Beijing-based Dalian Wanda Group, whose owner, Wang Jianlin, holds a 20% stake in Atlético Madrid, is "also trying to improve" Chinese football by paying for 90 children to live in Spain and train at three clubs including Atlético, according to Alex Duff of BLOOMBERG. Atlético said that FIFA is looking at the arrangements "as part of a wider probe into child players." Lawyer John Shea of Reading, England's Blake Morgan, who has advised parents on the transfer of minors, said that while the initiatives "might not contravene FIFA rules, they aren't in line with the spirit of the regulations." Shea: "FIFA's overriding objective is to curtail mass emigration of youngsters, taking them away from their parents and their roots." Under FIFA rules, clubs "can only field minors from another continent if their parents are living in the same country" for reasons not linked to football. An Atlético official said that the 30 minors being trained by its youth academy coaches have not signed for the club, "and will eventually return to China." The club said that it has "sent information about the arrangement to FIFA and is awaiting its response." In March, the Chinese government said that it was "setting up a Communist Party committee to develop the sport" and would quadruple the number of football schools in the country to 20,000 by '20. Individual sports such as badminton and pingpong are more common in China than football. When Bayern Munich "sent six scouts to the the world's most populous country" for five weeks a couple of years ago to find talent, club Chair Karl-Heinz Rummenigge said in '14 that they "came back empty-handed" (BLOOMBERG, 6/25).
