Why China doesn’t dominate soccer

Parallel to the article's argument, I'd argue football (soccer) unpredictability are due to size and diversity in almost all it's aspects: most number of fans/aspiring players, also inherently (culturally) most diverse set of potential players/strategies and leagues organization.

At the regional scale, those also tend to be the most competitive and popular leagues, enabling breeding grounds of diverse playing styles. There's diversity even in how those leagues are managed and organized.

Compared to popular US sports franchises, which according to the article and my understanding (non-american), football(soccer) leagues around the world are much less centralized.

I don't know about China now, but growing up in Asia in 90s I'd say it is hard to foster the type of rivalry/diversity/competition needed to adapt to football(soccer).

The manager (the head of a baseball team is the manager, not the coach, for whatever reason) is also responsible for putting on the shift, telling the batter to bunt, calling for stolen base attempts, and other strategic things along those lines.

> China doesn't excel at soccer because of authoritarianism and because the sport is not well understood by anyone and central planning doesn't help

It's hard not to be mean to someone who calls it soccer :-), but this betrays an obvious lack of familiarity with the history of this sport.

USSR, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia all had very strong national teams, pretty much until they were dissolved. Clubs from the communist bloc did not dominate football, but put very convincing performances and were routinely represented in the higher stages of European competitions. Red Star Belgrade and Steaua Bucharest won the Champions Cup within a few years of each other -- all this while players trained in sub-par conditions, worked with sub-par equipment, had access to sub-par medical conditions, research and treatment, and were usually unable to play abroad and further their career at the truly major European clubs.

If anything, the quality of football in most ex-communist countries, Russia included, has steadily declined. Poland and Croatia are the only major and steady exceptions (Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Romania enjoyed some brief stints but not much else), and it's probably no coincidence that their national economies are faring better than those of most ex-communist countries.

There is a better explanation.

Being talented individual is not enough. They have to play against other equally talented individuals in the highest level professional leagues from the age of 18 to develop tactically and technically. China needs a professional soccer league with top level foreigners or they need to send their best to European leagues. They can do it but it can take several generations.

Soccer is the most popular sport in the world and has most professional athletes by far. Best individuals from all over the world go to play in best professional teams, mostly in Europe and they continue to grow with better opponents and teammates. Talented Brazilians playing in top leagues all over the world a bring all that with them to their national team. Iceland (population little over 300,000) has professional players playing in England, Russia, Sweden, Netherlands ...

China plays the US for the gold medal in Olympic BEACH VOLLEYBALL. They can dominate anything they want, they just haven’t invested the effort and money into soccer yet. There are more popular sports in China like basketball which they will go after first.