Darko Matic blames video games for China’s soccer teams being terrible
If you’ve ever wondered why China, a nation of 1.3 billion people (many of them soccer fans), is terrible at soccer, Beijing Guoan defender Darko Matić has your answer. The Bosnian-born Croatian player, who has been in China since 2007 playing first for Tianjin Teda and now for Beijing Guoan, recently gave an interview to goal.com, and when asked about the lack of promising young Chinese prospects in soccer, he said this:
I was a part of an academy here run by Tom Byer from Japan. There were about 100 12 year old kids and of those 100, 80 couldn’t even run and played without coordination. In my own situation when I was playing football on the street, I would spend the whole day after school on the street and you don’t see that in China. Kids are playing on iPads and computer games but not football.
On the one hand, he’s right that fewer Chinese kids are playing sports and more are playing video games these days. And China’s success in competitive eSports like Dota 2 and League of Legends is certainly evidence that many Chinese kids are pouring their time and training into digital games rather than games that require grass and a ball.
On the other hand, though, China’s soccer woes can’t really be blamed on video games, because China has been failing to produce top-quality footballers for decades. In fact, if anything, the Chinese national team—which at least theoretically represents China’s top home-grown talent—has actually performed better in the video game era than it did beforehand. Almost all of the team’s most impressive accomplishments have come since the year 2000, which means that the players who earned those accomplishments grew up with at least some access to video games.
Moreover, there’s plenty in addition to video games that’s keeping Chinese youth from excelling at sport. The near-unbreathable air in most major Chinese cities these days doesn’t really encourage hearty outdoor activities, and the pressure-cooker that is China’s education system ensures that most kids don’t have much in the way of free time to think about soccer anyway. There are also serious problems with China’s national athletic system and infrastructure, but that’s a topic for another day.
This image, via the Atlantic, sums up how things generally go for China’s national team.
With that said, it remains to be seen what today’s youth, who are being raised amidst a huge boom in China’s online gaming scene, will produce in terms of sporting talent. In ten years when this generation of Chinese athletes should theoretically be reaching their peak, could the Chinese national soccer team actually be worse than it is right now?
Shockingly, the answer is a definite yes. While China’s team is currently ranked 96th on the FIFA world rankings table, which puts it quite a distance away from the teams that will be participating in the World Cup next month, it could theoretically drop much further, as the list bottoms out at number 207.
The next question is: will Chinese people care? If Chinese eSports teams can achieve more success, then perhaps they won’t. Many Chinese fans would happily trade away soccer success if it meant that in 10 years Chinese teams would be regularly beating their Korean rivals in League of Legends (which isn’t happening right now). And China’s Dota 2 teams are already achieving the kind of international success the nation’s soccer team has only dreamed of.
As more and more of the nation gets interested in eSports, are China’s ambitions likely to change? Maybe. But regardless of whether that happens, I think it’s unfair to blame games for China’s soccer failures. They might be part of the reason China lacks exciting young prospects, but that’s far from the whole story.
(h/t Netease Games)
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