The Backroom Staff - Coach & Writer: David Miadi

Coach & Writer: David Miadi

Coaching, researching and writing - inside China's football reform

Not long ago, China seemed destined to become football’s next superpower. Massive investment flowed in, from the government’s 2016 reform plan aimed at making China a global football force, to the Chinese Super League becoming the second-highest net spending league worldwide between 2012 and 2020.

Since then, the momentum has stalled. Transfer spending has plummeted (just €2M spent across the entire league so far this season!), no Chinese club has reached the Asian Champions League semi-finals since 2019, and earlier this year the national team failed yet again to qualify for the World Cup, managing just three wins in ten third-round matches.

With this context, I spoke with David Miadi, a German coach with experience in elite youth football at Bundesliga academies and top amateur clubs. In 2018, at the height of China’s football ‘moment’, he moved to Shanghai with the Shanghai FA and later, FC Bayern Munich’s projects in the region.

In this interview, David reflects on the contrasts between German and Chinese football, why the country’s ambitious reforms have yet to deliver, and what lessons other nations might take from China’s approach. He also shares insights from his upcoming book exploring these challenges, the potential and why, even if it feels far away, there are still reasons for optimism.

The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for grammar and clarity. 

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[ Background ]

I played football my whole life and started playing in a club when I was 5. But at one point, I figured I wouldn’t make it as a professional player, so I started coaching pretty early. I started coaching while I was still playing, actually, when I was 14, I started as a volunteer coach at the local club where I was playing. It was a lot of fun for me and I think I’m better as a coach than I was as a player!

So, I coached for almost 10 years in Germany for different amateur clubs. By the end, we were at quite an ambitious level - we were providers for the big clubs, the academies of the Bundesliga clubs.

I did my coaching licenses up to the UEFA B License and also worked as a freelancer at Borussia Mönchengladbach and did an internship at FC Köln, my hometown club.

[ How did you get connected with Chinese football? ]

By coincidence, I met this guy from Dortmund on Facebook because we were both writing about football and discussing various topics around youth training. I traveled to Dortmund to meet him, I watched his training session and we went out for a couple of beers and became friends.

A couple of months later, he got this opportunity to go to China for a couple of weeks, and they asked him if he knew anyone who was interested, too. So, he referred me - that was in 2016. They were initially looking for someone to come that very same summer, but I didn’t have a passport at the time! But I got one, did all the visa paperwork and everything, but in the end, they decided they didn’t need another coach and the whole project was cancelled.

And that's how I got this connection to China and a Chinese agent after about 9 years working as a volunteer in Germany. Then in 2017, I went to China for just 2 or 3 weeks for a short term project to get to know the country and see if I’d like working there. Then, in 2018, finally, I had this offer to go to China full-time as a coach with the Shanghai Football Association (SFA).

[ How does the SFA fit into the Chinese football landscape? What was your role there? ]

The SFA and the Chinese Football Association (CFA) offer one of various pathways for young people to become professional players. They are in charge, for example, of the provincial selection teams. They also have a connection to the CSL, the Chinese Super League, but what they don’t have is a lot of money. The CFA, SFA and local sports ministries are subordinate to the General Administration of Sports (GAS), the highest governing body of sports in the People’s Republic.

Since money is short in most GAS-affiliated institutions, they rely on the Ministry of Education (MOE) to make everything work. To train kids, you need to have a school and infrastructure, so the SFA cooperates with the MOE.

Although all sides are needed to make something work, they don’t always cooperate well. My job was created because there was a cooperation agreement between a German provincial football association and the Shanghai Football Association and the Shanghai Sports School. In my case, I was lucky we were working together quite closely, because the Shanghai Sports School is funded and run by the Ministry of Education.

The challenge, being reliant on the MOE, is of course their main focus is academic, so it’s hard to find the right balance. The Shanghai Sports School is like a boarding school for various sports, football was just one of them - and one of the less successful ones. But it’s a huge and beautiful school in the center of Shanghai and it was a great experience.

When I started, there were only two football teams, the 2003 and 2004 girls’ teams. At some point, they merged into one team, or into a ‘first team’ and ‘second team’ and this team acted as the Shanghai provincial team - so we were competing in the national games against other provinces.

[ Did all the players come from Shanghai or from all around China? ]

Some of them were local, but many were scouted from all over China. For example, just after I arrived, we got a batch of kids from Nanjing through a connection between some of the coaches.

In the end, our team got bought by Shanghai Shenhua and Shanghai Port, the two CSL clubs in the city and integrated them into their academy. That’s pretty common in China, to meet the requirements set by the CFA, clubs have to run an academy - but often they just buy the local FA teams!

