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Michael Owen, a man who once quipped he had never drunk tea or coffee, isn’t known for his adventurous palate. Safe to assume, then, that the former England striker was out of his comfort zone sipping Roxburgh rose juice and eating chilli-wrapped rice noodle rolls during his recent visit to south-west China’s Guizhou province.
The 2001 Ballon d’Or winner dusted off his boots for a match in Rongjiang county, the birthplace of viral amateur football league Cun Chao, also known as the Village Super League. Scoring twice in a 4-3 loss for local side Rongjiang Niubi, Owen endeared himself to the thousands in attendance, even if some weren’t familiar with the former Liverpool and Real Madrid player.
“Many people didn’t know who he was. The older generation doesn’t even know who David Beckham or Cristiano Ronaldo are,” May, a Rongjiang local whose family helps run Cun Chao, says.
“But what left a deep impression was watching him play football with the local players. There were also very young schoolchildren who had been preparing for days to interview him in English. Owen was very patient in communicating with them.”
Guizhou’s amateur tournament became an unexpected viral hit in 2023, drawing the attention of tens of millions on social media, including from Owen. Tourists began flocking to the rural, mountainous community, as crowds of more than 10,000 watched farmers, construction workers and students represent their local village teams.
“When it started, Guizhou was amazing. Chinese tourists found there was a place where ordinary people played football … It became an internet sensation,” says Rowan Simons, a China football expert who founded one of the country’s first amateur networks in the early 2000s. “It’s quite remarkable that China is latching on to amateur football 150 years after the rest of the world.”
The league’s success – the fourth season of Cun Chao that kicked off in January had 137 village teams – has inspired similar initiatives by local governments across China hoping to replicate its popularity. Amateur football has since become a national phenomenon, drawing larger attendances than many European professional leagues. It has even drawn praise from the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, who said in his 2024 new year’s speech that it “presents a vibrant and flourishing China to the world”.
‘China is fundamentally a top-down country’
Yuming, a 24-year-old lifelong fan of Chinese Super League (CSL) club Beijing Guo’an in the top tier of professional football, says China’s amateur leagues fill a “similar gap to college sports in the US and non-league football in England”.
“The local feel is the single biggest attraction to these competitions,” he says. “It was easy for people to jump in since the [geographical] allegiance is already there.”
But while this nascent love affair with the local game has drawn comparisons to British football’s formative years, in which amateur sides evolved into today’s multi-billion pound industry, experts remain sceptical that China has finally found a formula to develop its long-absent grassroots football scene. Mark Dreyer, the Beijing-based founder of website China Sports Insider, doesn’t believe authorities will allow the amateur game room to grow organically.
“The more successful it becomes, the more it’s going to get co-opted by the state and the football association and the sports ministry. Then all of their bad decisions are going to start impacting these more organic leagues,” Dreyer says.
Poor governance has long held back China’s professional game. In 2016, the country’s football association outlined its vision to become a “world football superpower” by 2050, including getting 50 million children and adults playing by 2020. What followed was an ill-fated spending spree, in which international stars were handed lucrative contracts to join the CSL. The splurge ended in the early 2020s as several clubs folded amid funding issues and corruption scandals.
Today, China’s men’s national team has made little progress, languishing 91st in the Fifa world rankings and failing to qualify for a sixth consecutive World Cup this year. Dreyer says this failure is due to Chinese authorities applying their customary top-down approach to football.
“Football needs to be bottom-up, but China is fundamentally a top-down country. Everything stems from the top, so they focus on the elites instead of focusing on the base of the pyramid,” he says. “Every country has done it, it’s not rocket science. But China doesn’t work that way.”
The Chinese Football Association was contacted for comment about the state of the grassroots game but had not replied by time of publication.
Local leagues like Cun Chao, and its copycats, may seem to offer the antidote. But Simons cautions that even provincial tournaments that have sprung up in Cun Chao’s wake can’t truly be considered “grassroots”.
“It happened [organically] in Guizhou, and other provincial governments jumped on the bandwagon,” he says. “It has appeared from nowhere in two years … regional governments saw the cultural and tourism benefits and created these amateur leagues.”
Crucially, the amateur leagues aren’t part of a larger pyramid connected to China’s professional game, and so their potential as a talent pipeline is limited. “There still isn’t a pathway to go from amateur through to professional,” says Simons.
But that’s of little concern to the regional governments running the roughly 13 leagues that have sprung up around China since 2023. Football is almost a “sideshow”, says Dreyer, with match days serving as hyperlocal celebrations of ethnic heritage, food and culture. Beijing Guo’an fan Yuming says the matches are accompanied by “non-footballing activities like a food market before and after, half-time shows featuring local cultural icons, which makes it more of a spectacle”.
An amateur match with a crowd of more than 60,000
The model is hugely popular. The most successful Cun Chao clone is Jiangsu province’s Jiangsu Football City League, known as Su Chao, which consists of 13 teams. The league’s final in November saw 62,329 fans – just shy of China’s spectator record of 65,769 for a domestic club match – pack into Nanjing’s Olympic sports centre. The league’s average attendance in the later rounds of the competition exceeded 30,000. In France, the average attendance across the whole Ligue 1 season was about 27,500.
“It’s a great way to bring more people into a football stadium to see the beautiful game,” Yuming says. “Who knows, maybe our next generation of footballers might have gotten into football because they attended Su Chao games as a small kid?”
Dreyer doubts the transformative potential of these leagues, but agrees that “anything that gets people playing or watching football is a fantastic thing”.
Back in Rongjiang, local May describes Cun Chao’s appeal to her community, and also captures the sentiments of amateur football fans worldwide.
“These [players] are our own people; it all happens right here among us, and they’re all our relatives and friends,” she says. “Since the players are so closely connected to us, we pay much more attention than to the Chinese Super League, or even the World Cup.”
Additional reporting by Yu-chen Li
