On Nov. 10, Australian super team Canberra United Women's Football Club announced that the 26-year-old women's soccer from Jiangsu Women's Football Team will join the 2022 Asian Asian Cup champions, becoming the first Chinese player in the history of women's football in Canberra United. Following Shanghai women's soccer international Xiao Yuyi joining Australian Super League team Adelaide United, Wu Chengshu also became the 12th female soccer player to study abroad in the latest wave of women's soccer students.
At the end of July next year, the Women's World Cup will be held in Australia and New Zealand. It is a good trend for Chinese women soccer players to go abroad on a large scale a year before the Women's World Cup. Shui Qingxia, the national team's director, said, "This will not only help the individual development of women soccer players, but also further help the overall improvement of Chinese women's soccer."
From a player's point of view, the purpose of choosing to study abroad is to improve their individual skills, tactics and game by playing at a higher level. When you return to the national team again, you hand your opponents a "downgrade" to fight against. In this regard, Tang Jiali, who came back from the Premier League to participate in the East Asian quarterfinals, gave a strong impression: "In the game, her strength clearly exceeded that of the other players."
On the other hand, it is also a helpful aid for players to experience a different soccer environment and soccer system when they go abroad. For example, for Wang Shuang to stay in the United States, Shui Qingxia said that the new environment will bring new challenges. I hope Wang Shuang can accept this adjustment.
This is the first time that Chinese women's soccer has gone abroad to study on such a large scale. As a matter of fact, behind the large-scale study abroad of women soccer players, many of them have temporarily given up higher pay in their domestic clubs, such as Wang Shuang, Zhang Linyan and even Xiao Yuyi. For them, since they want to go out, they have to focus on playing soccer. The players themselves will definitely use different standards when it comes to treatment.
As a matter of fact, in recent years, the women's national team has been giving certain subsidies to women's international players every year, and the total subsidy for studying abroad for women's international players is about 500,000 yuan, most of which comes from women's soccer partners. Although this subsidy can not be said to be a lot, but at least it also provides some material security for women's international players to study abroad.
The formation of a women's soccer team with a massive 12 players going abroad represents the determination of the women's soccer movement in China, but on the other hand, we must look at whether we have gone out? What more can we do and what more should we do to achieve better results?
Just looking at the distribution of the 12 women's soccer players, none of them play the most intense soccer in the Premier League. After playing for Tottenham Ladies for a short period of time, Chia-Li Tang moved to Madrid, Spain and has remained in the highest level of women's soccer. Paris Saint-Germain in France, where Li Mengwen and Yang Lina play, is also one of the top women's soccer teams in Europe. However, judging by the number of appearances Li Mengwen and Yang Lina have made, they also need to improve their ability to take chances.
In the rest of Europe, women soccer players playing in the American and Australian leagues are the equivalent of the "big five" in Europe. In addition to playing for a team, they need to be more integrated into the local team and increase their participation rate in order to achieve their goal of improving their level of play.
On the one hand, the distribution of 12 Chinese women's soccer players suggests that perhaps the majority of women's soccer players have not yet reached the level of Europe's top leagues. On the other hand, it also shows that there is definitely room for improvement and optimization in our overseas study channels - if we can't get our best players into the ideal league environment, to achieve the real league environment "practice" without a doubt, this kind of stay in the world, is a discount stay in the world. If we can't get our best players into the ideal league environment to "practice" in a real league environment, there's no doubt that this kind of overseas study is a discounted overseas study.
In this sense, next year's Women's World Cup is not only an opportunity to test overseas achievements, but also a chance for women soccer players to showcase and promote themselves. It is a top-level gathering of national women's soccer teams and will also attract a great deal of attention from professional women's soccer teams. Therefore, next year's Women's World Cup will also be a great opportunity for us to build strong alliance channels.
