Author(s): WANG, W., Institution: UNIVERSITY OF PARIS NANTERRE, Country: FRANCE, Abstract-ID: 312

In China’s youth football, many young players withdraw from organised training pathways at around age 12, a phenomenon known as “retirement at age 12” (Yang, 2024) . It primarily involves ending structured football training around age 12 and shifting towards academic pursuits. However, around age 12 usually marks a key milestone when players enter elite training system (Ford et al., 2012), while Chinese youth football shows the opposite trend. Therefore, “retirement at 12” cannot be explained merely by micro-level studies, such as training models and individual ability differences (Ford et al., 2009; Ford et al., 2012; Unnithan et al., 2012). It requires a broader understanding in terms of social institutions and local cultural contexts. On this basis, the paper integrates Historical Institutionalism (HI) (Hall & Taylor, 1996) and the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) (Kingdon, 1984: 93), explaining both the historical roots of the phenomenon and the contemporary policy responses.

From an HI perspective, youth football development in China is shaped by a long-standing separation between the sport system and the education system, which is described as “sport–education separation”. China’s elite sport system, organised under the whole-nation system (juguo tizhi), is strongly performance-driven and emphasises early specialisation and selection. （Zheng et al, 2018）The education system, by contrast, is organised around standardised examinations and regards academic achievement as the primary means of allocating opportunities and achieving upward mobility (Deng, 2024). In an exam-centred institutional and cultural environment that prioritises academic success, youth football and physical education have long been marginalised, reinforced by valuing study over sport, mind–body dualism that devalues embodied practice, and a utilitarian orientation（Peng et al., 2025). Around age 12, finishing primary school marks the start of academic streaming, while football training becomes more specialised. This overlap further strengthens the path dependence of “sport–education separation”.

As the limitations of performance-oriented governance in both the sport and education sectors have become increasingly evident, “retirement at age 12” has increasingly been treated as a public issue requiring policy response. The paper adapts the MSF to China’s political system and highlights the politics stream (Wang & Wang, 2025; Wu & Wu, 2025), to explain why and how the path dependence of “sport–education separation” can be broken through. Under high-level political impetus, heightened public attention and policy instruments centred on school football, policy entrepreneurs facilitate coupling across the problem, policy, and politics streams, placing “sport–education integration” on the policy agenda to address early attrition in China’s youth football talent development (State Council of the PRC, 2024).