Beijing is going football crazy. And no, we’re not talking about American football. As of Tuesday, Haidian has officially signed up to become an "experimental zone" for youth soccer, vowing to achieve higher standards in the sport, Xinhua reports.
In an effort to raise the bar on China’s football game, the district of Haidian is collaborating with the National Youth Campus Soccer Working Group (NYCSWG) to help develop higher quality football practices, players and teams in Beijing.
The news comes in the wake of Tuesday’s announcement that China plans to open a whopping 50,000 football academies by 2025. (The initial plan was to have 20,000 schools by 2017.) The hope is that each institution will develop 1,000 players (on average) with the end goal of sculpting 50 million skilled players. There are also plans to create 200 college-level football teams. Out of the 3,755 elementary and high schools involved in China’s new soccer agenda, 80 are located in Beijing.
China's national team has only managed to qualify for the World Cup Finals once, and it’s highly unlikely they’ll have better luck in 2018. So it’s clear that China is hoping to mold a generation of soccer stars by urging elementary and high schools to add soccer to their agenda.
When it comes to becoming a football superpower, China means business. Beijing already added soccer to student PE tests for the capital’s high school entrance exams in late 2016. And now, Haidian is playing its part in this very ambitious plan.
Wang Dengfeng, an official in NYCSWG and the physical education director at the Ministry of Education, said Haidian will serve as an example of "how soccer should be developed on school campuses,” Xinhua reports. He added that in 2016, 16,000 principals, PE teachers, coaches and refs received training in the sport, and 115 football coaches were hired at Chinese schools.
Beijing will also see a major increase in the number of pitches in the coming years. By 2020 the capital will be home to 1,610 pitches of varying sizes, 331 of which will be of standard size.
[Image via New China]
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