Youth program urged by soccer boss

A visiting FIFA official said he was shocked by the small soccer population in China and has advised the country to develop the sport by building a youth program.

"I was surprized to find there are only tens of thousands of teenagers playing soccer in China," FIFA secretary general Jerome Valcke said at a signing ceremony with CCTV on Thursday in Beijing. "I originally expected it to be 30 million to 40 million, you know, this is a country with 1.3 billion people."

The registered number of teenage players slumped from 650,000 in the early 1990s to about 30,000 in 2007 while the number of soccer academies fell from 4,300 to 20, according to the Chinese soccer registration system.