The Green Pitch Jianghu

Whenever Chinese soccer comes up, people are always baffled: "Why, with a population of 1.4 billion, can't we find eleven people who can play soccer?"

Countless people have offered countless answers to this question, but every one of them has been proven wrong.

The simplest answer is right there in the question: precisely because we're trying to find eleven people who can play soccer among 1.4 billion people, we can't find eleven people who can play soccer.

Does that seem hard to understand?

To put it another way: if we want to develop a professional soccer league or a national team, a population of 1.4 billion isn't an advantage, but a disadvantage. Sometimes, having too many people is counterproductive.

Developing soccer with 1.4 billion people may not work as well as developing it with 140,000.

So what population size is best for developing soccer? Each of China's provinces is the perfect size.

In this book, you'll see what happens after China entrusts soccer to each province to develop independently: the provincial teams can crush Brazil, Germany, France, Spain, Argentina, Italy, the Netherlands, England, and other European and American powerhouses, while nearly all the world's top ten soccer clubs are from China.