“When President Xi Jinping visited Manchester City [last year], I knew Chinese football would never be the same again,” Wang said. “We won’t just sit here to wait for our turn, I wish to represent China to claim the Asian championship and make it to the World Cup finals.”

The profile of China’s national soccer team received a boost when Xi, a passionate soccer fan since his childhood, became Communist Party secretary general in 2012.

Last month, the central government laid out a grand plan to produce one of the world’s strongest soccer teams by 2050, with other interim goals such as boasting some 50 million soccer players by 2020 and becoming one of Asia’s best teams by 2030.

The national men’s soccer team has qualified for only one World Cup, in 2002. In March it won a spot in the third qualifying round for the 2018 World Cup after a dramatic 2-0 victory over Qatar.

The women’s team took fourth place at the 1995 World Cup and eighth place last year.

Evergrande Football School features top-notch coaches from Real Madrid and facilities including an indoor gymnasium, swimming pool, restaurants and a movie theatre, as well as the library and dormitories more usually associated with a boarding school. The all-inclusive tuition fee is 55,000 yuan a year.

Pupils are recruited from across the country, with the exception of Tibet, with the quarter in need of subsidies granted scholarships of various levels.

“After four years of operation, construction and operating costs for the school have surpassed 2 billion yuan (HK$2.3 billion),” school principal Liu Jiangnan, a former director of Guangzhou’s Sports Administration, said.

But that’s not something that’s worrying property tycoon Hui Ka-yan, who owns Evergrande Group and bankrolled the school’s development.

“We are investing way more than we charge on each pupil but profit is not our concern at this stage,” Liu said.

Life is not easy on campus, with the pupils on a tight schedule from dawn to dusk that’s packed with football training, matches and school lessons. Soft drinks and junk food are banned at the football factory and mobile phones are confiscated by teachers on weekdays.

“We are a modern school, training not only elite footballers but those who are highly educated too,” Liu said, adding that admission was purely based on merit.

Zhan Weishan, a 30-year-old coach at the school, used to play professionally for Shanghai Shenhua.

He said it was wrong to point at China’s population, the world’s largest, and draw conclusions about its lack of success in producing world-class football players, or even ones able to stand out in Asia.

“Take table tennis for example, there’s at least 100 million out of 1.3 billion people playing table tennis but only a tiny fraction of that are playing football,” he said. “The lack of a grass-roots population devoted to the sport is the main reason.”

Zhan said part of that was down to the nature of football as a team sport that was hard to organise because it required both players and pitches.

Liu said that was about to change, however, thanks to the Communist Party.

“Under their reign, nothing is unachievable,” he said. “Before football, no one would have thought China could generate world-class athletes in field and track, swimming or even tennis.”

Evergrande acquired the struggling Guangzhou Football Club six years ago and transformed it into a two-time Asian champion in the past three years by investing heavily on foreign players and coaches.

In 2011, it also decided to nurture China’s own football stars, with construction of the school in Qingyuan completed in 2012. The school also signed a contract to bring in more than 20 coaches from Real Madrid, who brought advanced training methods and tactical theories along with them.

Manu Merino, 47, a coach with Real Madrid’s youth set-up, said China had a good shot at becoming a world footballing power but still had a long way to go.

“Everyone here shares a dream of football and I’m here to help them to realise it,” he said. “There is no problem with [pupils’] physical quality. What needs to be changed most is their mindset; football is all about team spirit and that requires individual sacrifice at times.

“The lack of a football population in China is a major issue ... in one district [of any Spanish city], there could be hundreds of teams competing all the time, so players are improving fast.”

To increase the sport’s popularity, the national blueprint called for more grass-roots tournaments and playing fields, with the aim of having at least one soccer pitch for every 10,000 people by 2030 and an interim target of creating 70,000 additional pitches across the mainland by 2020.

It calls for China to have 50 million soccer players by 2020 – two thirds of them at school or university – and 20,000 soccer schools by then capable of producing 20 million players, with another 10 million to come from mainstream schools.

Football has long been a favourite pastime for some rural children, like Mardan Maimaijiang from Kashgar in Xinjiang, which has a relatively large football population.

But unlike most of his classmates at Evergrande Football School, the 13-year-old was not familiar with Chinese as a medium of instruction, having been taught in Uygur until his teacher in Kashgar recommended him for the school.

“Only two out of five selected students from Kashgar made it to the school ... it was really hard with the language barrier but the teachers here gave me round-the-clock tuition even after school hours and I’m finally catching up,” he said.

The school sends its 25 most talented pupils off on a three-year exchange programme in Spain every year. They could be destined to become China’s next football stars and Wang is very focused on getting into that programme.

“My dad told me not to give up on anything,” he said. “I shall strive on, even with the slightest possibility ahead, in order to succeed.”