Hope and despair: The two faces of Chinese football

Chinese football has always had a habit of offering hope and despair in almost equal measure.

Just recently, China’s Asian Games side won a medal for the first time in 28 years after defeating Uzbekistan on penalties in the bronze medal match, the latest in a growing collection of encouraging results at youth level.

At the same time, however, the senior team hosted a four-game international series in Chongqing and were humbled, some would say embarrassed, by defeats against New Zealand, Palestine and Tajikistan.

If ever there was a snapshot of where Chinese football finds itself in 2026, this was it.

The current generation remains flawed; capable of more, but lacking the consistent quality to produce it. But, for the first time in a long time, the future underneath it looks considerably brighter.

When China slumped out of the last Asian Cup in January 2024, winless and without scoring a single goal, the outlook could scarcely have been more bleak.

In fact, I wrote at the time that their failure was the symptom of a broken system; one hollowed out by financial excess, collapsing clubs, corruption and decades of underwhelming youth development. Perhaps the most damning element of it all was the absence of anything coming behind it.

China had not qualified for either an U17 or U20 World Cup since 2005. At some age groups they had failed even to reach the respective Asian Cup.

As I wrote then, it offered “no glimmer of hope for the future”. Less than three years later, however, the outlook is far less bleak.

Not because China’s senior team has transformed; another World Cup cycle has come and gone without qualification, and without even looking competitive, while the defeat to New Zealand was a reminder of just how much work remains.

But something underneath it has changed.

In January, China reached the AFC U23 Asian Cup final for the first time, progressing through five matches without conceding before running headlong into a rampant Japan, who emphatically won the final 4-0.

Four months later, China’s U17s did it again.

They reached their first continental final since 2004, qualified for the FIFA U17 World Cup and, despite falling three goals behind against Japan in the decider, almost completed an extraordinary second half comeback, falling just short as Japan won 3-2. 

Now the Asian Games side, which like the Olympics is an U23 generation with a sprinkling of overage players, has reached the last four for the first time since 1998, before giving up a 1-0 lead to lose 2-1 to a very strong Korea Republic outfit, for whom success at the Asian Games means more than most.

Once can be dismissed as an anomaly. Twice invites curiosity. But three times starts to look like a trend.

“The youth development system has fundamentally changed,” Xiaoou Zhao, who writes the Chinese Sports Diaries Substack, said this week on the inaugural episode of Road to Riyadh.

“Before the 1990s, even though China had never qualified for the World Cup, football still enjoyed a privileged position within the hierarchy of Chinese sport. Football academies basically got first pick from the broader sporting system.

“After the 1990s, that system was essentially gone for 25 or 30 years.

“Chinese football transitioned from a pure Soviet system before the 1990s, to a system that was neither here nor there, and now – fundamentally – to a system that corresponds more closely with China’s economy and political economy as a whole.

“I think that is the difference we are seeing here.”

That change, he argues, dates back more than a decade.

When China’s football boom exploded into life around 2015, most international attention naturally focused on the money pouring into the Chinese Super League and the plethora of international stars and coaches lured east.

But away from the spotlight, resources were also being redirected towards youth football, which this year were acknowledged with three-star membership of the AFC Elite Youth Scheme, joining the likes of Japan, Korea Republic and Australia.

Those investments were never going to provide an instant return, which is the dichotomy faced by many nations in Asia who want instant return on investment.

Zhao believes the generation now emerging is among the first to have experienced the benefit of that renewed focus on youth development.

“After 2015, the Chinese government published a white paper saying it was going to pay much more attention to football,” he explained.

“Going back a little bit: in the early 1990s, the education and school system ran out of money, and they decided to let go of some disciplines – mainly football and basketball at the time – so they had to make their own living.

“Chinese football then spent a very long time in this wilderness where its operations had to rely much more on the private sector. But at the end of the day, China’s economy is still dominated by the state, and there were a lot of resources in youth development that were not going to football.

“After 2015, the state said it was going to rededicate some government resources – and consequently economic resources as well – to football, albeit at arm’s length.

“That incentivised everybody to spend money, but more importantly to think about how to improve the youth football programme.

“So a lot of resources were put back into youth football in China. After the white paper was published, it took a year or two for everyone to digest it and for the policy to be implemented. 

