Michael Owen, a man who once quipped he had never drunk tea or coffee, isn\u2019t known for his adventurous palate. Safe to assume, then, that the former England striker was out of his comfort zone sipping Roxburgh rose juice and eating chilli-wrapped rice noodle rolls during his recent visit to south-west China\u2019s Guizhou province.<\/p>\n
The 2001 Ballon d\u2019Or winner dusted off his boots for a match in Rongjiang county, the birthplace of viral amateur football league Cun Chao, also known as the Village Super League. Scoring twice in a 4-3 loss for local side Rongjiang Niubi, Owen endeared himself to the thousands in attendance, even if some weren\u2019t familiar with the former Liverpool and Real Madrid player.<\/p>\n
Michael Owen touring Handan in north China\u2019s Hebei province last year. Photograph: Feature China\/Future Publishing\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
\u201cMany people didn\u2019t know who he was. The older generation doesn\u2019t even know who David Beckham or Cristiano Ronaldo are,\u201d May, a Rongjiang local whose family helps run Cun Chao, says.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut what left a deep impression was watching him play football with the local players. There were also very young schoolchildren who had been preparing for days to interview him in English. Owen was very patient in communicating with them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Guizhou\u2019s amateur tournament became an unexpected viral hit in 2023, drawing the attention of tens of millions on social media, including from Owen. Tourists began flocking to the rural, mountainous community, as crowds of more than 10,000 watched farmers, construction workers and students represent their local village teams.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it started, Guizhou was amazing. Chinese tourists found there was a place where ordinary people played football \u2026 It became an internet sensation,\u201d says Rowan Simons, a China football expert who founded one of the country\u2019s first amateur networks in the early 2000s. \u201cIt\u2019s quite remarkable that China is latching on to amateur football 150 years after the rest of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Village football in Guizhou Province has inspired the creation of amateur leagues throughout China. Photograph: VCG\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
The league\u2019s success \u2013 the fourth season of Cun Chao that kicked off in January had 137 village teams \u2013 has inspired similar initiatives by local governments across China hoping to replicate its popularity. Amateur football has since become a national phenomenon, drawing larger attendances than many European professional leagues. It has even drawn praise from the country\u2019s leader, Xi Jinping, who said in his 2024 new year\u2019s speech that it \u201cpresents a vibrant and flourishing China to the world\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u2018China is fundamentally a top-down country\u2019<\/p>\n
Yuming, a 24-year-old lifelong fan of Chinese Super League (CSL) club Beijing Guo\u2019an in the top tier of professional football, says China\u2019s amateur leagues fill a \u201csimilar gap to college sports in the US and non-league football in England\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe local feel is the single biggest attraction to these competitions,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was easy for people to jump in since the [geographical] allegiance is already there.\u201d<\/p>\n
But while this nascent love affair with the local game has drawn comparisons to British football\u2019s formative years, in which amateur sides evolved into today\u2019s multi-billion pound industry, experts remain sceptical that China has finally found a formula to develop its long-absent grassroots football scene. Mark Dreyer, the Beijing-based founder of website China Sports Insider, doesn\u2019t believe authorities will allow the amateur game room to grow organically.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe more successful it becomes, the more it\u2019s going to get co-opted by the state and the football association and the sports ministry. Then all of their bad decisions are going to start impacting these more organic leagues,\u201d Dreyer says.<\/p>\n
Poor governance has long held back China\u2019s professional game. In 2016, the country\u2019s football association outlined its vision to become a \u201cworld football superpower\u201d by 2050, including getting 50 million children and adults playing by 2020. What followed was an ill-fated spending spree, in which international stars were handed lucrative contracts to join the CSL. The splurge ended in the early 2020s as several clubs folded amid funding issues and corruption scandals.<\/p>\n
Today, China\u2019s men\u2019s national team has made little progress, languishing 91st in the Fifa world rankings and failing to qualify for a sixth consecutive World Cup this year. Dreyer says this failure is due to Chinese authorities applying their customary top-down approach to football.<\/p>\n
\u201cFootball needs to be bottom-up, but China is fundamentally a top-down country. Everything stems from the top, so they focus on the elites instead of focusing on the base of the pyramid,\u201d he says. \u201cEvery country has done it, it\u2019s not rocket science. But China doesn\u2019t work that way.\u201d<\/p>\n
The opening ceremony of the 2026 Jiangsu Football City League, the most successful league to copy Cun Chao. Photograph: China News Service\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
The Chinese Football Association was contacted for comment about the state of the grassroots game but had not replied by time of publication.<\/p>\n
Local leagues like Cun Chao, and its copycats, may seem to offer the antidote. But Simons cautions that even provincial tournaments that have sprung up in Cun Chao\u2019s wake can\u2019t truly be considered \u201cgrassroots\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt happened [organically] in Guizhou, and other provincial governments jumped on the bandwagon,\u201d he says. \u201cIt has appeared from nowhere in two years \u2026 regional governments saw the cultural and tourism benefits and created these amateur leagues.\u201d<\/p>\n
Crucially, the amateur leagues aren\u2019t part of a larger pyramid connected to China\u2019s professional game, and so their potential as a talent pipeline is limited. \u201cThere still isn\u2019t a pathway to go from amateur through to professional,\u201d says Simons.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s of little concern to the regional governments running the roughly 13 leagues that have sprung up around China since 2023. Football is almost a \u201csideshow\u201d, says Dreyer, with match days serving as hyperlocal celebrations of ethnic heritage, food and culture. Beijing Guo\u2019an fan Yuming says the matches are accompanied by \u201cnon-footballing activities like a food market before and after, half-time shows featuring local cultural icons, which makes it more of a spectacle\u201d.<\/p>\n
An amateur match with a crowd of more than 60,000<\/p>\n
The model is hugely popular. The most successful Cun Chao clone is Jiangsu province\u2019s Jiangsu Football City League, known as Su Chao, which consists of 13 teams. The league\u2019s final in November saw 62,329 fans \u2013 just shy of China\u2019s spectator record of 65,769 for a domestic club match \u2013 pack into Nanjing\u2019s Olympic sports centre. The league\u2019s average attendance in the later rounds of the competition exceeded 30,000. In France, the average attendance across the whole Ligue 1 season was about 27,500.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a great way to bring more people into a football stadium to see the beautiful game,\u201d Yuming says. \u201cWho knows, maybe our next generation of footballers might have gotten into football because they attended Su Chao games as a small kid?\u201d<\/p>\n
Amateur football\u2019s appeal in China is the same as for fans of it around the world. Pictured: a match in Changzhou last August. Photograph: China News Service\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Dreyer doubts the transformative potential of these leagues, but agrees that \u201canything that gets people playing or watching football is a fantastic thing\u201d.<\/p>\n
Back in Rongjiang, local May describes Cun Chao\u2019s appeal to her community, and also captures the sentiments of amateur football fans worldwide.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese [players] are our own people; it all happens right here among us, and they\u2019re all our relatives and friends,\u201d she says. \u201cSince the players are so closely connected to us, we pay much more attention than to the Chinese Super League, or even the World Cup.\u201d<\/p>\n
Additional reporting by Yu-chen Li<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michael Owen, a man who once quipped he had never drunk tea or coffee, isn\u2019t known for his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":785967,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-785966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785966","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=785966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/785967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=785966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=785966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=785966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}