[ What kind of expectations did you have? Were you expected to win games/tournaments or e.g. develop players? ]

We were assessed based on our performance at the National Games. It was very interesting for me because I was hired as the head coach for the under-15 team back then and the head coach of the other team was also the department head of the sports school, so even though it was just two teams, he was basically the big boss.

I’d say his experience and knowledge about football was somewhat limited. It’s a funny story actually. He had a background in the military - and in China, if you do military service, you’re guaranteed a civil service job when you retire from the military. Next to the sports school is a driving school, and they wanted to offer him a job there, but the driving school rejected him! So, they kept thinking and they figured, there’s a sports school, they have a girls’ team and - this was 20 or 25 years ago - they didn’t consider football, especially girls’ football very important so, he’s been doing that job ever since, even though he’s not a huge football fan or anything.

Some things were difficult because training methods weren’t exactly modern and the progress was very slow - it was an environment that was, to say the least, hesitant to make changes and adopt new methods. But I want to stress that the school’s principal and vice principal were always very supportive and I always felt comfortable working at the school.

[ Can you share an example of these outdated training methods? ]

Yeah, so, we were assessed on our success at the National Games, but I wasn’t free to make a decision when to train or how much to train - for this, I was dependent on my boss’ decisions.

Overtraining is a huge issue in China. Before the National Games, which is a tournament where we’d play say, 10 games in 14 days and then go 3 months without a single game, only training back home in Shanghai before another tournament with 10 games in 14 days!

Before the tournament, they always decided to do a training camp, where we spent two weeks training twice a day to prepare for the National Games. I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone working in sports that the girls were completely exhausted by the time the tournament started. Luckily, all the other teams did the same. It was sometimes horrible to see because all the girls were so tired.

I saw this again this year when I was back in China and working with the province team from Yunnan. There’s a very high training load, it’s very extensive but not very intensive because you just can’t do any intense training twice a day. So what they’re doing is just keeping the same speed all the time - you don’t see any sprinting, but you also don't see any walking. It's just the same speed all the time, there are no intervals. That’s not how you play football and you could see that in our games.

Back then, with the SFA, we were quite successful. We won several tournaments, and we did well at the National Games, so the school was quite happy with that, but to be honest, that was mostly due to us having more talented kids.

[ Alongside your work at the SFA, you were also doing some work with FC Bayern? Why are they interested in football in China? ]

Yes, a couple of months in, I was contacted by a person who was working for Bayern Munich in their Shanghai office. They were expanding at the time and asked if I could help out as a freelance coach and do some projects with them. So I started working with them on a couple of projects. We did something for Adidas in Shanghai, and we also went to Korea to do a project with the Korean Football Association, which was very interesting.

Why are they doing that? I think they opened their office in 2016, just after China announced this ambitious football development - and most of the German clubs rushed to China because they thought, ‘okay, there’s some way to make money’. They still have an office in Shanghai but it’s smaller now, they’ve downsized.

Basically, all the clubs that have any operations running in China want to make money, that’s the main goal - and also the requirement from headquarters. So, Bayern Munich were interested in marketing and sponsorship and establishing partnerships. Of course, they also wanted to do some scouting - 3 or 4 years ago, they even signed a Chinese goalkeeper for their academy who is now 20 or 21 and played in the Austrian second division, so while he didn’t make it at Bayern Munich, he’s still a decent player.

Many clubs are looking for this Chinese superstar. If there is a Chinese superstar who makes it in Europe, it will be so lucrative for them. For example, Espanyol Barcelona, they’re huge in China because of Wu Lei. But even then, Wu Lei was only signed because Espanyol is Chinese-owned. It’s very difficult to sign a Chinese player if there is no connection and many players don't really want to go abroad because their market value is lower outside of China because of the foreign player limits in the CSL.

[ How was the language barrier for you? Were you learning Chinese? ]

When I went to China, I didn't speak a single word. But, because I was at a Chinese public school and almost nobody could speak any English, I started learning right away!

I also had a translator, which was helpful but also not without problems. Translators changed from time to time, they were usually students who did it for one semester. Sometimes you would have a translator whose English is great, but they don’t have any football knowledge - or someone with football knowledge but not the English skills to translate effectively.

I also learned that, in the process of translating, a lot of information is lost - but also a lot of emotions are lost. I would always see the team standing in front of me, and while I was speaking English, they wouldn't listen to me. They would just wait for the translator to translate into Chinese. So whatever emotions I wanted to express wouldn’t transfer.

