China's Sports Reform Should Give Ordinary Children a Ball to Play With

First, let’s clarify the matter about Fan Zhendong

The controversy surrounding Fan Zhendong has extended beyond a single season. This article discusses the relationship between his withdrawal from the world rankings, his move to play in Germany, and the talent system, based on publicly verifiable information as of September 15, 2026.

On December 31, 2024, the Chinese Table Tennis Association confirmed that Ma Long, Fan Zhendong, and Chen Meng have withdrawn from the world rankings, stating that they respect their decisions and have communicated with the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) and WTT regarding competition rule adjustments based on the athletes’ concerns. This statement does not equate withdrawing from the rankings with retirement, and it certainly cannot be used as a basis to announce Fan Zhendong’s withdrawal from the national team. Xinhua News Agency report on the Chinese Table Tennis Association’s statement

There has been new progress in his move to play in Germany. Borussia Düsseldorf announced a contract with him for the 2026/27 season; the club’s match report dated August 23, 2026 records that he achieved two singles victories in the team’s home match. Therefore, it is no longer accurate to summarize his German experience simply as “joining Saarbrücken.” Contract announcement, Düsseldorf home match report

In April 2025, Calderano won the men’s singles championship at the Macau World Cup; a month later, Wang Chuqin defeated him in the men’s singles final at the Doha World Table Tennis Championships to claim the title, while Sun Yingsha also won the women’s singles championship. These results show that Team China still has top players, but they do not answer the question of what happened to the overall depth and succession of the men’s team more than a year later. Macau World Cup report, Doha World Table Tennis Championships report

Dismissing all athletes because of a single defeat is too simplistic; using past championships to offset a recent string of losses would also overlook the real problems. Whether the selection is reasonable, whether the training is effective, and whether reserve players can step into the starters’ roles should all be examined through the lens of recent competitions.

Fan Zhendong’s experience is more suited to raising another set of questions: how much choice do athletes have over their competition schedules and professional lives? How do performances at overseas clubs enter the national team’s talent selection radar? For already-established athletes, how are rest periods, commercial events, and national team duties coordinated? These questions deserve open discussion. Transfers and withdrawals from rankings alone are not enough to write “being marginalized” as fact.

Consecutive Losses Have Triggered a Succession Alarm

This round of concerns is not only driven by fans’ obsession with the “must-win championship” mentality. On September 12, 2026, CCTV News reported that China’s men’s table tennis team had failed to reach the semifinals in four consecutive WTT high-level events: the U.S. Grand Smash, Yokohama Champions, Sweden Grand Smash, and Macau Champions. Failing to reach the semifinals at four events in a row is a problem of a different magnitude from occasionally losing a final. Reported by CCTV News, reposted by CNR

Spreading out the matches at both ends, the changes become clearer:

The U.S. stop results can be found in a CCTV News report, reposted by China Youth Online; the results of the top two players at the Macau stop can be found in the aforementioned CNR report, and Zhou Qihao’s matches can be found in a Yangzi Evening News match report. What is listed here are specific external match and stage results; matches from different-level tournaments, qualifiers, and internal team encounters are not lumped together as a single “loss count.”

The Macau stop has one condition that must be stated: according to Yangzi Evening News, Wang Chuqin and Lin Shidong withdrew due to injuries, and the players who competed were Zhou Youhao, Chen Yuanyu, and Huang Youzheng. Therefore, this stop is not sufficient to gauge the ceiling of the full main lineup. However, at the U.S. stop, both Wang Chuqin and Lin Shidong participated, and no men’s singles player made it to the quarterfinals, so this round of poor performance cannot be entirely attributed to “the main players not being there.”

The absence of key players can also expose another issue: how much of the burden can the players behind them shoulder? If the team can only maintain its ability to compete for the championship or even advance to the latter stages of the tournament by relying on a very small number of players being available, the depth of the bench is worth questioning. The results across four consecutive stops are already enough to demand that the coaching staff explain the lineup, training, and match arrangements; as for how much responsibility falls on injuries, form, technical response, and selection respectively, each factor still needs to be analyzed one by one.

