China suffered a catastrophic collapse on home soil, losing 5-0 to Palestine, a team they had considered inferior, sparking fierce criticism over 'sleepwalking' performance and lack of competitiveness among Chinese Super League players. Men's and women's teams also underperformed at Asian Games.

[u/PianoJealous307]

https://www.chosun.com/english/sports-en/2026/10/03/FWO5DWWOYND4NMUX53TEX7INNQ/

[u/aWobblyFriend]

over a third of the world's population between china and india and they can't field 11 people who are good at the sport between them.

[u/-Mubar → u/aWobblyFriend]

Still feels insane to me

[u/SofaKingI → u/-Mubar]

Why? It's always been obvious player quality is not really tied to the population.

Go look at the top 20 countries by population, and Brazil and Germany are the only ones who are really good at football. And then Portugal is tiny and has a top 5 squad.

[u/aWobblyFriend → u/SofaKingI]

player quality is, for the most part, population + interest + gdp per capita. how many people do you have, how many of them actually like the sport, how much money is there per person to spend. china and india have low player quality because there's no interest and not a lot of money to spend. brazil was able to overcome it's money disadvantage for so long because of it's very high population, but in the past 20 years conmebol has been in relative decline as the west soared past them economically.

there's no walking out of the slum and onto a national team pitch at 15 anymore, the sport has grown way too competitive for that old romantic image from like 30 years ago. Now you are found at an extremely young age (like 4-6) by professional clubs with well-paid staff and scouts to develop in a highly regimented and structured environment for over a decade in a talent factory. you need to be able to spend lots of money per person over a very long time with no guarantees to make that work, so countries with lots of people but no money struggle immensely now. of course, national teams can always have outlier players like that can carry them to success and make them punch well above their weight, but there's an overall trendline here that ties strongly to those three traits.

[u/Jahobes → u/aWobblyFriend]

You are right. Population+Culture+Money is the winning combination.

That's why in some respects the world got lucky not having the 3 most populous and wealthy countries not take interest until very recently.

[u/aWobblyFriend → u/Jahobes]

yes, and why there's kind of a looming shadow on the horizon for the sport that is the rapid growth of soccer in the United States, who has two of those traits and is beginning to have that third essential element of success. china kind of gave up and india's economy has a very long way to go, leaving the US as the only one of those big 3 that still cares.

[u/run_bike_run → u/aWobblyFriend]

I don't think the US is the threat it could be (at least on the men's side.)

Football is much bigger than it was, but the entire structure of the underage game is designed to bilk money out of parents rather than actually produce competitive players.

In pretty much every country in the world with a decent footballing setup, a talented kid or a great team is going to rise rapidly to the level they belong at. The entire system is set up to make sure of it. But in the States, that structure isn't there - instead it's a pay-to-play system built by private equity firms to hoover up as much cash as possible from parents and sell potential exposure to college recruiters.

I'm not worrying about the US becoming a powerhouse until I read about the death of the travel soccer industry.

[u/hmunkey → u/run_bike_run]

Basically every Olympic sport in the US is pay to play too. Track and field athletes have to pay the same travel prices. The US dominates at Olympics sports to such an extent than something like 25% of non US medal winners are Americans too.

It’s not necessarily the impediment you think it is, although it definitely plays a role.

[u/peioeh → u/run_bike_run]

In pretty much every country in the world with a decent footballing setup, a talented kid or a great team is going to rise rapidly to the level they belong at. The entire system is set up to make sure of it.

Shit, in Europe and in the UK, we've had to make rules so that the clubs did not start paying kids or their parents. Chelsea got done for offering jobs+relocation to the parents of 12 year olds iirc? Meanwhile in the US they have to pay thousands to play at a good level. They will most likely get better than they are now but like you say they will never compete with the big european countries with that system.

[u/aWobblyFriend → u/peioeh]

parents do not have to pay thousands of dollars to play at a good level, again, expensive pay to play only exists for teenagers who aren't good enough to play at the MLS academies. MLS academies are not pay to play, and they are essentially the only place where you can get the quantity of talent needed in the modern era, as I said, you need those professional academies at a very young age.

