According to the news of January 26th of the live broadcast, the Chinese men's football team in the group stage of the Asian Cup with two draws and one loss did not qualify for the knockout stage. Xinmin Evening News published an article stating that this bad coaching experience doomed Jankovic to be fired, and the countdown to his resignation has begun.
The national soccer team's final ranking was 18th, their worst performance in the history of the Asian Cup tournament. It should be noted that in the previous 12 tournaments, the national soccer team has reached the final and finished second twice, and has also finished third twice, fourth twice and stopped in the last eight four times. The worst results before that were two group stage finishes, but the team managed to reach 9th place in the final ranking.
Jankovic has been the subject of controversy and skepticism since he took charge of the national team. In terms of his experience, Jankovic has only coached the Serbian U21 national team before, and in terms of club coaching, he has only briefly served as the head coach of teams such as Red Star Belgrade and Standard Liege. He has no experience of coaching the adult national team, no experience of coaching in the first tier clubs of the top five leagues, and even less experience of coaching in Asia, so it can be said that he belongs to one of the "three no's". Among all the foreign managers, Jankovic's qualification can be considered one of the worst.
Jankovic has been in charge for close to a year now, and has led the team in a number of warm-up matches and enjoyed more than 20 days of training in the build-up to the Asian Cup. However, the tactical play of the national soccer team is difficult to understand. According to Xinmin Evening News, it is true that the overall strength of this group of players is average, but the responsibility of the head coach is to select the best form and the most suitable tactics from the existing players, and make up for the lack of individual strength through tactical means, and show his philosophy in the game. Obviously, Jankovic did not do that.
With the World Cup qualifiers about to restart in March 2021, the time left for the CFA is quite limited. Insiders say that the new head coach of the national team is likely to be a foreign coach familiar with China's top league, considering that the World Qualifier is more important than the Asian Cup. Shandong Taishan's Cui Kangxi, Zhejiang's Qiaodi and Chengdu Rongcheng's Xu Zhengyuan are all suitable candidates, but there are doubts about their willingness to get involved in the thorny issue of the national team.
