ABU DHABI, May 16 / WAM / China has taken several steps over the past few years aimed at building a national football team capable of competing strongly in continental and international tournaments, especially the World Cup, with the aim of making China a football superpower.
In recent decades, the ambitious Chinese project has begun to support the professionalization of football clubs and the creation of a professional league, while allowing companies to own clubs to support and manage them.
The championship went through many transformations and developments in its system over these decades until it reached its current format, the Chinese Super League, which has 16 teams competing in a two-round “domestic” tournament system. And away”, as is the case in the major European leagues, after the league system saw its teams divided into two groups in previous seasons.
Over the past two decades, as part of the General Administration of Sport of China’s campaign to develop the standard of the game and increase its popularity, clubs tend to attract well-known players and coaches. At the international level, in particular with the launch of the “Premier League” activities in 2004.
The clubs have already succeeded in attracting a number of big stars, starting with Argentine Carlos Tevez, the former Manchester City and Manchester United star and the Italian Juventus star, who joined Shanghai Shenhua at the end of 2016. According to this contract, Tevez received an annual salary of 41 million US dollars, to become The highest-paid player at the time, until he left the team in 2018, returning to his former team, Boca Juniors, to end his football career.
The list of international stars who joined the Chinese Premier League includes Brazilian Hulk and his compatriot Oscar, former Chelsea star Ivorian Didier Drogba, Spaniards Javier Mascherano and Andres Iniesta, Frenchman Nicolas Anelka, Belgian Marouane Fellaini, Italian Stefan El Shaarawy, Slovakian Marek Hamsik, Venezuelan Salomon Rondon and Nigerian Odion Ighalo. .
The Chinese championship also attracted a number of famous coaches, including former Italian national team coach Marcello Lippi, who won the 2006 World Cup, and Brazilian Luiz Felipe Scolari, who led the Brazilian national team to victory in the 2002 World Cup and the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup.
Lippi and Scolari coached Guangzhou Evergrande, and each led the team to win the Chinese Super League title 3 times during the club’s so-called golden era, in which it won the title from 2011 to 2017.
The list of coaches includes Italian Fabio Cannavaro, Portuguese Vitor Pereira and Romanian Cosmin Uluru.
Guangzhou Evergrande won the AFC Champions League in 2013 and 2015, bringing the number of Chinese titles in the tournament’s history to three, with Liaoning FC already winning the title in the 1989-1990 season.
The Chinese national football team also maintained its continuous presence in the Asian Cup tournaments, which it has not missed since its first participation in the 1976 edition. Despite the strong competition in the tournament, the team reached the quarter-finals in each of the last two editions in 2015 in Australia and 2019 in the United Arab Emirates. United. It also qualified for the finals of the next edition, which will be hosted by Qatar early next year.
However, China’s ambition is to win the World Cup in the coming decades, which is a major goal of this football development project in this populous country.
Two years ago, the General Administration of Sports in China revealed the direction of establishing between 16 and 18 sports cities in a number of regions. .
In recent years, it has also been decided to reduce the number of foreigners in league teams in order to give the country’s youth the opportunity to better participate in competitions.
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