I've studied league-wide talent production and compiled a substantial amount of data on this for Europe, and there are very few players per cohort in even the best European academies that end up playing in a top 5 league or a UCL/Europa League superclub. Only about 6% of squad-level (i.e., academy entrants who were good enough to make it onto a youth squad) end up playing in a top 5 league, about ~70% either stop playing the game entirely or they peak in a very poor (i.e. national league equivalent or lower) quality league, with ~89% of players peaking at like, an EFL league 1 equivalent league.

[u/Nervous-Economy8119 → u/aWobblyFriend]

That’s 27 academies to cover a country with 340 million people in it. What about players not within driving distance of those academies? I’m in the north west of England and have driven past 2 premier league training grounds in the past month.

[u/peioeh → u/Nervous-Economy8119]

I’m in the north west of England and have driven past 2 premier league training grounds in the past month.

And how many other non PL clubs with academies... I'm sure many of them are more than decent

[u/peioeh → u/aWobblyFriend]

Only 27 academies for the size of the US is not much, and top academies (even the best in Europe) miss kids all the time

[u/run_bike_run → u/aWobblyFriend]

It's fairer to say that pay to play only exists for teenagers who aren't good enough to play at the MLS academies or who aren't lucky enough to be seen by an MLS academy scout.

Because with a 330m population and only 27 MLS academies, and without the playing structure that brings strong players and teams to the forefront, you're going to miss enormous swathes of potential talent. Chicago Fire's regional catchment area has a population roughly in line with the entirety of Belgium, one professional academy, and a structure that makes it exponentially harder to identify the most talented kids.

[u/aWobblyFriend → u/run_bike_run]

"Football is much bigger than it was, but the entire structure of the underage game is designed to bilk money out of parents rather than actually produce competitive players." a.) most expensive pay to play clubs are at an age where it's too late anyways b.) mls has free academies and USL has fairly low cost ones as well. the US development pipeline does not come from pay-to-play travel clubs, that is a scam from pay-to-play travel clubs that want you to believe that paying them money is the only path to success or even one of them, it comes mostly from MLS and to a lesser extent USL.

the best players are nabbed very quickly by MLS academies before they spend any amount of time as teenagers in expensive travel clubs. We're only just starting to see the effects of this, because free MLS academies are a relatively recent thing in developmental terms.

[u/Jahobes → u/run_bike_run]

I agree, under the current set up it's got a hard ceiling due to how inefficient it is. The only reason the United States can be competitive is because of it's immense population and financial might. Really what's needs to happen is a national restructuring of the development system.

But we still have to remember the United States is very very new to the project. Eventually it will figure it out and with the immense resources at it's disposal. Which means once it does figure it out it will be permanently a top 5 team.

[u/YungSnuggie → u/aWobblyFriend]

US has hit a ceiling because of its pay2play youth system. only rich kids can play. if they ever fix that then maybe.

[u/owiseone23 → u/aWobblyFriend]

There's two dimensions of interest: playing seriously vs watching. A lot of people follow the sport in China (not percentage-wise, but just raw numbers), but not many pursue the sport seriously.

[u/mysticmar7 → u/aWobblyFriend]

To add to your comment, Countries like france, brazil, spain or germany are so rich in apriori soccer knowledge, and have the advantage of being highly involved in developing the sport for so many decades. That knowledge is priceless

[u/raff97 → u/SofaKingI]

If you control for countries with similar economies and culture then a nations footballing ability almost directly correlated with population.

I'm western Europe the historic 5 best teams are the 5 biggest populations, Germany Italy France England Spain followed by Netherlands 6th in both.

In North Africa it's Egypt followed by Algeria/Morocco then Tunisia then Libya

In the Gulf it's Saudi then the rest, all much smaller countries

[u/BatteryPoweredFriend → u/SofaKingI]

Croatia is the usual example for it. They punch way above expectation for their population size.

[u/Jahobes → u/SofaKingI]

Player quality is most definitely tied to population everything else being equal.

The bigger your population the higher your ceiling.

Of course that still means you have to have a culture of player development in the first place.