“The difficulty of travelling to Europe is far from being as beautiful as it seems. What I care about is not money, and I am not afraid of hardship, but I can’t bear it.

“The feeling of disrespect and endless loneliness made me unable to find the best version of myself, so I decided to return to China to play in the national team.”

She said that daily communication with the coach and teammates “was like a riddle” without a translator and led to confusion.

Wang explained that once she ended up alone in a restaurant after a misunderstanding over a team meal.

It is not the first time Wang has told of her troubles in Paris.

“It led to a lot of despair,” she wrote on the Player’s Tribune website in 2019. “I would video chat with my parents and there would be moments when I wanted to cry.

“But I didn’t want them to see me like that and so I’d lie to them and say, ‘Sorry, I have to go!’ Then I’d shut down the computer. Humiliation avoided.”

She returned to China in 2019 to play for her hometown’s Wuhan Jianghan University. The team won the Chinese Women’s Super League last season in its shortened Covid-19 format.

Wang, who was locked down in Wuhan at the beginning of the pandemic and missed the group stage of China’s Olympic qualifiers, dedicated the league title to the Covid-19 frontline workers.

The 25-year-old also described national team coach Jia as “like a father” and credited him with keeping her in the sport.

Jia famously dropped Wang to the bench for a Fifa Women’s World Cup game against Germany.

Wang also featured in a Xinhua live video interview online where fans asked her questions.

She told them that she was a fan of Arsenal and her favourite footballer was Cristiano Ronaldo.

“Everyone knows that I like Ronaldo in foreign countries and Li Na in China,” she said of the tennis star and fellow Wuhan native.