I started learning by myself - lessons didn’t quite work for me, because I was very pragmatic in how I wanted to learn, I was focused on the football vocabulary - and there wasn’t really a course for this. I wasn’t interested in learning all the words for, I don’t know, pencil, paper, panda and whatever you learn when you start in a school or textbook environment.

But, in the end, it worked out really well for me. I left China after two and a half years with the HSK4 certificate, which is cool. I was in China last month actually and I still managed to get along very well in Chinese - but of course, it’s far from fluent, it’s a difficult language!

[ You’ve written in the past about the impact of things like fear of failure, perfectionism and creativity on player development. What are some of the biggest differences between your experiences coaching in Germany and China? ]

We were just talking about overtraining, and this amount of training and this training load that they have to endure, that has several consequences for them, which makes it very different from any training in Europe, because first, most of them didn’t start playing because they love football.

They started because they were told to start playing football because it would increase their chances to get a scholarship for university if they were registered football players in their province. Kids from a more financially wealthy background wouldn’t go into football because they have the money to pay for university and that’s the safer way to get a job in the end. Many parents don’t allow their kids to play football.

So, we have this group of kids who have to play football, and some of them even like it, because football is fun. But then there comes this Chinese training regimen consisting of a high training load, very repetitive, isolated drills. What they completely lack is any sense of creativity and a sense of understanding the game.

I think, basically, a 10-year old kid in any European country has way more experience in just playing the game, open play, than a 20-year old Chinese kid.

For example, with my team in Shanghai, I introduced once a week an hour of free play without any supervision, I’d give them a ball and leave it to them. I just wanted to let them play whatever, any games they could think of, it didn’t have to be a real game, they could invent their own rules - like kids in Germany would do, I knew that from when I was a child. And, they just had no idea what to do, so I ended up teaching them how to make their own games, which is a contradiction in itself. But I think that illustrates the difference in mindset and how they have been trained.

There is this notion that more is always better. If we do this exercise once, it’s useless but if we do it 200 times, it’s the best exercise ever. And that’s never true. Even if you have the best exercise ever, there’s a certain amount of time you should spend doing it and then move on to something else. I saw sometimes players do the same dribbling exercise, where they just set up cones and dribble through them for 2 hours. I would have stopped playing football if I was a child growing up in China. That's not fun at all!

I tried to make football fun again in my trainings, and I think in some cases it worked - because even if they had some negative experiences in the past, football is the best game in the world so it’s going to be fun again. But in the end, you always face a lot of criticism from other (Chinese) coaches who regard ‘fun’ training as not useful in improving the players. There’s an understanding that you can’t learn while having fun - even though it’s scientifically proven the opposite is true and you actually learn better when you’re having fun!

[ Do you have a sense of how things are changing? Has this exposure to e.g. FC Bayern and all these clubs doing different types of exchanges made any impact on the actual development of Chinese footballers? ]

100% there has been a lot of change, even since 2018, when I was there for the first time. It’s always easy to overlook changes when you’re working in this environment every day but when I look at training videos from China from 2005 or 2010, that kind of ‘military style’ training where they dribble the ball, juggle the ball while just standing there, that doesn’t happen anymore.

So, of course, there have been changes, it’s just very slow. There are also many forward thinking Chinese coaches, but because hierarchy is so much more important than in Western countries, it’s hard for them to make changes. The old generation feels threatened and don’t want to make a change. I know many Chinese coaches who have good ideas but they run against this wall of expectations and the ‘way it’s been’.

This summer, in Yunnan, talking to the coaches there, there was an understanding that what they were doing maybe wasn’t the best method but they feared if they changed anything and didn’t have success, they would lose their jobs. So, rather you don’t change anything than change something and make yourself vulnerable for criticism.

[ Is there something(s) that Germany or other top ‘footballing countries’ can still take from China - something they are doing particularly well? ]

I think what we can definitely learn from China in football is this dedication to supporting football and growing football, and also the understanding that football is beneficial for society - not only in elite sports, not only for the national team or the CSL, but if more people play football, then we have a society that is healthier, a society that is socially in a better place.

This is something that I feel in Germany, the government isn’t putting any emphasis on. It used to be something that would just run and support itself - you got volunteers, you got the clubs organizing themselves and politics had nothing to do with that. But now it’s getting harder for the amateur clubs to find volunteers and it’s harder for volunteers to engage with clubs.

Also the infrastructure, especially in Germany, is aging. We got a lot of new public pitches before the World Cup in 2006, but now it’s 20 years on and they’re getting old, you need to replace them, you need to make some investments, and the government and local governments are either hesitant to do that or they don't have the funds.

I think we should look at China and how the government can see the relevance of football for society as a whole.

