One of the Football Weekly bods mentioned that China have put football on the national curriculum so playing it is now mandatory for at least a few years. Forcing everyone to do something under threat of punishment seems like a very Chinese way to improve the talent pool, but it'll definitely work to some degree.
You can teach them a skill that way, but football is about pushing the boundaries and forcing the unexpected. Have you ever seen a national-level east Asian player who survives on more than a work ethic and a textbook positional skillset? Son Heung-Min, perhaps, Keisuke Honda, but there haven't been many, and those two countries are better than China at it anyway.
Sub-Saharan Africa is basically the opposite.
I think one of the aims is to just increase the interest in football in general - if you are playing football at school and enjoying it, then you at more likely to play with your mates and play for the fun of it. I think one of the biggest problems that faces China is the fact that the cities are so densely populated - the availability of places to play is almost zero. Even here in Saigon, I reckon there are probably 60 artificial pitches (and 2 or 3 grass pitches), which for a city with a population of some 9 million is just stupid.
Perhaps they are relying on the country-bumpkins for the future.
The other problem a country like China has is that it's so big that the population 'advantage' is neutered by the fact that it's impossible to consolidate the best talent. In Belgium, say, they know exactly what they're working with.
Indeed. That also leads to all the "better" coaches heading to the bigger population centres, leaving the smaller towns relying on geography teachers.
Sounds like a Mourinho wet dream.Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
Anything where you can lock people in a gulag and thrash them until they've learnt it the Chinese are great at, team sports not so much.
The only example I can think of where a huge country has done well at football is Brazil and even there, they've probably declined in the years since they expanded beyond the traditional two centres of Sao Paulo and Rio - it gets awfully complicated with state level politics and all sorts of things.
Argentina runs on one city alone, Uruguay too.
The Chinese have the best, most creative badminton players.
Yeah yeah lolbadminton.
Not a team sport. This is probably all linked to how/why they reverse engineer technology as well. I find it fascinating.
Singapore I think has the best exam results in the world, these are outcome-driven societies. But you can't build a football team purely based on the idea you want to win matches in the same way you can coach a badminton player.
I don't understand the logic behind 'they can be creative in individual sports but not team ones'.
Also South Korea are dominant in certain team-based competitive video games, whilst China are very competitive in others.
Winning at them relies on precisely the kind of stuff you're saying they are incapable of, regardless of them not being 'sports' or your views on competitive gaming.
I'm more interested in India's situation. You can talk about how they prioritize cricket over anything else, but they have academies (at least in the old Portuguese city-states), enough of a crowd, and a yuuuge population. Yet they're a few tiers below even China in their player production. They jizzed themselves when they finally exported a player to a mid-level Norwegian team - a goalkeeper - and he's played once in 2 years. That's as far as they've gotten.
Video games (like what, League and Dota?) don't require any sort of teamwork at all until you reach the very highest levels, at which point the coach tells them all what to do and they probably never talk to each other anyway.
Of course the individual/team divide makes sense.
Literally everything in this quote is completely wrong.
They require teamwork at every level - a team of players who are experienced playing together will beat a team of players significantly better than them who have never played before at every level of play.
Teams with players with language barriers NEVER do well due to the struggles in communication, and if you've ever listened to voice comms for league or dota they are constant and extremely important
Video gamesFuck off.
Why?
There;s a fuck ton of money in ya Starcrafts in Korea. Its pretty much the national 'sport'. Not that its a sport but the skill level is immense.
There's actually relatively no money in it these days sadly. Shutting down left and right. All about League of Legends and DotA these days
League of legends is bigger than StarCraft in Korea now.
The player base stats are pretty absurd in the major regions.
Not so much recently, the SC2 pro-league announced fairly recently that it's coming to an end. All about the MOBA's now.
Ah damn, last I saw was a documentary on the pro Starcraft scene there. Seemed to be buzzing but was a few years back.
Shame as DotA and LOL are both utter, utter shit.
It's been on the slide for a a little while but you're right, it was pretty huge for quite a long time.
DS. Are you talking about 'State of Play?' That was a good one.
Remember StarNation? Did that EVER come out?
edit: Hahaha no it didn't. Christ, fans gave them like 400 thousand dollars and they never even made the documentary
Yar that's the one phonics.
The smash Bros is a really good esports documentary.
Yeah The Smash Bros is definitely the best gamer thing I've seen since King of Kong. Single handedly revived the game as well.
But anyway, back to transfers, apparently Utd are buying some centre back called Lindelof for 30 million quids.
You're saying Asian people can work well in teams sitting on their arse playing video games so they should be able to get themselves to an elite level at a professional team sport, that's why not.
He'll probably look Lost in the Premier League.
I would love to have a look at the official Chinese government list of priorities if 'become good at football' is pressing enough to pay Carlos Tevez a mirrion dorrars a week.
Koreans being good at video games is a great way of proving my point - video games require a singular focus on one thing (the screen), with no requirement to take in what is going on around you or adapt to a unique or unpredictable set of conditions.
Asians are also ridiculously good at other single-focus disciplines like the violin, chess, and so on.
I'm not saying it's impossible for them to form a good football team, but their culture leads them away from the things that make Europeans good at doing so.
That's really not the kind of video games we're talking about.
This isn't something like OSU where its just repetitive single focused grinding.
These are team games played against other people and are just as varied and unpredictable as football, if not more so.
What kind of video games are we talking about?
You can have team chess as well, and team wanking.
They do rely very much on learning and optimising their actions, 'creativity' is mostly limited to choosing which pre-determined strategy to use in any given situation.
Except it's not because it's a computer game with a finite number of scenarios.
They're not really. I think there's been something like 300 million dota games played and no two with identical hero line-ups. They are incredibly complex as games.
We're fucked then.
If you're a solo queue God (which these guys obviously are), you work your way up to Diamond I on individual skills and if you're a good sport you type in chat to organize teamfights and baron/dragon rushes. That's the extent of your teamplay. You can do ranked 5's but that's not how these guys hone their skills. Clearly it's an individual sport you play at home alone for several thousand hours and then if you're good you become part of a team. Football you're on a team from day one and it's all about the team.
By never talk to each other I mean outside of game environments, so you don't need any social skills. If you're a complete weirdo playing football you'll get hounded out of the sport fairly early.
More complex than real life permutations that can happen on a football field? Come on.
They're both just a set of arbitrary rules, I'm not sure how you can accept that one has many outcomes but the other cannot.
Ok, but they're both orders of magnitude more complex than what we could ever explore in our lifetimes, so it's a moot point.
Came in here looking for some juicy transfer gossip and I just got this shit.
StarCraft is more like that, Mobas aren't.
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co....-live-12345336
This quite superbly designed page should have you covered.
You're interacting with what the other team/player is doing, not a predefined series of game events.
It's limited only in the same way that there is a limit to the number of ways a human can physically move themselves on a football pitch.
I can't believe this is even a debate
Come back to me when you can't play Dota cause it's raining in your living room. Jesus Christ.
Yes, but 5 diamond 1 players who've never played before will lose to 5 diamond 3 players who are an experienced team.
Solo queue is a convenient practice environment, not an ideal one.
Most professional teams scrim as much as they play solo queue anyway, and live together in houses.
??I can't believe this is even a debate
Come back to me when you can't play Dota cause it's raining in your living room. Jesus Christ.
Dumbass
I mean, I wasn't really but my eyes hurt now anyway so thanks for that.
I genuinely can't believe the MEN do an all-day live blog on Manchester United transfers when the transfer window isn't even open. They probably pay some kid about £4 an hour to do it as well.
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