Football / Soccer / Calcio / Futebol / Fußball

Something like that, but then they realised it takes many decades for grassroots investment to take effect at the professional level, and by then all they'd have achieved is making foreigners stupidly rich with no guarantees that Chinese born players will ever be as good. It's better to just invest in grassroots football and wait, it'll be a lot cheaper, more rewarding, and politically much more popular.