This also doesn’t mean that the entire Chinese table tennis team has lost competitiveness across all events. While no men’s singles player advanced to the quarterfinals at the 2026 US Grand Slam, Sun Yingsha and Kuai Man met in the women’s singles final, and the Chinese team also won the men’s doubles and women’s doubles titles. Pointing out the men’s singles issue separately allows the succession pressure to fall on specific teams and training processes. Tokyo TV Tournament Summary

Japan Has Already Made Breakthroughs, and Germany Is Also Supplementing the Next Generation

The change in Japan is evidenced by their performance in adult competitions. In January 2026, Matsushima Haruku defeated Tomokazu Harimoto in the semifinals of the All Japan Championships, then won the men’s singles final 4-0 over Daito Shinozuka, achieving back-to-back men’s singles titles. By July, he had also won the US Grand Smash final 4-2 over Sidorenko. The Japanese men’s team now has a player other than Tomokazu Harimoto who has won a WTT top-tier Grand Smash singles title. Japan Table Tennis Association All Japan Championship Report, US Grand Smash Full Results

At the same U.S. stop, Daito Shinozuka also defeated Wen Ruibo and Calderano in succession to reach the quarterfinals. The significance of this example is that the competition among Japan’s younger generation is no longer confined to domestic trials—it has already translated into results on the senior international stage. For the relevant match outcomes, see the U.S. Grand Smash record mentioned above.

The German evidence is on another level. In June 2026, the men’s singles final of the European U21 Championship was contested between Andre Bertelsmeier and Wim Verdonschot, with the former winning 4-3. Bertelsmeier’s name also appears on the German squad for the London World Table Tennis Championships as announced by the European Table Tennis Union. European U21 Final Report, German Senior Team Roster Introduction

These facts indicate that some German players have progressed from youth competitions to the adult national team, but a European youth championship cannot be directly equated with an adult world-class championship. Whether this German group can take over the international competitive position of the Boll and Ovtcharov generation will depend on their subsequent performance in adult competitions. Stating that both Japan and Germany have “already completed the succession” would exaggerate the extent that the current evidence from Germany can demonstrate.

Similarly, Fan Zhendong’s strong performance in the German Bundesliga first proves that the league can meet the demands of professional competitions for top athletes; Chinese-trained star players playing for German clubs cannot be counted as the result of Germany’s domestic youth development. It is worth observing whether local young players can get playing opportunities in such a league, and whether they can convert the experience of competing against high-level opponents into progress.

In China, the term “gap” also needs clarification regarding what it refers to. Lin Shidong, born in 2005, has already won the 2025 Singapore Grand Slam men’s singles championship, so it cannot be said that there are no young players in China reaching a high level. Lin Shidong’s date of birth and major achievements

But having one young champion does not mean a group of players has already formed who can sustainably take over. What is more worrying in the recent results is whether young players can turn a single breakthrough into a sustained winning rate against foreign opponents; whether the second tier can continue to advance in high-level tournaments when the main players are injured or absent; and whether, when facing opponents who have already beaten them, they can come up with an effective response the next time. What the Chinese men’s singles has shown is a warning sign about sustained competitiveness and the depth of its reserves. It deserves to be discussed seriously, and it points more directly to what needs to change than a simple claim that “there is no one left in the country.”

This brings the issue back to the selection mechanism. How should the national team balance immediate results with the development of new talent? How are opportunities in international matches distributed, and on what basis can those who are not selected regain visibility? What role do youth tournament results, senior international performances, and training evaluations each play in selection? If the rules and the effectiveness of player development lack verifiable explanations, the public can only speculate after every loss. Reform should enable people to assess where talent is discovered and where it is held back, rather than only showcasing the system when winning championships and asking for patience when losing.

