CATCH A SHOOTING STAR
Spanish football teams are looking to China to develop their fan base as the popularity of fixtures like El Clasico take off in Asia
China’s national football team may be absent from this summer’s World Cup, but Chinese fans may still have the chance to cheer on a few of their favorite soccer stars — so long as they hail from Spain, that is.
La Liga, the top professional league in Spanish football, recently announced they would team up with Mango Entertainment, a media company based in the Hunan provincial capital of Changsha, to produce a 28-episode TV drama series during the World Cup this summer.
The production, titled Greenfield of Love, is scheduled to be aired through MGTV, an online video platform also based in Changsha.
“It will tell the stories behind the top football clubs,” says Yang Jian, deputy president of Mango Entertainment. “It will also cover other themes like family, friendship, stardom, and romance.”
The upcoming series will follow the fortunes of three young footballers trying to make it to the finals of the China Football Association Cup, the Chinese counterpart of Spain’s Copa del Rey.
The series will be partially shot in Spain and will include many scenes shot at La Liga clubs and other wellknown international football venues.
Whether the locations will include Santiago Bernabeu stadium or Camp Nou is anyone’s guess, as the TV production company has yet to release more details, but the storyline will explain how the three Chinese footballers’ became tied with Spain.
And without naming names, Yang says that around 20 current and former football stars from La Liga will take part in the series, including several “football legends”.
“The show will give Chinese fans an insight into the daily lives of the stars and a behind the scenes look at their training regimes,” he says.
The TV series is just part of bigger plans La Liga has for China.
In late December, the 270th edition of El Clasico — a fiercely contested derby between Spanish arch rivals Real Madrid and FC Barcelona — was held at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium in Madrid, where the away side from Barcelona defeated their opponents 3-0.
And in an unprecedented move, the match had been arranged to kick off at 8 pm Beijing time, a peak viewing slot for millions of Chinese soccer fans who had previously been used to staying up past midnight to watch the famous fixture. Former FC Barcelona player and French international Eric Abidal also visited Shanghai to celebrate the football fiesta with Chinese soccer fans.
Currently broadcast live in China via the online sports platform PPTV, La Liga viewers normally pay 1 yuan (0.15 US cents) to watch a single match but this was raised to 12 yuan for the most recent El Clasico in a bid to control a surge in traffic to the website’s servers.
In October, 2016, La Liga partnered with Shanghai-based Activation Group to found La Liga Club in Shanghai, the organization’s first official fan club in China, and its destinies
Sergi Torrents,