Opinion: Football starts from home

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The hottest topic in football this year in China has been youth development. We have witnessed so many different training camps, clinics and youth development academies in cooperation with glorious European top clubs, not to mention all kinds of conferences, summit meetings and media discussions on the issue.

Fostering more talent is widely considered to be the remedy for football quality and lack of competitiveness in China. However, there is still a lot of muddled thinking on how this can be done and the priorities for youth development.

Javier Tebas, the President of the Spanish Football League (LFP), believes the Chinese football league will become one of the "most important in the world" on March 8, 2016./ Xinhua Photo

Grassroots promotion of football as a sport in schools and kindergartens for the sake of children’s well-being is one part of youth development, but so is feeding the elite training system designed to provide the full international male and female team. If these two sides of youth development are not carefully defined, we are talking about a messy issue.

In order to have more capable international football teams coming from China, it is a paramount pre-condition that we have a stronger base in this huge population.

Desportivo Brasil's Edson Alves Miranda Junior (3rd R) celebrates a goal with his teammates during the Luneng-Weifang Cup International Youth Football Tournament against Chivas Guadalajara CD in Weifang, east China's Shandong Province, China, July 27, 2017./ Xinhua Photo

The focus has been increasingly on official projects like Football in Schools, which is organized by the Ministry of Education. These kinds of schemes can be influential in encouraging participation in football, but the real breakthrough for this sport to have any serious foundation still lies in each and every family; in parents’ determination for their kids to play this sport.

My friend Tom Byer, an American who has promoted soccer in Japan for almost 30 years and is widely respected as a guru of kids coaching, has always held the doctrine that football starts from home. I couldn’t agree more. If Chinese parents drive their kids to play football in the same way they drive them to learn English in their spare time, who can doubt that in 20 years’ time there will be a Messi coming from China?

(Yan Qiang is the founder and CEO of Scoresport, a sports mobile community. The article reflects the author’s opinion, not necessarily the view of CGTN.)