Fuping county, China (CNN) — Soccer players in red jerseys jump up and down, spraying their cheering teammates with champagne, as confetti and streamers cascade around them and crowds capture the jubilation on their phones.
This isn’t Spain’s World Cup victory, clinched Sunday in New Jersey, but a win celebrated a day earlier, some 6,000 miles away, in Fuping county, a mountainous and rural part of northern China’s Hebei province, at a stadium lined with Communist Party slogans.
This game is one of many taking place across the country, as teams battle for a place in the national “Village Super League” finals. The amateur tournament has become a phenomenon in China, attracting millions of spectators across the country – and making for a colorful alternative to the World Cup that hasn’t seen a Chinese men’s national team compete for more than two decades.
“Standing in the spotlight like this – it’s not something I normally get the chance to experience,” Tong Zehao, a dentist-turned-defender for Baoding Lianchi told CNN ahead of his team’s clash with hometown contender Fuping Luotuowan village. “Before the Village Super League, there really wasn’t a (local) tournament with this level of attention.”
From a single league in a rural county in one of China’s poorest provinces, the format has expanded to include some 60 leagues and hundreds of teams in rural towns and smaller cities across the country.
The idea is simple: everyday guys working normal day jobs form teams and compete in local leagues for a chance to play in a national championship – drawing fans to carnival-like events throughout the season.
Local government officials have played a key role in orchestrating the competition’s spread, eying the boost for businesses in a domestic economy beleaguered by weak consumption.
But the Village Super League has also emerged as an antidote for fans irked by years of entrenched corruption and mismanagement in professional soccer, which are widely seen as having stymied the country of 1.4 billion from producing a men’s team capable of making it on the global stage.
“Since our country didn’t qualify for the World Cup, watching our local soccer (here in Fuping county) is more interesting,” said Liu Jiaping, a 21-year-old college student, who also declared herself a fan of the World Cup star, French player Kylian Mbappé.
“Coming out here lets us experience soccer in our country – and that’s much better than sitting home on your phone,” she said from the stands, where she, her aunt and sister fanned themselves with pieces of cardboard in the dry, July heat.
‘We now lead a good life’
Thousands of spectators packed the stands of a local vocational college stadium for the Fuping county league final on Saturday night – a big deal for a county with a population of roughly 200,000 that’s better known for growing fruits and nuts than hosting sporting events.
“Probably half of Fuping county is here,” quipped one 20-year-old who was attending with her boyfriend and said they just came to “join the excitement.”
A cavalcade of horseback riders launched the game’s opening parade, followed by colorful cohorts of fan-wielding performers; local businesses repping their enterprises; tool-wielding farmers and workers, and a dance troupe showing off boxes of local apples, jujubes and chestnuts.
Hundreds of local children joined a carefully choreographed opening ceremony and halftime show, which celebrated the county’s revolutionary history that draws tourists to the region.
Outside the stadium gates, dozens of vendors hawked barbequed skewers, cold noodles and sweets at a dedicated night market for game days.
The spectacle made it clear that, for organizers, the tournament wasn’t just a game – but an advertisement, a stimulus and pep rally for the county.
Once a deeply impoverished and remote region, Fuping county has been a posterchild for success in Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s poverty alleviation campaign over the previous decade – and officials are keen to continue to find ways to boost growth. (An oversized sign bearing the Communist slogan “We now lead a good life” carried during the parade emphasized the point.)
Geng Yang, 32, a schoolteacher who was participating as cheerleader, said the games and these displays were “crucial to the development of our Fuping.”
“They show everyone’s spirit after we lifted ourselves out of poverty … and let more people get to know our hometown,” she said.
Cities and towns across China in recent years have been pushing for more local events or niche industries to stimulate spending and draw tourists – an increasingly urgent effort as many local government budgets are tied up with debt repayment.
The opening game of the Fuping county league season in May generated over 200,000 renminbi (nearly $30,000) in consumer spending, event officials told CNN.
For Liu Qian, who spent Saturday’s game behind a wok frying up sweet-and-sour pork, having a stall at the Village Super League night market was adding about 10,000 renminbi (roughly $1,500) to the day’s earnings of his restaurant in the county center.
Fewer customers were seen at stalls of agricultural products, such as Wang Yinke’s.
Local government invited the honey dealer to the market rent free. The games were helpful to draw attention to his brand, he said, but his honey business just wasn’t as good as in previous years, he said.
‘The purest love of the game’
The teams were “giving everything on the field, running with all their strength … embodying the purest love of the game,” the announcer blared over the loudspeaker as the two sides wrapped the first half – with a score 0-0.
For fans, watching players who are college students, doctors, teachers and company workers is part of the appeal – and a contrast with the Chinese Super League.
Major pro clubs like the Shanghai Port and the now-disbanded Guangzhou Evergrande and Jiangsu Suning lured elite foreign players with outsized salaries, during an era when Beijing announced its plan to transform the country into a “soccer powerhouse.”
But years later, some of the highest-flying professional clubs have folded due to financial mismanagement, and dozens of soccer officials have been banned or imprisoned, and numerous teams ensnared in an anti-graft campaign. Meanwhile, China’s men’s team hasn’t qualified for the World Cup since 2002.
It’s onto this stage that the original Village Super League in rural, southwestern Guizhou province’s Rongjiang county stepped, winning national attention in 2023 for its simple love of the game and festival atmosphere – and sparking copycats nationwide.
Leagues across the country have joined Rongjiang’s national Village Super League, launched last year, with some even live-streaming their games and gaining major followings.
In Fuping, now in its second year, soccer fans are hopeful that these kinds of games could be help build a new generation of players to power a national team.
“Spectators are moving from simply enjoying soccer, to understanding soccer, to believing in soccer,” said Gao Qiang, a Fuping county league organizer and head of referees.
Zhao Junjie, a chemical engineering student who said Saturday’s game was first time attending such an event, had a similar thought.
“The whole country has started playing this kind of (village league) soccer – and it created a huge wave – that helps more people fall in love with the sport,” Zhao, who himself grew up playing and following China’s de facto official sport, table tennis.
With the clock ticking down on the final minutes of the game, the Baoding team was unable to stop the offensive push that placed the home team into a 1-0 lead late in the second half.
As the home team took their victory lap and residents rushed onto the pitch to celebrate their team, Tong, the dentist from Baoding, looked crestfallen, but was already thinking to the next season.
“Winning and losing are both part of the game. It’s normal, and we can accept it,” he said. “We’ll come back and fight again next year.”
The-CNN-Wire
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