Why School Football Is a National Sore Point in China — the Real Story Behind Road to Success (灿如繁星)

To understand why a Chinese studio made a prestige drama about a failing high-school football team, you need one fact:

China invented football, and China cannot play football.

Both halves are true, both are widely known inside China, and the gap between them is a live national irritation. Road to Success (灿如繁星) is a romance and a mystery, but the thing underneath it is that gap — and specifically the government programme built to close it.

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FIFA agrees: football is Chinese

This isn't a patriotic talking point. FIFA formally recognizes 蹴鞠 (cùjū) as the earliest form of football for which documentary evidence exists.

• 蹴 (cù) — to kick
• 鞠 (jū) — a stuffed leather ball

The earliest descriptions appear in the 《史记》 (Records of the Grand Historian) and 《战国策》 (Strategies of the Warring States), which place it in Linzi, capital of the state of Qi, during the Spring and Autumn (770–476 BCE) and Warring States (475–221 BCE) periods. By the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) a competitive version existed with formal rules, instructional manuals, and recognized tactics — and it was used as cavalry training, which is why it turns up in a Han military manual.

A game with a rulebook and a coaching literature, two thousand years before the Football Association wrote its laws in a London pub.

And then: one World Cup, zero goals

The men's national team has qualified for the FIFA World Cup exactly once, in 2002 — after more than forty years of trying. They got there by beating Oman 1–0.

Then, in the group stage:

• Played 3, lost 3
• Goals scored: 0
• Goals conceded: 9

Brazil beat them 4–0, a match now mostly remembered outside China for a Roberto Carlos free kick. China went home without having scored a single goal in the country's only World Cup appearance.

For a nation of that size, with that history, and with a state apparatus that reliably manufactures Olympic gold in a dozen other sports, this is not a sporting disappointment. It's a recurring national embarrassment, and it is joked about constantly on the Chinese internet — bitterly, and by football fans themselves.

The 2015 plan, and where the drama's setting comes from

In March 2015 the government issued the Overall Chinese Football Reform and Development Programme — a 50-point plan, personally associated with Xi Jinping, an open football enthusiast.

Its headline targets are extraordinary in scale:

Target	Scale
Football-specialty schools (足球特色学校)	50,000
School-age children playing	tens of millions
New pitches	tens of thousands
By 2050	FIFA top 20; host and win a World Cup

(The 50,000-school figure is reported against both 2025 and 2030 in different official framings — the staging shifted over the decade.)

The school-level arm of this is 校园足球 (xiàoyuán zúqiú), "campus football" — the effort to build a talent base by putting the sport into ordinary schools rather than relying on a narrow professional academy pipeline.

This is the world Road to Success is set in. Hongjing No. 8 Middle School isn't a sports academy. It's a mid-tier school with a disbanded team — exactly the unit the campus-football policy is aimed at, and exactly where the policy most often fails.

Why it fails: the parent problem

Here's the part the drama is genuinely about, and the reason it resonates domestically far beyond football fans.

Chinese parents, in large numbers, do not want their children playing football. This is documented in the academic literature on campus football, and it isn't irrational.

The reason is the 高考 (gāokǎo), the college entrance examination — a single test that substantially determines a Chinese child's university, career, and prospects. Against that, hours on a pitch are hours not spent studying. A football career is a lottery ticket with terrible odds; the gaokao is the known path. A rational parent optimizes for the exam.

So the state can build 50,000 pitches and still not produce players, because the binding constraint isn't infrastructure. It's that the education system and the sports system are competing for the same child, and one of them decides that child's entire future.

The policy term for trying to fix this is 体教融合 (tǐ jiào rónghé), "integration of sport and education" — the attempt to stop making families choose.

What this makes the drama about

Read against that background, the casting choices stop looking arbitrary.

The heroine is not a coach. Lin Wanxing is a psychology PhD — someone from the academic side of the wall, and specifically an expert in how minds work. The male lead is not a teacher. Wang Fa coached at a top English club — the elite professional side, the very pipeline that campus football is supposed to feed and doesn't.

The drama puts one person from each side of the 体教融合 problem in the same school, gives them a squad of 问题少年 — kids the academic track has already discarded — and asks whether the two systems can be made to serve the same children.

That's why the finale lands the way it does. Lin Wanxing gets her academic reputation back and returns to research; Wang Fa turns down his elite career and stays to teach. Neither abandons their side. Each stops treating the other side as the enemy. (Ending explained →)

And it's why the drama is titled 灿如繁星 — "brilliant as a sky full of stars." Chinese elite-sport policy has historically been a 举国体制 (jǔ guó tǐzhì), a "whole-nation system" that identifies a few prospects early and concentrates everything on them. It wins Olympic medals in individual sports. It is very bad at producing a football team, because football needs a broad base, not a selected few.

A title about many stars rather than one is, quite deliberately, an argument about that.

The idioms in play

• 有教无类 (yǒu jiào wú lèi) — "in education, there are no classes of people." Confucius, Analects 15.39. Two and a half thousand years old, and still the exact counter-argument to writing off a 问题少年.
• 因材施教 (yīn cái shī jiào) — "teach according to the material." The other half: don't just teach everyone, teach each one differently.
• 众志成城 (zhòng zhì chéng chéng) — "many wills make a fortress." The broad-base argument in four characters.

Full set in 11 Chinese Idioms Every Fan Should Know.

Frequently asked

Did China really invent football? FIFA recognizes cuju (蹴鞠) as the earliest documented form of a kicking game, with evidence from Han-dynasty sources and descriptions going back to the Warring States period.

How many times has China been to the World Cup? Once — 2002. They lost all three group games, scored no goals, and conceded nine.

What is 校园足球? "Campus football" — the national programme to embed football in ordinary schools, part of the 2015 reform plan targeting 50,000 football-specialty schools.

Why don't Chinese parents want their kids playing football? The gaokao. Time on a pitch is time away from the exam that determines a child's university and career, and a football career is a far worse bet than a degree.

Is Road to Success based on a true story? No. It's adapted from Chang Er's web novel 《狭路》. The campus-football setting and the tensions around it are real.

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More on Road to Success:

• Ending Explained: Is It a Happy Ending?
• What 灿如繁星, 林晚星 and 王法 Really Mean
• 11 Chinese Idioms Every Fan Should Know
• Release Date, Cast & Where to Watch