The strength of the women’s volleyball team is real, but whether ordinary people can play the game is another matter

The most compelling aspect of the nationwide system is its ability to concentrate coaching, training, medical, and competition resources over the long term. For events that lack commercial revenue, this sustained investment is especially important; for ordinary children from selected families, public cultivation may also reduce the direct training costs borne by their families.

The historical achievements of the women’s volleyball team cannot be dismissed as “national effort making everyone mistakenly believe they are very strong.” The five consecutive championships from 1981 to 1986, as well as subsequent titles including the 2016 Rio Olympics, are genuine competitive accomplishments. National organizational support, coaching expertise, technical training, and the athletes’ dedication together formed the foundation of these victories. 40th Anniversary Retrospective: Chinese Women’s Volleyball Team’s First World Championship

The inference that needs to be corrected is the one from a national team to society as a whole: having a world champion team does not mean that most schools have stable volleyball teams, nor does it mean that an ordinary girl can find a court, a coach, and opponents of similar skill level after school.

A gold medal measures how high the very best of a small group can reach; mass sports must also answer whether the rest of the people have a chance to participate. The two can support each other, yet one cannot be used to submit a report card in place of the other.

Similarly, being trained at a sports school and having personal interests are not mutually exclusive. Children at sports schools can genuinely enjoy sports, and children at clubs may also be pushed by their parents to practice. The question is how the system treats such interests: are children allowed to try several sports? Are they allowed to show their talent a bit later? If they don’t pursue a professional path, can they still keep up with their studies and athletic life?

For team sports like football, basketball, and volleyball, long-running leagues are especially valuable. Beyond technical skills, players must repeatedly make judgments against different opponents, rhythms, and lineups. This means that improving the talent pool requires a sufficient number of continuously operating teams and matches. Bringing the best few dozen people together can improve the quality of their training, but those who have yet to be discovered need a place to play first.

China is already changing; progress should be viewed in layers

If we continue to describe youth sports in China as having only the path of sports schools, we will miss the changes that have already taken place.

The 2020 Ti-Jiao Ronghe (Sports-Education Integration) Opinions proposed establishing school representative teams, supporting social forces to enter campuses, and connecting competitions from primary schools to universities, and from county-level to national-level. This indicates that policy direction has already recognized that learning and training need to be arranged within the same growth process. Ti-Jiao Ronghe Opinions

But policy direction, event implementation, and actual benefits for families are three different stages.

The national competitions and evaluation directions in the table come from the 2026 National Youth Sports Work Conference; the local practices come from the Beijing case released by the General Administration of Sport. They demonstrate that the reform is advancing, but do not provide a nationally unified assessment of family burden or participation retention. National Conference Report, Beijing Youth Competition and Youth Training Practice

Beijing’s example is worth examining in more concrete terms. Official materials document that the 2025 Baidui Cup had 1,369 participating teams and allowed the public to freely form teams; the North China Youth Three Major Ball Leagues adopted a home-and-away double round-robin format. This adds a layer of substantive content beyond the vague announcement of “valuing sports”: it transforms who can form teams, where they play, and how they repeatedly face each other into concrete organizational arrangements. The aforementioned figures and competition formats can be found in the previously cited Beijing practice reports.

However, after organizing a successful event, there are even more difficult everyday issues to address. Can training continue after entering middle or high school? Who pays for transportation and coaching fees for weekend competitions? After the regular team loses, will there still be a next game? If a coach nurtures many children who participate long-term but never wins an award, will that put the coach at a disadvantage in performance evaluations?

My assessment is that China is expanding entry points through schools and clubs and attempting to connect different systems; the publicly available materials are still insufficient to prove that a universally accessible, affordably manageable pathway has been established. Nor is it appropriate to assign the reform a nationwide completion rate: the number of events, talent pipelines, and the participation experience of ordinary children are not measured by the same yardstick.

What’s Worth Learning from Abroad: Multiple Opportunities and Long-Term Competitions

“Free choice of sports in elementary school, joining clubs during vacations, and being discovered by a coach or scout to advance through the ranks” describes one possible developmental pathway. However, treating it as a universal experience for all children abroad would erase the differences in region, sport, and family circumstances.

