By Zhu Tian

The 2026 FIFA World Cup final is just around the corner. The tournament's expansion from 32 to 48 teams this year offered more qualification opportunities than ever before, including for Asian teams. Yet China once again failed to qualify.

This reveals a striking contrast. China is a global powerhouse in Olympic sports such as diving, table tennis, weightlifting, gymnastics, badminton, shooting and more, consistently finishing near the top of the Olympic medal table. Yet in the world's most popular sport, it continues to lag behind countries with populations measured in the hundreds of thousands or a few million.

In this article, CEIBS Vice President, Co-Dean and Professor of Economics Zhu Tian examines a question that has long puzzled football fans and policymakers: How can a country of 1.4 billion people fail to produce just 26 players capable of competing at the World Cup?

How many football players are there in China?

Many explanations for China's underperformance in football have been offered—poor governance, short-term policymaking, corruption, weak youth development, a lack of football culture, excessive academic pressure, inadequate facilities and coaching, or limited incentives for players to compete overseas. Each contains some truth, but reveals only part of the picture. Some are root causes, others are symptoms or secondary factors. More importantly, any convincing explanation must answer a fundamental question: If China operates under the same political and institutional system across all sports, why has football alone suffered such sustained underperformance while most other sports have flourished?

From an economist's perspective, the answer lies not primarily in governance or funding, but in the economics of talent discovery.

According to FIFA's widely cited Big Count survey, China had around 26 million players of football in 2006—more than either the United States or Germany. However, only around 710,000 were registered players, compared with 6.3 million in Germany and 4.18 million in the United States.

At first glance, 710,000 registered players does not sound insignificant. This ranks China twelfth globally, exceeding celebrated football nations like Spain and Argentina. In principle, identifying 26 elite players from a pool of 710,000 should not be difficult. The real issue is density. Registered players accounted for just 0.054% of China's population. Germany's player density was approximately 7.7%—more than 140 times higher. Japan's was roughly 0.82%, around 15 times higher than China's.

Using FIFA's 2006 data, China ranked 191st out of 208 countries and territories in player density. Even though China's registered player base has since grown to over one million as of 2025, player density remains extremely low by international standards. This, rather than the absolute number of players, is the fundamental weakness of Chinese football.

Yet this raises another puzzle. China's athlete density is also relatively low in many Olympic sports, but that has not prevented it from producing world champions. Why is football different?

Football is uniquely difficult to evaluate

The answer lies in what economists call measurement costs—the resources required to accurately assess someone's ability, including time, information, and the cost of making mistakes. In general, the cost of identifying talent is relatively low in individual sports and team events based on cumulative scoring, but considerably higher in competitive team sports. Among them, football stands out as one of the most difficult sports in which to accurately assess talent.

In weightlifting, diving, gymnastics, or swimming, performance depends on relatively few dimensions that can be measured independently. Strength, explosive power, flexibility, body control, and speed can all be assessed through direct testing. Talent can therefore be identified early and at relatively low cost.

Football is entirely different. Whether a ten-year-old can eventually become a professional footballer cannot be determined through speed tests, strength measurements or technical drills. Being physically gifted or technically proficient says little about whether a player can succeed in real competition. Football talent can only be identified, filtered and developed through repeated competitive matches. Elite clubs often monitor young players across multiple seasons before making recruitment decisions.

What truly matters—decision-making under pressure, positioning, tactical awareness, teamwork and game intelligence—can only be evaluated in live competition. Even then, talent identification remains highly uncertain. For every player who eventually reaches a professional league, countless others are filtered out during successive rounds of evaluation.

Unlike many Olympic sports, football also presents a classic team production problem. In basketball, players generate hundreds of measurable actions—points, assists, rebounds—that allow individual contributions to be statistically isolated.

Football offers far fewer observable metrics. A match may produce only one or two goals, or even none at all. A defensive midfielder may dominate a game without registering a goal or assist. Many of the most valuable contributions—controlling tempo, disrupting attacks, creating space—barely appear in conventional statistics. Because football outcomes are jointly produced by eleven players, attributing success to individuals is extraordinarily difficult.

In economic terms, football therefore has one of the highest talent measurement costs of any sport.

Why player density matters so much

High measurement costs fundamentally change how talent is discovered. In football, population size is not the competitive advantage—player density is.

Even in a country with millions of players, low density means that relatively few serious players exist within any given community. In China, a district of several hundred thousand residents may contain only a few hundred committed young players spread across different age groups. At any particular age, there may be only a few dozen serious players—far too few to support multiple competitive teams, professional coaching or regular scouting. A gifted child may simply never be discovered. Without enough competitive matches, equally capable teammates or quality opponents, potential remains hidden.

This reflects what economists describe as agglomeration effects. Where participation is dense, more players create more teams; more teams create more matches; more matches attract more coaches and scouts; and stronger competition accelerates talent development. Success then attracts even more participants, reinforcing the ecosystem. Football development therefore cannot rely solely on concentrating resources on a small group of selected youngsters. Unlike Olympic sports, many football skills—game intelligence, tactical awareness and decision-making—cannot simply be taught through intensive training. They emerge through repeated competition against other talented players. Training intensity cannot substitute for participation density.

Equally important, talent identification in football is never a one-time selection process. Children who appear promising at ten may fail to progress later, while others develop physically or tactically much later. A healthy football ecosystem therefore requires high participation across every age group, not simply at the entry level. China's youth player numbers, however, fall sharply after the age of 12.

