Schools look to kick off soccer renaissance

Major Chinese clubs are helping to reverse a decline in domestic soccer by backing local academies, as Qiu Quanlin reports from Guangzhou.

When Evergrande Soccer School in Qingyuan, Guangdong province, was launched in 2012, Executive President Liu Jiangnan found himself at odds with Xu Jiayin, the chairman of the main investor, the real estate giant Evergrande Group.

The two men disagreed about the amount of time students should devote to academic work and to soccer training. "Xu wanted the students to spend more time training, and not to have winter and summer vacations so there would be even more time for training. But I disagreed with him," Liu said.