German football and American collegiate sports operate under different organizational logics.

The German Football Association’s (DFB) talent development program connects grassroots clubs with higher-level training centers and football elite schools. According to the description at the time of its current certification review, U12 to U15 players selected for training points receive an additional specialized training session per week, beyond their training at their original clubs. The significance of this arrangement is that children can first stay with their local teams while receiving extra development opportunities, before transitioning to higher levels. DFB Talent Development Introduction

There are both clubs and associations providing unified organization and quality requirements. Relying on a single scout happening to pass by is not enough to support stable talent discovery; what is needed is continuous local matches, coach observation, and cooperation between levels.

The United States cannot simply fit into the European soccer club ladder. School teams and college competitions form an important pipeline, with outside clubs also participating; entering college competition and entering professional leagues are different thresholds. The NCAA itself separately tracks the probabilities of transitioning from high school, college, and professional stages, and notes that these are only estimates. NCAA Pathway Research from High School to College and Professional Competition

From these arrangements, there are three interrelated benefits that China can truly learn from.

First, the child can participate first, then decide how far they are willing to go. There is no need to immediately interpret their interest as a future career at the beginning, so the family is more likely to allow them to try.

Second, talent can be observed repeatedly. If a child isn’t selected this time, as long as there are still competitions available, they have the opportunity to receive new evaluations through their subsequent performances. The value of multiple entry points depends on the competition opportunities after not being selected.

Third, there is a connection between schools, local clubs, and higher-level teams, so the responsibility for development does not have to rest on a single institution from start to finish. Grassroots organizations are responsible for broad participation, while professional institutions take in those suited to continue improving; whether this division of labor works depends on whether the transfer-in, transfer-out, and development compensation rules can truly function.

These are the benefits that institutional design can bring; it does not mean that every foreign club has achieved them. The fact that the German Football Association still needs to build a dedicated development network shows that beyond free participation, organization and investment from someone are also required.

The club also turns interest into an increasingly expensive bill

The most easily romanticized notion is that “as long as you love it, you can keep practicing forever.”

Hmm, let me reconsider. Actually, I think I got tripped up — let me just translate this naturally:

The thing that gets romanticized the most is the idea that “as long as you love something, you can keep practicing it forever.”

According to the Project Play parent survey conducted by the Aspen Institute in the United States, in 2024, American families with children participating in sports spent an average of $1,016 on a child’s primary sport — a 46% increase compared to 2019. This figure reflects spending among participating families and cannot be interpreted as the average across all American households, nor does it represent top-tier youth training fees. Project Play Youth Sports Spending Survey

Beyond registration, there are also equipment, travel, accommodation, and additional training. Even if registration is nominally open, who can afford long-term investment may still affect who has the opportunity to accumulate training and competition experience. The cost barrier also reminds China that the proliferation of training institutions outside of schools does not mean that public sports services have improved.

Another easily overlooked point is that the career pipeline is very narrow. According to the NCAA’s estimate for the 2024 men’s basketball draft, approximately 1% of NCAA men’s basketball players eligible for the draft were selected in the NBA Draft. This percentage does not account for all other professional paths, and cannot be used to assert that the rest are unable to play professional basketball; but even those who have already entered the collegiate competition system are far from all being able to enter the top league. NCAA Estimate and Methodology

Therefore, if parents treat long-term training as an investment in scholarships or professional income, and clubs only keep selling the hope of “going one step further,” an interest may turn into another competition. Whether commercial institutions exaggerate prospects and whether they guarantee cultural learning still requires oversight.

The selection process itself does not automatically become fair simply because it is handed over to clubs. If coaches are primarily held accountable for wins and losses in the current season, they may favor children who currently have a physical advantage and can win games right away. This is a bias that short-term evaluation can produce, and it applies to any organizational structure; having multiple institutions coexist only provides conditions for error correction, and still requires reasonable grouping, development assessment, and transfer opportunities.