[ You mentioned this reform plan for Chinese football from 2016, with the oft-quoted goal to make China a ‘football superpower’ by 2050. What kind of things are part of this plan? Is it working? ]

I actually think the plan was written in a very reasonable way and makes a lot of sense - and it should have propelled China to the top of the football world. But it didn’t, not because the plan was wrong, but because, in reality, things are hard to change.

They wanted to establish a football infrastructure, not only the pitches but also leagues and institutions, because they’re still lacking nationwide leagues and most local associations are still lacking youth leagues. That’s why we’d often go months without any games in between tournaments at the SFA. That’s what they used to do for the Olympic sports but it doesn’t make sense in football. If you only play every 3 months, the rest of the world will overtake you year by year because they’re playing every single weekend, often two games a weekend.

I have one friend who is from California, he's working there in soccer, and he told me that's kind of the problem with this spring, summer, winter season thing in the US, where kids pick different sports for each season - they don’t get the same exposure European kids would get. And in China, the problem is even bigger, because I'd rather have the Chinese kids do some other sports than just training in a useless way for 3 months!

So, how is it going? I think we had this phase in the beginning where there was a lot of money spent on football, a lot of money spent on the elite and professional levels, which didn't work out. And they figured it didn't work out, so they cut it, and they stopped it, and I think we have this consolidation right now. Which is a good thing, so the Chinese government is re-thinking where to spend the money, also businesses are re-thinking where to spend the money, and I think now, maybe more sustainable projects could benefit from that.

Also, we're in the phase where clubs are starting to grow as a business, because they were never run as a business, they wouldn't make any money, they were dependent on their investors and their sponsors, or not even sponsors, it was mainly one firm, one institution that invested in that club, and if they went bankrupt, or if they stopped investing, there was just no business case anymore for the club, because they wouldn't really sell merchandise or tickets.

[ Is that related to many clubs changing their name to remove the sponsor? (e.g. Shanghai SIPG became Shanghai Port or Jiangsu Suning became Jiangsu FC, etc) ]

Jiangsu Suning went bankrupt in 2021, so the club doesn't exist anymore. They were the champions of the previous season but they went bankrupt and couldn’t start the next season. I think 9 out of the 16 teams that played CSL in 2020 are now dissolved. I think more than 30 professional clubs in the top 3 leagues have dissolved in the last ~6 years.

That happened because, in that case, Suning, the company stopped investing and the business model didn’t work anymore. The same happened with Guangzhou Evergrande, they first rebranded as Guangzhou FC but they went bankrupt in the end too.

The Chinese government introduced this rule that clubs can’t have the investor’s name in their club name anymore. The intention behind this was to disincentivize the owners from investing in a club with the sole purpose of making it their own ‘vehicle’. It’s, of course, less interesting if the club isn’t named after your company.

For the clubs, this also gives them some of the independence and agency that they need. A problem with many clubs was they were basically run by employees from the investor’s firm. Guangzhou Evergrande, for example, the officials from the club were also salesmen for Evergrande, which is funny because they would never negotiate a better sponsorship deal, right?

Of course, now that many clubs had to rename, most of them don’t have their main investor at all anymore.

[ Is football increasing or decreasing in popularity in China? ]

I'd say the general trend for the last year is a positive one. I think popularity is increasing again.

Many of the stadiums in the CSL are full again, clubs like Beijing Guoan, Shanghai Shenhua or Chengdu Rongcheng are attracting huge audiences and have 50,000-60,000 spectators at every game.

More people are picking up football as a leisure sport as well.

And there are some independent leagues starting up with lots of success. A couple villagers and businessmen from Guizhou province, one of the poorest regions in China, started the Village Super League. What’s special about Guizhou is there are many local minorities and they merged these local cultures and football in a really nice way. They attract huge crowds, just google ‘Village Super League’ and you can see amazing videos and photos of crowds of thousands, tens of thousands watching these amateurs.

There’s also the Jiangsu Super League, called the ‘Su Chao’. They also have crowds of 60,000 people watching games between Nanjing and Suzhou district teams.

The Jiangsu League and the Village League, it’s not the Chinese Super League but they attract a lot of people and I think that’s also their advantage, because the CSL’s image - with their corruption scandals in the past - hasn’t fully recovered.

This is something that makes me very hopeful, because it's a business case in itself, and they're generating money through football, and it's not only from investors. If you don’t allow football to grow bottom-up, it will never change because, unlike Olympic disciplines, where it’s all about how much money a country is willing to spend on, say, diving, football is very competitive globally, there are so many countries in the world where people are working relentlessly, without any financial compensation, to make football better. If you’re trying to pay for your football development without this, as a country, it’s impossible.

