It is well known that our country has a huge population base, yet there are very few players in the field of soccer. However, little attention has been paid to the weakness of the youth training system. The phenomenon of senior footballers such as Gao Fengwen and Xu Genbao devoting themselves to youth training is becoming rarer and rarer. With the divestment of the sports team's soccer program and the wave of marketization, excellent coaches have flocked to professional soccer teams and adult teams. What remains at the grassroots level are mostly physical education teachers who have not been involved in soccer. Most of them are just ticket-level coaches who have to coach children to play soccer despite their still shallow understanding of the game. When selecting talents, they only look at height and weight, and short players like Lionel Messi even find it difficult to get in the door. Some coaches even take the kids to play while they play, occasionally participating in low-level matches organized by the city, so that youth training is more like a game.
Slightly experienced coaches will use adult training to guide the children, most of the children in the harsh training have to quit, only a very few can succeed. Even if they do make it, they still have to go through a lot of tests to get into a professional team, and this process is even tougher than getting into Tsinghua University. This has also led to fewer and fewer children playing soccer, and the level of the national soccer team is deteriorating. In fact, our neighbor Japan is the best example to learn from. Their school soccer activities are even hotter than the top European leagues, which is the cornerstone of the rise of Japanese soccer. Soccer should start from childhood, not just on the slogan, there must be practical action to achieve real results.
