Beijing \u2013 <\/p>\n
China’s top soccer body said on Tuesday it planned to form a national esports team, a surprise foray into virtual gaming after a dismal performance saw the country fail to qualify for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.<\/p>\n
The new national esports soccer team will compete in “events organized by FIFA, the Asian Football Confederation and other organizations,” the Chinese Football Association (CFA) said.<\/p>\n
The CFA last month sacked national coach Branko Ivankovic after a 1-0 defeat to Indonesia, a result that effectively dashed China’s hopes of qualifying for the World Cup.<\/p>\n
But while China languishes at 94th in FIFA’s world rankings, two places below tiny Luxembourg to the dismay of its vast fanbase, the country’s esports sector is booming.<\/p>\n
In 2024, the industry boasted approximately 490 million users, generated $38.5 billion in annual revenue and hosted 124 esports competitions.<\/p>\n
At the 2023 Asian Games, China’s esports team secured four out of five gold medals.<\/p>\n
The CFA’s foray into esports sparked mixed reactions among Chinese football fans.<\/p>\n
“I think this might actually work,” one Weibo user said.<\/p>\n
“We have quite a considerable esports player base in our country, and the talent selection is relatively fair,” he said.<\/p>\n
Others were less optimistic.<\/p>\n
“They have messed up soccer in real life and now they want to mess up soccer in esports,” wrote another.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Beijing \u2013 China’s top soccer body said on Tuesday it planned to form a national esports team, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15159,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,512,16750,596,85],"class_list":["post-15158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-china","tag-esports","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15158\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}