[ You publish a regular China Football Survey, what is it and how did you start? ]

We started in 2020 with a friend of mine who is still living in Shanghai and working for Bayern Munich and running his own football school. We met once a week and thought about Chinese football, talked about Chinese football and wrote some things down.

By that time, we had established a network of coaches with experience coaching in China and figured we should ask them for their opinions. We did this first survey to just do a ‘reality check’ and see if our assumptions and opinions were widespread or if we were some weirdos and the only ones having these thoughts!

Turns out, many people had similar experiences coaching football in China, so when we published the first survey, the response was very positive. We revised it, improved it a little bit - I have a background in psychology - and worked on the design a bit and did it again in 2023.

Then, this year, we thought, two years have passed, let’s do it again and see if we can see some trends. I’m still working on the paper, and it’s more extensive than ever.

[ Can you share something that was interesting or surprising from this year’s survey? ]

I think something really interesting - and it’s confirming the feeling I’ve gotten - is that coaches are more and more often working at the professional clubs. There used to be so many government projects. When we did the first survey, most of the coaches were working for some government funded project. Now it’s a very small fraction and most of the coaches are working for professional clubs, which is cool.

I think some of this has to do with the club's change in mentality. Now, they’re looking at results and there’s pressure to develop something, so they’re trying to hire experts who might improve their academy or their first team. In the past, with a sole investor, it didn’t really matter what happened - and there were so many projects where you weren’t really assessed on your work.

[ You’re also working on a mysterious new project - what is it? :) ]

Yeah, I'm looking forward to talking about it. What I’ve been doing the last year is, I wrote a book on Chinese football and my experience from the time I’ve spent in China. It’s been really interesting. It’s not so much about myself - at first, I didn’t want it to be about myself whatsoever but I figured I needed a vehicle to tell the story because otherwise it’s just facts and analysis, which is kind of boring to read!

My mother, she’s a journalist, helped me a lot, especially with the storyline and how to tell the story.

The book answers the question, why China, despite being very successful, becoming a global superpower, being successful in all kinds of Olympic disciplines, can’t succeed in football yet.

I try to answer it from an analytical and systemic side. Of course, I’m talking about culture and some of the things that are wrong with Chinese football but also the challenges, misunderstandings, and failing foreigners. I mean, we, foreigners, came to China to improve football, we didn’t really succeed, so we also failed.

It’s also a systemic analysis of why some countries succeed in football, and why others don't, and what makes a successful football system and a successful football culture. Because football culture is so important.

In Europe, football is everywhere and for kids, it’s not a big question whether you start football or not because you get this network effect - all your friends are playing football, so you start playing too.

There’s a really interesting book, The Gold Mine Effect, where the author traveled to a village in Kenya where so many world class marathon runners are from. He thought there must be something in their genes that might be suitable for running, but that’s not the single explanation, genetics is never the single explanation. What he saw was this running culture, people from the village with marathon world records, were still running in their village during their training. All the kids around would see them and they would start running too! They were so close to these superstars, they got this feeling that they’re also just human, if they can do that, I can do it too.

You need that for football in China. There’s one chapter I’ve written about the need for role models. You need a role model for kids to believe that Chinese can also be great footballers and so far, we don’t have that role model. Right now, there are still people who say, Chinese genetics or Chinese culture doesn’t allow someone to become a great football player, which is bullshit.

[ When did you get the idea to write this book? ]

The idea started when I was meeting my friend every week in Shanghai and we would write stuff down. But it was only maybe one or one and a half years ago that I decided, okay, I want to really start writing it. I want to ‘wrap up’ my experience in China. And I have thought so much about it, I've done the surveys, I've read a lot about Chinese football, I've read scientific papers, and then tried to understand what is going on there, and I wanted to make this work and my thoughts available for everyone.

So, I thought, let’s do it now because it’s still fresh and my research is up to date!

I’m currently in the process of finding a publisher with my agent and hope it’s going to be published within the next year.

[ That’s so cool - how are you thinking about your next steps? Do you want to work ‘formally’ in football again? ]

I would love to work in football, but also, the truth is, it's very hard to get a full-time job that pays well in football, especially if you're a coach. I left that path of coaching a couple of years ago and I don’t think I will go back to coaching - if anything, I’d like to support a local club as a volunteer coach. I’d like to work in football on international projects or something that can support these projects.

I’m based in Germany again, also for family reasons, and I don’t want to leave right now. It’s hard because, as many people have said, in football, it’s very important who you know.

I’m happy with what I’m doing right now - I’m getting back into the HR/recruiting world and I’m still going to do some football projects on the side.

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