For a long time, the crux of China's soccer is obvious: the popularity of soccer is not high, and there is a lack of soccer root talents.The reform plan introduced and implemented in 2015 is dedicated to solving this problem. After seven years of steady progress, now the data has shown obvious results. The figure of 55 million students participating in this announcement was simply unimaginable in the past. Our first priority is active inclusion, and universal access is now bearing fruit.
Next, we need to sift through a small percentage of them and push them realistically into the soccer population, which will help our country's soccer prowess take a leap forward. The development of soccer is a long process, we have made steady progress in the past seven years in terms of fundamentals, and the key today is whether we can sustain the healthy development. However, there has been a bottleneck in our youth soccer, and the tumor must be removed before healthy development can be achieved. The recent Guangdong youth soccer match-fixing incident has just passed, and I am afraid that this kind of incident is not an isolated case in China's soccer field.
If it continues to grow at a healthy rate, there may be a glimmer of hope in another five years, with the soccer population starting to grow in 2015 and reaching a certain size in 2020. The 10 year olds, for example, were born around 2010 and in 5 years time they will be 16-20 years old and just about ready to make their mark.
The National Youth Football League has officially opened this year and will be expanded in the future to accommodate the growing soccer population. All of these initiatives are progressing in an orderly manner according to plan, but it will take time to see results. However, many fans are in a hurry and base their conclusions only on current results.
Although we say that our country's soccer cannot wait any longer, development takes time and process, and again we have to wait. The naturalization strategy previously promoted was aimed at solving the current problem of lack of strength, but the naturalization process encountered various obstacles and failed to give full play to the strength of naturalized players. Even if the naturalization is successful, it is only temporary, our soccer ultimately needs to rely on itself. We need to be patient and wait a little longer.
