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Chinese football missed key targets on its 2020 Action Plan
- Chinese Football Association had lofty ambitions for this stage of the national team’s development
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Barely weeks into the new year, Chinese football’s “2020 Action Plan” is in tatters after another international tournament failure that ended with players leaving the field in tears after losing all three games without scoring a goal.
In 2018, China’s Football Association, the CFA, set a number of targets for the men’s national teams at various age levels. None have been met.
The latest failure is missing out on qualification for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. To book a ticket to Japan, China needed to finish in the top three of the Under-23 Asian Championships, underway in Thailand. Instead, China placed last in their group with no goals and no points.
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Other objectives that have not been achieved include reaching the semi-finals the 2019 AFC Asian Cup, qualifying for the U17 and U20 World Cups and being ranked in the top 70 by football’s international governing body. China is 76th this week in Fifa rankings. This is all despite significant financial investment in recent years by Chinese Super League clubs on foreign talent and by the government at the grassroots level.
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“I am not sure what is happening because China has been investing in youth football and the new generations are coming, but low quality is still a problem,” former Beijing Guoan striker Dejan Damjanovic said. “They need to keep investing to try and send the best young players to Europe to develop. That’s the only chance for Chinese football.”
The latest setback was not completely unexpected, as China had lost eight of its previous nine games at the U23 championship. But it was more painful than past failures because that group of young players had a better preparation than previous eras.
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