By Sportswriter Wang Haoming
GUANGZHOU, April 3 (Xinhua) -- China has set a target to build a World No.6 professional football league, a top official with the Chinese Football Association (CFA) told Xinhua on Wednesday.
"We will work hard to develop our league to be in the top in Asia, and No. 6 in the world," said CFA vice-president Li Yuyi.
Despite the poor performance of its national teams, China is making steady progress in its football reform and development plan which was introduced in 2015 in an effort to transform the country into a footballing powerhouse by 2050.
The Chinese Super League (CSL) may have already hit the No. 6 goal, if the list is ranked by audience size. A total of over 5.7 million people, or an average of over 24,000 fans per match poured into stadium in 2018, making the CSL the world's sixth biggest in spectator size, only smaller than German's Bundesliga, the English Premier League, Spain's La Liga, Italy's Serie A and Mexico's Liga MX.
"Fans are a powerful force to push our league forward; we will produce more interactions between the fans and the players in the future," Li said.
The CFA is planning to introduce a new system which could enable the fans to give marks to the players.
In addition, Li said the CFA has been making progress on technical development by applying big data.
Li said that data digging has been playing an ever more important role in the CSL, helping the clubs to review their players from an objective angle.
"We publish a list of the top 80 players according to their match data after each round, which can be a great reference for club coaches and the national team coach," Li said.
Li believes that in football, a strong professional league naturally leads to a strong national team.
"It is a general rule that if a team had a good result in the World Cup, it always had many players played in the world leading professional leagues," Li said.
Since 2017, the CFA has carried out a series of regulations on the club, including restrictions on investment, transfer fees and player salary. Rich clubs like Guangzhou Evergrande and Shanghai SIPG cut back on importing expensive foreign players.
Li believes that such regulations could prevent the Chinese professional football league from financial instability, and that clubs could benefit in the long term.
In front of dozens of professional club officials in a meeting, Li gave a stern warning.
"No financial cheating! If a club was found cheating, it will be expelled no matter what," he said.
Instead of pouring money into the transfer market, more clubs have increased their budgets on youth training. This year, nearly 500 teams joined the Chinese Youth Super League. That figure was only 87 in 2017.
"We are not in a hurry, we have to be patient, it could take five to ten years for us accomplish the mission," Li said.
