School football: the new hope! Exploring the new nationwide system of Chinese sport

After the Beijing Olympic Games, people began to rethink the long‐existing sport ‘nationwide system’ in China in light of the many negative aspects of this system. School football, as a new and prominent product of this system, is playing a pioneering role in reforming the system. This paper analyses the existing problems with the old ‘nationwide system’ through interviews with field experts and suggests a roadmap to a new system. We take school football as an example of system reform, providing a possible way of not only developing school football itself but also reforming the system.