On February 6, 2022, the Chinese women's soccer team defeated South Korea in a miraculous 3:2 comeback to win the Asian Cup. However, behind this glorious moment is countless efforts and persistence.
Less than a minute after the end of the game, Song Yao's circle of friends and WeChat was drowned out by the sound of celebration. In the face of a tidal wave of celebration and concern, the retired women's soccer player for many years, but the heart is mixed, "so many people can pay attention to women's soccer, really do not even dare to think of happy." However, she was also confused about how long this attention would last and how far it would extend.
After the women's soccer team won the Asian Cup, the question of Wang Frost and other top players' salaries became a hot topic. Their incomes are among the highest in international women's soccer, and the media have been popularizing the idea that the "hard days" of women's soccer are gone. However, the huge gap between men's and women's soccer incomes, and "equal pay for equal work" is still a long way off, but let people think deeply.
Compared with those shining stars, the bottom female soccer players face a completely different situation. Competitive sports are brutal, and it is always the group at the top of the tower that can be seen, while it is the unseen majority that determines the ecology of the entire sports program.
The women's soccer fever brought about by the victory, which we once had, quickly faded. There are still a series of questions that cannot be answered by "trophies" that need to be pondered over and over again after the heat has subsided.
The fleeting "women's soccer fever"
2008, the year of the Olympics. Song Yao remembers very clearly that before the Olympics were over that year, her father took her out of Inner Mongolia, destined for the China Football School set up by the State General Administration of Sports in Qinhuangdao.
Song Yao's father is a fan himself, and since he found out that she was getting more and more addicted to playing soccer, he began to plan for her, "Holding a soccer ball 24 hours a day, if you like it so much, why don't you go and learn it professionally?" Her father's simple suggestion made Song Yao's life closely related to soccer.
When I first arrived, Song Yao's impression of the football school was all positive and good, "The coach is from the national team, the supporting facilities are complete, and there are 23 soccer fields alone". This campus is like a utopia for every football-loving child, where everything revolves around sports competitions, "We were all focused on soccer, no other talk, only the competition results is king, who plays well listen to who".
The players spend only half a ringing hour a day in culture classes, and the rest of the time in training. Near the game, Song Yao's dormitory will also discuss tactics all night long. If you are unfortunate enough to draw a rival team with your best friend, you will also agree to stop communicating one night in advance until the game.
Before coming to the soccer academy, Song Yao had barely played soccer with girls. Most of the girls who go on to a professional soccer career have the same experience. Due to the small number of girls who like to play soccer, most of them had to train with boys before they were able to train professionally. The experience of playing soccer with boys was not always pleasant, and even all the major injuries in Song Yao's career were related to playing soccer with boys. Inborn differences in physical fitness make girls more prone to injury when playing soccer against boys. Even in mixed-gender amateur soccer, it is not uncommon for girls to run all over the field after the ball and not be able to get it.
The year Song Yao entered the school, the women's soccer class was divided into three teams according to grades, and each team was close to 30 people, plus the goalkeeper, a total of about 100 people. This was a pleasant surprise for Song Yao. However, these 100 or so women's soccer players are not as old as the heyday of the school. According to enrollment records, the Chinese football school was officially established in 1994, in 1997 the enrollment of up to 3500 people. At that time, the women's soccer class lived in more than twenty dormitory buildings alone, and even the class specifically for goalkeepers had as many as ten.
This soccer fever is due in part to the 1999 Women's World Cup, where the Chinese women's soccer team lost the title by a penalty kick in the final. Nonetheless, the spirit of the "Clanging Roses" continues to ignite the nation.
However, the soccer fever brought by the "Clanging Roses" did not last long, and since then the Chinese women's soccer team slipped rapidly from the second position in the world, and the bleak results made the masses pay attention to the women's soccer team continued to lose. 2000 Sydney Olympics, the Chinese women's soccer team, which was expected to fail to break through the group stage, and 2004 Athens Olympics was even worse, the score of 0:8, lost to the German team. In 2004, the Athens Olympics was a 0:8 defeat to Germany. When the European and American women's football began to step into the road of professionalization, relying on the national system of Chinese women's football in the "golden generation" after the curtain falls, it is difficult to convey a continuous flow of talent.
In addition, the attention brought by the results could not cover up the dismal attendance of the women's soccer league. Compared with the hot men's super league in China, the average number of spectators in the women's soccer league in 2005 dropped from 5,000 in 1999 to a negligible number. And because of the small number of teams, there is no promotion and relegation system in the women's soccer league, and except for the National Games, women's soccer tournaments are often in a state of neglect. Tournaments such as the one Song Yao participated in had hardly any spectators outside of the participating teams.
When she first enrolled in the school, Song Yao had no idea that she would become the last student of the China Football Academy, which quietly stopped enrolling students in 2009.
Throughout the three years of junior high school, most of Song Yao's teammates who had fought together with Song Yao had left one after another, and the original women's soccer team of a hundred or so had shrunk to just one team. This group of people will be Song Yao's main opponents and teammates in the next five years.
Now the Chinese football school has been renamed the Qinhuangdao Training Base of the State General Administration of Sports, which is used for youth training and the opening of summer camps for youth and children's fitness.
The soccer schools that had appeared overnight soon disappeared overnight, along with the attention and enthusiasm that had been focused on women's soccer.
"Sometimes I'm glad I retired early to go to school."
From national attention to no one's attention, Liu Shuang has experienced the long winter of Chinese women's soccer.
