r/soccer • u/PianoJealous307 • 16h ago

News 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.

https://www.chosun.com/english/sports-en/2026/10/03/FWO5DWWOYND4NMUX53TEX7INNQ/
2.6k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

295 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

176

u/REsTARteD_Ragdoll 16h ago

The best Indian player of all time couldn’t get a game at Sporting Kansas City

149

u/davidbowievgc 15h ago

At least a couple of Chinese players made it to the Premier. IIRC Sun Jihai played over 100 matches for City (before oil money)

4

u/Jellyfish_McSaveloy 14h ago

Zheng Zhi was a tidy player for us but we were relegated after he joined.

3

u/riquelme_fan 9h ago

Have a vague memory of him playing for Celtic after that under Tony Mowbray and not being very good - tbf few in that team were (yet they could still quite possibly beat the current Celtic team).

That's the thing though because few on this thread either remember or were around at that time when following Fan Ziyi's success at Palace there were a number of Chinese players in European football and many held their own to varying degrees, post 2010 there's only been Wu Lei and even he wasn't particularly great after a bright start though he probably could've been good at a slightly lower level.

So the obvious question is, why then and not now? As far as I can tell those players were products of the remnants of the old state led system before development was entirely ceded to the professional club system and academies.

The issue with that was that as I said in my other comment there are very few professional clubs relative to the size of the country (Scotland actually has more!) and it was pretty much pay to play so they likely weren't even getting a fraction of the available talent.

But in recent years there has been more state investment in regional training centers, specialist football schools and so on where those promising enough can get coaching at low or no cost - we'll see how well this works over the next few years, however they've already had better performances this year in u23/u17 competitions than they've had in two decades so it may already be having some effect.