This is why China can dominate sports such as diving, gymnastics or weightlifting despite relatively small participant pools. Their core abilities are easier to identify early, making centralised selection and training highly effective. Football is fundamentally different. The sport's high measurement costs mean talent can only be identified through large numbers of meaningful matches. Sustaining such competition requires high participation density. That is why the same system that produces Olympic champions can struggle in football.

China's relatively more successful women's national team does not invalidate this logic. Like the men's game, women's football is constrained by high talent measurement costs and low player density. However, women's football professionalised much later and attracted fewer resources globally, China remained among Asia's leading teams and the world's top tier. As Europe and other Asian countries have significantly increased investment over the past decade, however, China has slipped from Asia's dominant force to fourth in the region.

Culture matters—but incentives matter more

China's low player density partly reflects the absence of a deep football tradition. In countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Germany and France, children encounter football naturally in their neighbourhoods, schools and public spaces. Playing football is not a deliberate family investment, but simply part of everyday life. China lacks that tradition.

The 2026 World Cup offers several telling examples. Cape Verde, with a population of around 550,000, and Curaçao, home to fewer than 200,000 people, both qualified. Cape Verde in particular earned widespread admiration for holding stronger opponents to draws in the group stage and the Round of 32. Yet many of their key players were born and developed in the football systems of Portugal and the Netherlands.

Likewise, many leading players from African teams such as Morocco, Algeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were trained in France, Spain or Belgium. Their success reflects not only domestic football traditions but also the legacy of historical migration and colonial ties, which provide access to talent developed in established football nations.

However, culture alone cannot explain the gap. Japan and South Korea share many of China's educational pressures and were not historically football powers. Yet Japan has qualified for eight consecutive World Cups over the past three decades, while South Korea reached the semi-finals in 2002.

The more important constraint is opportunity cost. For most Chinese families, educational achievement remains the most reliable path to upward mobility. Time spent on football inevitably competes with academic study, while the probability of reaching professional football remains extremely low. Parents therefore face a difficult calculation: If football fails, can their child still return to mainstream education?

The separation between sport and education narrows families' options. School football exists but offers too few competitive matches to produce elite players. On the other hand, entering a sports school or professional academy often means exiting the mainstream educational track, with substantial risks if a football career fails to materialise. What is missing is the integrated pathway found in Japan and South Korea, where school competitions, community clubs and professional structures are closely connected.

Why China's state-led sports model struggles with football

China's state sports system has achieved remarkable success by concentrating resources on disciplines where talent can be identified early and performance measured objectively. But football requires something different. Its foundation is not elite training alone but a broad grassroots ecosystem with high participation across every age group, something that cannot simply be created through administrative targets.

China's 2015 football reform plan successfully expanded football facilities and designated thousands of specialist football schools. But participation failed to meet expectations.

Infrastructure is relatively easy to build and count. Genuine, sustained participation is much harder to generate. This illustrates a structural mismatch between football and the strengths of China's traditional sports system.

Japan took a different path. Following the launch of the J.League in 1993, it adopted a long-term vision centred on community clubs, youth development and school competitions, treating the national team as the natural outcome of a healthy football ecosystem rather than its primary objective. South Korea similarly integrated university football into its education system, reducing the opportunity costs faced by families.

China has promoted similar concepts, including school football and greater integration between education and sport. Yet implementation has often focused more on administrative targets than on building sustainable participation.

Corruption has frequently been blamed for Chinese football's failures. More accurately, corruption may be an expected by-product of a top-down administrative system operating in a sport where performance is difficult to measure objectively. Decisions about team selection are inherently discretionary which, combined with football's substantial commercial revenues, creates opportunities for rent-seeking.

Reducing corruption would undoubtedly improve Chinese football. But it would not answer the central puzzle: Why has the same system produced Olympic champions but not World Cup footballers? The answer remains the same: without dramatically higher player density, football talent cannot emerge at scale.

There is hope—but no shortcut

If this analysis is correct, then reform should focus on increasing participation density rather than chasing quick fixes. That means reducing the opportunity costs for families by ensuring school football is fully integrated into mainstream education, providing comprehensive insurance against sports injuries, and guaranteeing that children who leave elite football pathways can easily return to conventional schooling. It also requires building stable local leagues across different age groups and ability levels, allowing talent to emerge through continuous competition rather than one-off selection. Finally, grassroots coaching capacity must expand alongside participation. Higher participation without enough qualified coaches merely produces greater inefficiency.

Given the importance of local density, China might consider piloting comprehensive football reform in one municipality or province, such as Shanghai, Jiangsu or Guangdong, where educational and sporting institutions can be more effectively integrated.

By contrast, naturalising foreign-born players, establishing a few elite football academies or changing the national team coach all address only the top of the pyramid. But the national team is the apex of the ecosystem, not its foundation. Changing the top does not automatically alter what happens at the bottom.

What Chinese football ultimately needs is simple, but not easy: many more children playing many more meaningful matches over many more years. Japan and South Korea each spent roughly three decades building their football systems. China's starting point is lower, and its educational pressures are greater, suggesting the journey may take even longer.

There is no shortcut to the World Cup. Only by creating an ecosystem in which more children play meaningful football matches, compete regularly, develop over time and retain viable educational opportunities if professional careers do not materialise, can China gradually build the foundations of a genuine football nation.

Zhu Tian is Vice President and Co-Dean, Santander Chair in Economics at CEIBS. He's an expert on the Chinese economy and the author of Catching Up to America: Culture, Institutions, and the Rise of China (Cambridge University Press, 2021).