A soccer fan performs football skills in front of a billboard featuring AC Milan players on May 10, 2008 in Nanjing of Jiangsu Province, China. (Photo : Getty Images)
China is planning on building 50,000 football academies as part of its ambitious blueprint of becoming a soccer superpower.
The announcement, made by China's football association vice president Wang Dengfeng, more than doubles the country's previous target of 20,000 academies by 2020.
Each school would be able to train 1,000 young players, achieving the goal laid out in a plan announced in April last year of 50 million competent Chinese players, Wang was quoted by the local media as saying.
"This is a solid way to select football talent for our future reserves. Improving Chinese football is no longer just a dream," he said.
China's men's soccer team have only qualified once in the world cup and President Xi Jinping, an avid soccer fan, has made boosting China's soccer fortunes a part of his 50-point road map for the country. In April, the government laid out its plan of getting 50 million Chinese to play soccer and winning the World Cup by 2050.
To that end, China last year signed Brazil's World Cup-winning manager Marcelo Lippi to handle the national men's team. The government has also ordered the construction of 70,000 soccer fields across the country to fill in the gaps in its youth program.
Domestic soccer teams, on the other hand, have spent tens of millions of dollars in contracts to make Chinese soccer transfers for international stars such as Brazilian striker Alex Texeira and Jackson Martinez, a former member of Colombia's national soccer team, raising concerns that they are neglecting home-grown talent.
In response, China's football association last month announced its plans to enact measures to address the "irrational" spending by clubs. It also cut down the number of foreigners who can pay per club at any given time from four to three and required each team's starting list to include at least two Chinese players under age 23.