“The players we are now seeing at U17 level were among the first generation to benefit from that policy.”

A decade after the policy shift, China may finally be seeing the beginnings of the return, which would be about the timeframe you would expect after such reform.

But money and infrastructure only tell part of the story.

Just as significant, Zhao believes, has been the gradual improvement in the people actually developing those players.

A generation of former Chinese internationals who experienced football overseas have now moved into coaching, bringing with them exposure to different training methods and tactical ideas while retaining an understanding of the particular realities of Chinese football.

“Generally, the quality of coaching has gone up as well,” Zhao explained.

“We always have this debate between Chinese and foreign coaches. The choice used to seem like a Chinese coach who was rather conservative or too cautious, versus a foreign coach who needed a lot of time to adapt and perhaps never would.

“Now I think we are getting the best of both worlds. We have Chinese coaches who have overseas experience and are willing to work with foreign coaches.

“There was also that first generation of Chinese players who played extensively in Europe. They developed under the old Soviet model but played in a more marketised football economy, which gave their talent a chance to be expressed.

“That cohort has now retired, and many of them, having played in Europe, have gone into coaching.

“So not only has youth development changed for the better, we also have a new cohort of coaches who are more in tune with advanced tactics and modern training methods.

There is, however, an important distinction to make.

Winning at youth level is not the same as developing elite senior footballers.

China’s U23 run was built largely on defensive solidity and pragmatism. That deserves praise, after all tournament football is ultimately about getting results, but an organised youth team does not necessarily translate into a generation capable of transforming the senior national side.

That is where the next test begins.

The real question is no longer whether China can produce talent capable of mixing it with the best at their respective age levels. It’s whether those players can survive the notoriously difficult years that follow; whether promising 17-year-olds are still progressing at 20, whether 20-year-olds receive meaningful first-team football, and whether by 23 they have developed into genuine senior internationals.

That is the bridge China has struggled to cross before and where it finds itself once again.

Zhao, however, sees value in China not simply trying to reproduce the systems of its neighbours.

“I don’t think there is one single style, and that kind of criticism is sometimes made of Japanese youth development as well,” he said.

“I think Chinese youth development generally is more diversified than Japan’s, and I think that is a good thing. What has happened in Japan is that the methods can be quite monolithic.

“That probably gives you a very high floor, but perhaps a lower ceiling.

For a country of China’s scale, he argues, allowing different methods and ideas to develop may ultimately be more valuable than enforcing one rigid philosophy.

That philosophy will now be tested at senior level under Shao Jiayi, one of those players Zhao referenced earlier with European experience, having spent a decade in the early 2000s playing in Germany in the Bundesliga and 2.Bundesliga for 1860 Munich and Energie Cottbus.

Zhao has been encouraged by Shao’s pragmatism and selection decisions, while players such as Wang Yudong represent the first wave of this emerging generation pushing seriously towards the senior side, as do Bunyamin Abdusalam, Yang Xi and Zhao Songyuan, who are other names beginning to making waves.

Songyuan, still only 17, was called up by Jiayi for the recent international series – in the process breaking the record for the youngest player to debut for the national team – and seemingly made a lasting impression.

“Although Zhao Songyuan has yet to play professional football, we can see that he is a very talented player,” Jiayi said.

“His physical attributes, his ability in duels and his running capacity all meet the basic requirements for the senior national team. In fact, some of those qualities have been even better than I expected.

“We believe these young players have the potential and the qualities to reach a higher level in the future.”

The temptation, after so many years of disappointment, is to declare another corner turned. Chinese football has been here before, however. Grand plans, ambitious reforms and fleeting moments of optimism have too often disappeared as quickly as they arrived.

But perhaps what has changed is the question being asked.

In 2024, looking across the wreckage of another failed Asian Cup campaign, it was difficult to find anything that suggested there was light at the end of the tunnel. Two years on and the evidence is increasingly difficult to ignore.

Whether those green shoots can now grow into anything substantial will be determined over the next four or five years, not the next four or five months. For now, though, Chinese football finally has something it has been desperately short of for more than a decade.

A reason to hope. And after the results of the senior team this window, it needs that now more than ever.