Mountain girls draw inspiration for soccer dreams from the big screen

A girls' football team from a remote mountain school in southwest China's Guizhou Province has shot to prominence after watching the hit movie Kung Fu Soccer, vowing to become "as awesome as their older peers" on the silver screen.

The Yuanbao Tongxin Experimental School team, hailing from deep in the Wumeng Mountains, has nurtured nearly 100 young players since its founding in 2017, with 21 of them reaching national-level athletic standards, and earning the players the nicknames of "Roses on the Green Pitch" and "Wind-chasing Girls."

The team recently gained second place in the 2026 rural campus girls' football summer camp in central and western China, after losing a tense final to a team from a town in Chongqing. After the match, the girls wrote their dreams on a football, expressing sentiments like "My goal is to join the national team" and "I want to be a soccer coach." They later gifted the ball to Kung Fu Soccer director and veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Stephen Chow.

"Football gave them wings," their coach said, reflecting on the team's journey from receiving a donated ball in 2016 to becoming a powerhouse in rural women's soccer.

According to industry tracker Beacon Pro, Chow's sports comedy has so far raked in more than 2 billion yuan (about $295 million) at the box office.