Football/Basketball, pretty much the same in China I feel. Their football league is very corrupted and totally uninteresting. I was living in Shenyang (in the North East part, not too far from Beijing) just near the Olympic Football Stadium, built for the Olympic Games of 2008 (60,000 seats !!!) and the thing is now a museum, nobody is ever using it, total waste...
Whenever I talk football with chinese here they just know "Barcelona, Madrid, Ronaldo, Messi" and for some a bit more but that's it. The CCTV broadcasts many games (on TV for the big ones, and on their internet website they broadcast la Liga, Bundesliga, Champions League, etc...) but because of the time zone, nobody watches. It's pretty much the same with basketball, the NBA games took place between 6am and 11am here so it's hard to become knowledgeable in a sport this way
It may also come from the fact that they have no club structure for the youngsters, everybody pretty much goes to an university and if they are good in sport they will specialize in it, a bit like the USA I guess. I have not yet found how the parents felt about their kid becoming a professional in football/basket ball yet, I need to improve my chinese for that But that might be another reason...
For football it doesn't matter how many people there is, if the country doesn't have the necessary infrastructure to raise talented young players then the country won't produce any. It took China decades to finally export players good enough for European leagues. There were some before who were probably talented enough but because of politics, etc, they never left China.
I don't know if there are any Crystal Palace fans here but I grew up watching Fan ZhiYi who played for the local Shanghai team I supported as a kid. He was able to become a valuable player for Palace in the 90s in what is now the Championship. Sun Ji Hai played regularly for the old Man City in the premier league. There were a couple others who played in Bundesliga and other lower tier European leagues. I think there was a group after that generation who were sent to Brazil as kids to train, but the most talented player to come out of that was Li Tie who was as far as I can remember, a terrible player for Everton.
I don't know anyone from the current generation good enough to play overseas but I've stopped following Chinese football a long time ago. Meanwhile S.Korea and Japan have continuously produced far more talented players and even legitimately world-class ones like Nakata (Roma, Parma), Kagawa, etc. I remember the consensus among Chinese fans used to be that Asian players are too physically meek to compete with westerners, but that grossly misinformed stereotype has been shattered long ago.
The Chinese league is probably one of the most corrupt in the world, but I am not sure how much that hinders development since professional players playing in the highest league still make a good living. Becoming a professional athlete is difficult in any country, and Chinese parents do discourage their kids, but certainly not any more than Korean parents. There's a lot of money in Chinese football, but it's too unprofessional, the culture is too backwards. I mean China lost to Iraq and Jordan in WC 2014 qualification (Iraq is pretty good). I think the country is still 20-30 years away from being able to do anything internationally.
In my university in Beijing a huge number of students played football, which was nice since it meant we always had people to play with. The problem was that everyone wanted to be the star of their team and score goals, so we had to teach them about passes and defense first (otherwise it was just terrible games with the bad guys pretending to play defense and the strong ones taking the ball and loosing it after trying to dribble 5 or 6 opponents). In the end we had the only team in the university's championship that played football properly and we won most of our games very easily. I was told be Chinese people that in order to play on the national team you need to pay the coach, not have talent, and that's why it's doing do bad..
Well if there are international games, it is usually the whole world that has international games. Like these days, every continent (oceania aside) has WC qualifiers going on. Would be very surprised if there aren't a lot of MLS teams affected by that, but I'm too lazy to check.
On September 08 2013 23:39 Pandemona wrote: How come MLS play games during international breaks? Won't most players be missing from the teams?
well in europe where you have man utd rm barcelona bayern etc, 80% of their lineups are going to be international players. in mls, even if the majority of the usa team is from there, its probably like 1 player from each team. itd be like missing a player through injury for a couple weeks
On September 09 2013 00:12 Pandemona wrote: Yeah not for european internationals. But in terms of USA national team the majority are from MLS?
Only a few teams get screwed such as LA, Seattle. It's stupid but it helps with parity. As a Seattle fan it really sucks to sign Clint Dempsey and then immediately lose him, Eddie Johnson and Brad Evans right away.
On September 09 2013 02:00 PixelNite wrote: Sulejmani vs Simunic, Croatia vs Serbia
That was disgusting. He doesn't even try to go for the ball.
Regarding the USA, there's actually a lot of MLS players in the squad right now, I'm guessing because they are all in midseason form, while the players from Europe are still gaining their match fitness. Almost all of our defenders are from MLS/Liga MX, which is why you see that MLS level defending
Edit: This is actually kind of cool Bayern have an Oktoberfest-inspired away kit:
On September 09 2013 02:00 PixelNite wrote: Sulejmani vs Simunic, Croatia vs Serbia
That´s really bad, but regarding the political and historical background of these nations, you could have expected something like this (even though the match was quite fair overall) -.-
No Croatian fans were allowed in the stadium due to the fear of violence. That shows, even football (or sports in general) cannot stop the hatred sparked by the war in the 1990s -.- (just read some comments below the video..)
The tackle was bad, Šimunić knew that and has apologised to Sulejmani after that, but unfortunately it was the only way to stop him from getting to the goal. The match was kinda intense, but considering what could've been, it was fair And yes, no croatian fans were allowed to travel to Beograd, and vice versa, because surely there would be excessive violence and dead people (not joking, which is sad tbh).
Also there will come a time as MLS continues to grow, and Soccer becomes even more popular that we will crush even Europe in skill, and numbers and be insane during Internationals.
Also there will come a time as MLS continues to grow, and Soccer becomes even more popular that we will crush even Europe in skill, and numbers and be insane during Internationals.
EPT