In 1999, learning that the Liaoning Provincial Youth Soccer Training Base began to enroll, Liu Shuang's parents immediately decided to send her to learn soccer. She remembers that the candidates who came to enroll were almost all over the country. The tuition fee for the soccer school was not cheap, more than 10,000 yuan a school year, and there were almost no exemptions and subsidies. In 1999, the per capita disposable income of urban residents in China was just over 5,000 yuan. Nonetheless, the enrollment site is still crowded with parents who are not happy to miss this opportunity to "train their children to become a talent. Many parents have good expectations of a stable income and respect for the development prospects of professional athletes.
In 2000, she was recommended by her coach to go to the Sichuan provincial team. In the following year, she was given a formal establishment in the provincial team, and received a salary of 450 RMB per month, in addition to food and accommodation. In the provincial team, the most important goal every year is the National Games. The medals of the Games are directly counted in the quantitative assessment indexes of the General Administration and the local sports bureaus, and are directly related to job promotion, bonus allocation and adjustment of key projects. In the women's soccer team failed to professionalize, the monthly salary of only a few hundred dollars, the Games for the leadership and players have a huge attraction.
At the same time, women's football is also exploring a self-sustainable commercialization path, but has never been able to find a clear direction. In 2005, the Women's Super League changed from a home-and-away system to a conference system in order to save hosting costs. Nowadays, common large-scale professional sports competitions, for example, the NBA basketball professional league is practicing the home-and-away system. This system guarantees sponsors the right to operate the home stadium, the right to name a single game, the right to name the team, and so on, so as to better attract investment for the club.
Since 2005, there have been news stories about women soccer players seeking wages every so often. The public has formed a perception of women's soccer as "bitter, poor, and miserable", but it still cannot pay attention to it for a long time. Throughout the sports programs, female players have a higher golden age than men. However, in China, the career of female soccer players is generally shorter than that of male soccer players. In the general environment of despair, many teams are unable to provide even basic health protection and reasonable salaries, and many "good talents" are therefore lost.
In 2010, Liu Shuang decided to retire from the Sichuan provincial team. At that time, this northeastern girl has been able to speak a mouthful of fluent and natural Sichuan dialect. For soccer, Liu Shuang dedicated the entire youth, still reluctant, "If there is a basic guarantee, I am willing to continue to play, I really like to play football. But kicked so many years, more and more can not see hope, sometimes I will be thinking, this is not a waste of time?"
The day she retired, Liu Shuang made a preparation buyout settlement. When she retired from the team, her monthly salary did not rise much compared to the 450 dollars a month she received when she joined the team, just over 2,000 dollars, plus training fees of less than 3,000 dollars a month. Because during the team, her unit had won the fourth place in the country, in the settlement, Liu Shuang also harvested a number of additional million compensation, but these tens of thousands of dollars did not comfort her loss.
Song Yao also remembers those "good seedlings" who left the school. Some of them went into business and opened milk tea stores, while others went back to their hometowns and chose to get married and have children. Although they left soccer, each living a different life, but it is certain that if you do not continue to play, the girls can choose not many options.
According to the development pathway of the football school, in their junior year, the players will be faced with an important choice for their future path. Those girls who are eliminated or choose to retire from professional teams such as the provincial, national youth, national junior and national Olympic teams, and who are eligible, can try to enter college through a single exam.
Despite the fact that the subjects of the single examination are only four subjects: language, math, English and politics, these four subjects are like four mountains for the sports students who only had half a dozen cultural classes every day for three years in junior high school. "Basically there is no time, everyone is busy playing games and training every day", Song Yao remembers, at that time, they basically do not learn other subjects such as physics, chemistry, etc., only four subjects, or particularly simple teaching content. Even so, Song Yao and the girls often couldn't even finish half a book in a semester.
Only a year before the single examination began to make up for the culture course is the practice of the foot school. For people who have not seriously studied math and English for close to three years, it is not practical to raid these two subjects in one year. Therefore, more students will choose to hard memorize language and politics and rely on these two subjects to pull scores.
The diploma of a foot school graduate can barely count as a junior college if you can't get into a university. According to the data of the Ministry of Education, in 2011, the national ordinary college graduates have reached 6.6 million people. In the era of more and more important education, can't get a single enrollment and can't enter the professional team, that will face a completely different life choice.
"Study" has become the only option for this group of soccer-loving girls to regain control of their lives. Liu Shuang retired from the Sichuan provincial team, through the high-level athletes exam, entered a university to study petroleum engineering, "retired after the settlement of the preparation of the day, I walked on the road, I feel that I have become a free, flexible people. I was finally free to study and work."
Song Yao and Liu Shuang were both fortunate in that they ended up attending university at a not-too-late age and gradually found their own "way out". Most of the female soccer players who came from the same pathway as them played until natural retirement or retired due to injury. Most of those who did, in their opinion, did not fare well.
"Sometimes I'm quite glad that I retired due to injury at such a young age, there's nothing to envy about being a professional athlete." Song Yao sighed.
"Golden Dollar Football" driven uptake
2015 was the year that China's women's soccer team took a turn for the better. This year, the Women's Super League returned to the masses. Thanks to the sponsorship of LeTV, the Women's Super League has two broadcasts per round. The women's soccer league finally distinguished between the Women's Super League and the Women's A League, and also had a clear system of elevation and relegation: "16 units according to the results of the league in 2014, the former