Therefore, social development requires public support. Low-cost venues, volunteer coaching staff, subsidies for families in difficulty, and ordinary leagues that non-selectees can still participate in — these determine whether the right to choose belongs to the majority of children, or only to families with money and time to shuttle them to and from activities.

In the End, Reform Must Reach a Child’s Saturday

The challenge for the next step of Chinese sports lies in making public investment, school education, and professional training each assume clear responsibilities.

First, schools need to provide stable conditions for most children to participate. Beyond school teams competing for rankings, class-level competitions, regular teams, and beginner training should also have people organizing them. If funding only follows the few award-winning teams, the new school sports programs may still grow into a scaled-down version of a gold medal project.

Professional development requires more transparent pathways. The eligibility criteria for registration, observation periods, selection rationale, and appeal procedures should be understandable to athletes and their families. For football, basketball, and volleyball, there should be continuous observation of young players’ actual playing time in high-quality matches, rather than merely counting those selected for rosters or short-term training camps. When mature athletes like Fan Zhendong compete overseas, how their performances are evaluated should also fall within the scope that regulations should clarify.

The professional capabilities accumulated by sports schools can continue to serve a purpose: supporting the training of grassroots coaches, providing specialized guidance to schools, and accepting children who are willing to undergo in-depth training. At the same time, the pathways for switching programs, exiting professional training, and returning to general education need to be thoughtfully arranged. The more controllable the cost of failure in training, the more willing families will be to let their children start.

To measure reform, we can first announce a few simple but useful results:

• How many matches does an average participant actually play in a year, and how much playing time do they get.
• What proportion of children continue to participate in sports after entering middle and high school.
• How much does a family actually pay in a season, and what support do families in difficulty receive.
• Among children not selected for the professional development pathway, how many continue their education and continue playing.

These metrics won’t immediately translate into a gold medal, but they can tell us whether sports has become part of everyday life.

A child should be able to walk into a nearby field on Saturday, find a team and coaches, lose the game, and still have another match the following week; years later, even if it turns out they’re not suited for a professional path, they can continue their education normally and still be willing to play with friends. Only when such experiences become commonplace can China’s sports reform be said to have truly reached ordinary people.

References

All sources below were verified on September 15, 2026; the 2026 summer tournament is used to analyze recent men’s singles performance, and the 2025 results are used to illustrate the heights the player has reached; overall win rate is not calculated based on scattered cross-year match results.

1. Xinhua News Agency: Chinese Table Tennis Association Confirms Three Players Withdraw from World Rankings, December 31, 2024.

2. Düsseldorf: Fan Zhendong Signing Announcement; Home Match Report on August 23, 2026.

3. Titan Sports Weekly: Calderano Wins Macau World Cup; Chinese Olympic Committee: 2025 Doha World Table Tennis Championships Singles Results.

4. General Administration of Sport of China: 40th Anniversary Review of Chinese Women’s Volleyball Team’s First World Championship.

5. General Administration of Sport and Ministry of Education: 2020 Opinion on Sports-Education Integration.

6. 2026 National Youth Sports Work Conference; Beijing Youth Competitions and Youth Training Practice.

7. German Football Association: Talentförderung.

8. Project Play: Family Youth Sports Spending Survey.

9. NCAA: Probability of Competing in College Athletics Beyond High School and Estimation Methods.

10. CCTV News: Chinese national table tennis team fails to reach men’s singles quarterfinals at 2026 US Grand Smash; Fails to reach semifinals at four consecutive events through Macau.

11. Yangtze Evening News: Zhou Qihao loses to Tomokazu Harimoto and Macau roster.

12. Japan Table Tennis Association: Harimoto Tomokazu clinches second consecutive All-Japan men’s singles title; Butterfly Table Tennis Report: Complete results of 2026 US Grand Smash men’s singles; TV Tokyo tournament summary.

13. European Table Tennis Union: German players meet in the final of 2026 U21 men’s singles; Germany’s adult national team and national championship roster.

14. Lin Shidong: Date of birth and major achievements.