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After only recommending it in recent years, from next season the Chinese Super League, the Chinese men’s soccer championship, will require all of its eighteen participants to also have a women’s team. It will be a requirement obligatory for entry and the women’s teams in question will need to participate in one of the top three tiers of the national league.
The decision is part of the change of strategy of the CFA, the Chinese football federation, and of the government for the growth of football in the country. After years of huge investments, both in the Chinese Super League and in the so-called grassroots football, the pandemic and the consequent economic difficulties have in fact significantly reduced the men’s movement. Some big teams have gone bankrupt, others have been relegated: this is the case of Jiangsu Suning and Guangzhou Evergrande, entangled in the big economic problems of their owning groups.
Even the short-term expansion plans of the men’s national team, which has not played a World Cup since 2002, have been complicated, if not interrupted, by the effects of the pandemic which have alienated many of the foreign players that China intended to naturalize. For all these reasons, the leaders of local football have begun to focus more on women’s football, where at an international level the differences are smaller and the costs decidedly lower.
Wang Shuang e Yao Lingwei (Thananuwat Srirasant/Getty Images)
In the Asian context, Chinese women’s football also starts from an advantageous position. It has had a championship since the 1990s and a real national team since the late 1980s, which has won nine editions of the Asian Cup, including the last one, and regularly participates in the World Cup and the Olympics. From here to competing with the United States, England and France, therefore with the best women’s national teams in the world, the road is much shorter than for men.
Last October, the federation and the government officially presented the plan to improve movement, and the recent mandatory establishment of top-level teams is part of it. Overall, the plan provides for the achievement of a better youth training system through more qualified coaches, including from abroad, to have a more competitive national team and obtain the organization of the 2031 World Cup, with the aim of winning them by 2034.
In the meantime, the women’s club championship, as well as the men’s, was won by one of the teams from Wuhan, the city where the first cases of coronavirus infection were recorded and which in its most critical period has climbed all the levels of the national football going on to win both titles.
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