As a result, Yao Xia and Wei Qun were not selected by the national team and unfortunately missed out on the opportunity to play in the World Cup, despite performing at the top level in the A-League at the time. That year, after the national soccer team entered the World Cup, many fans thought it was the starting point for the revitalization of the Chinese men's soccer team. However, in 2002, China became the strongest national soccer team. Over the next 20 years, the Chinese men's soccer team got worse and worse, never making it to the World Cup, and the level continued to drop, and is now down to a third-rate level in Asia.
Now look at the starting lineup of the national soccer team. While Wu Lei, Zhang Yuning and Li Lei also studied in Europe, very few of the players were truly distinctive and able to make a real impact, resulting in the national soccer team becoming increasingly mediocre.In 2019, the CFA attempted to improve by naturalizing foreign players. Six naturalized players - Aixon, Jiang Guangtai, Fernando, Alan, Luo Guofu and Li Ke - have joined the national team.
At that time, many fans thought that there was finally hope for the national soccer team to make an impact on the World Cup this time. However, the current FA president Chen Xuyuan and the national team manager Li Tie deliberately suppressed the naturalized players of the national team, except Jiang Guangtai, Aixen, Alan and Luo Guofu all had a hard time to get a stable chance to play, which wasted the talent of these naturalized players. And this wrong way of hiring also made this theoretically strongest national soccer team to return in the world preliminaries and miss the World Cup proper again.
Looking back at the past and comparing it to the present, the development of soccer in China nowadays requires clear thinking and making full use of the existing resources, especially when dealing with the issue of naturalized players, which should give full play to their strengths instead of deliberately putting up barriers. And the brand new FA leadership team is aware of this and has recently restarted the player naturalization program.
In addition, the CFA needs to increase investment in soccer youth training to lay a solid foundation for talent. Only in this way can we expect Chinese soccer to recapture its former glory and re-enter the World Cup stage!
