shared by all nations playing in the World Cup finals. This is built on large numbers actually participating in the game,\u201d Simons said in an e-mail. As it stands, registered youth soccer participation in China is still just a fraction of countries with far smaller populations, like England.
Xu agreed that while there is \u201ca world class football fan base\u201d in China, \u201cyou don\u2019t get kids kicking the ball around\u201d for fun the way you would see in say, South America or Europe. Parents view it as a waste of time \u201cbecause the chance isn\u2019t that great to succeed,\u201d he said. Going to the best university is viewed as a more assured path.
But unlike Simons, Xu is optimistic that the Chinese men\u2019s team can not just qualify but win the World Cup in the coming decades, which he says would bring out a whole new level of soccer obsession in the country of 1.4 billion \u2014 a FIFA marketer\u2019s dream.
The answer, he says, lies in an approach China recently used to achieve Olympic success. Call it the Eileen Gu model.
Gu, the daughter of a first-generation Chinese immigrant mother, was born and raised in Northern California but competes for China in freestyle skiing. Her gold and silver medals at the Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina earlier this year made her one of the most decorated freestyle skiers in Olympic history.
\u201cWe just simply bring the best and brightest from the kid level\u201d to China from other countries, said Xu. That would represent \u201cnot just a major breakthrough in sports,\u201d he argued, but \u201ca major breakthrough in the idea of China.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FIFA is expecting record-breaking revenue from the 2026 World Cup. But it\u2019s still leaving a lot of money on the table \u2014 or more specifically, Chinese yuan.Despite the expanded field in this year\u2019s tournament, China\u2019s men\u2019s national team still failed to qualify. FIFA is now talking about expanding again to 64 teams in 2030, with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}