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#2 China PR

There is a growing increase in Chinese support for football

Confederation - AFC

Current FIFA ranking - 72

China is the most populous nation in the world, as some over 1 billion people call the country home.

For a country with such an abundance of human resources, it would have been expected that they would dominate any sport.

However, that is not the case, as the Chinese were slow to adopt football as a national sport, only creating a professional league as recently as 1994.

However, with the increasing globalization of the game, China has started to take a front seat in football (as they do in every other thing).

The first step was the thorough rebranding of their top tier league in 2004 to form the Chinese Super League and since then, massive amounts of money has been invested in the league to make it attractive and on par with some European football leagues.

Indeed, the CSL has seen a massive influx of mega football superstars over the last decade including Carlos Tevez, Oscar, Hulk, Jackson Martinez, Yannick Carrasco, John Obi Mikel, Axel Witsel among others,

Marquee coaches including World Cup winners Marcello Lippi and Luiz Felipe Scolari and others like Andres Villas-Boas, Gregorio Manzano, Chris Coleman and Fabio Cannavaro have also graced the touchlines across China.

This has greatly increased the marketability of the league, with figures showing that the league recorded an average of 24,107 attendance during the 2018 season which is the 12th highest average in global sports leagues and the sixth-highest in football professional leagues in the world.

However, the focus is not only on attracting star players to China, as there is also a genuine interest in developing the national team evidenced by the policy to ensure that any team must have at least eight native players on the field for each league match.

There is also attention being given to youth development, with the country revealing plans to build 50,000 new football youth academies by 2025 and with all the structures being put in place, it would not be a surprise to see China as a global football powerhouse in the nearest future.