The 14-year-old has a full workload as a trainee at the Evergrande Football School – an enormous sporting academy in the southern province of Guangdong – but routinely trains on his own on weekends, working on his weaknesses, like heading the ball.

"First you have to get yourself right as a person and then when you train you have to work harder than everyone," he says. "In my mind, when you know you're tired, you think of your dream and keep pushing."

Chen has already made an encouraging step to reaching his ultimate goal: playing for China's national team and playing professional football overseas. He has made the cut for the national under-16 team for the first time, and will travel with the squad to Belarus this year.

Chen, a wiry central defender, is one of 2600 students at the Evergrande International Football School, arguably the most ambitious – and almost certainly the biggest – in the world.

Bankrolled by Xu Jiayin, a billionaire property tycoon and one of the mainland's richest men, it is an example of how the trajectory of China's rise has often translated to a bullish approach in achieving its ambitions – in this case, reversing the flagging fortunes of Chinese football.

Built on 167 acres of land cut into the hills of Qingyuan, an hour north of Guangzhou, the academy's main buildings, with its clock towers and medieval turrets, resemble something out of a Harry Potter novel. Lush trees transplanted from South-East Asia at a cost of 200 million yuan line boulevards leading to a "heroes square", featuring life-size bronze statues of England World Cup-winning captain Bobby Moore, and Brazilian legend Pele, widely considered the greatest player of all time.

It boasts a sprawling complex of 50 football pitches and state-of-the-art gymnasium, Olympic-sized swimming pool, cavernous recreation centre, library, and a computer room for children to make video calls home.

More than 150 coaches, including 22 imported from the top leagues of Spain in a tie-up with leading club Real Madrid, are tasked with grooming the next generation of Chinese footballers.

"The future of Chinese football is here," says youth coach Juan Jose Rodriguez Berraco, who moved to Guangzhou from top Spanish club Atletico Madrid. "To have such a big campus and so many students, this is almost impossible in Spain."

China has long staked high importance on gaining international sporting recognition, and underlined its status as a global sporting power when it topped the medal tally of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

But for a football-loving nation of 1.3 billion, China's consistent failure to field a team of eleven capable of competing at the highest level has both confounded the laws of probability and provided a long-running source of national disappointment.

Chinese football plumbed new depths in 2013 when, after a string of poor results, it lost 5-1 at home in a friendly match against Thailand, ranked 142 in the world. Worse still, it was the Thai under-23 team that delivered the humiliating defeat.

The performance saw irate fans riot outside the stadium. The coach was promptly sacked, and the Chinese football federation was forced into making a public apology.

Results have steadied in recent months under new national team coach, Frenchman Alain Perrin. But as it prepares from its training base in Campbelltown for its opening Asian Cup group stage tie against Saudi Arabia in Brisbane next week, China languishes at 97th place, sandwiched between Latvia and Mozambique, in the latest official rankings maintained by FIFA, football's international governing body. (Australia is ranked 100th).

Having only scraped through the qualifying campaign for the Asian Cup itself, China has been drawn into a tough group and is not considered among the bookies' top contenders, though expectations among Chinese football fans remain high.

There are numerous theories why Chinese football has failed to do well, including a lack of a genuine grassroots infrastructure, and a tendency for parents to prioritise studies over the perceived distraction of football.

China's sporting juggernaut, with its Soviet-style youth talent identification and state-sponsored development system has churned out athletes that dominate in routine-based sports such as gymnastics, shooting and diving.

Evergrande's principal Liu Jiangnan says that system has not translated well into a team game like football where more intangible qualities like creativity on the ball and knowing when to pass and when to shoot are innate qualities drawn from playing from an early age.

"There are many reasons why Chinese football has fallen behind, but the most important is that our grassroots set-up is backward," Liu says. "Our football-playing population is lacking, compared to more developed football nations."

Berraco, the coach from Spain, says he is surprised by the aptitude shown by his young charges in Guangzhou, but that a lack of structure in China's youth set-up often hindered them from making the step up to the next level.

"In terms of technique, our children can match any top youth players in Spain," he says.

Liu, who is also vice-chairman of the Chinese Football Association, says China's traditional rigorous training regimes focused too much on creating Olympic champions but risked burning out promising athletes at a young age.

Evergrande, he said, had considered different models around the world and emphasised academic pursuits and the development of well-rounded individuals. Evergrande's trainees spend most of their time in a traditional classroom environment, with football training sessions limited 90 minutes a day, more in line with the workloads of Europe's elite academies.

"This way, even if they do not make it as a player, they can fit back well into society," he says.

But Chinese football can also benefit from more traditional vestiges of the Communist Party structure.

A noted football fan who played for his school team, President Xi Jinping declared in 2011 an ambition that has since been frequently repeated: for China to once again qualify, eventually host, and one day, win the World Cup.

In November, it was announced that football would become a compulsory part of national curriculum at all schools.

By 2017 some 20,000 schools are to receive new football pitches and training facilities, with the aim of creating 100,000 new players. Football will become an option in the national university-entrance exam in 2016, a dramatic departure for an academic culture notorious for being based in textbook rote-learning.

The education ministry will also take over the promotion of youth football from the Chinese Football Association and play a more prominent role in expanding the school league system.

"It's not because President Xi Jinping loves football that prompted Mr Xu Jiayin to do what he is doing," Liu says, pointing out the property mogul's initial investment in football was in 2010, when he purchased a struggling professional club in Guangzhou. "Of course, when we saw President Xi point out his three football dreams … it gave us a huge lift in motivation."

Xu's investment in the club, renamed Guangzhou Evergrande, revitalised interest in a national league that was until recently mired in corruption and match-fixing scandals. He brought in high-profile foreign players on bulging salaries, and instituted lucrative match and goal bonuses for players.

Most notably, at a reported annual salary of $15 million, he hired Marcello Lippi, the Italian who coached his national team to World Cup victory in 2006.

The club won three Chinese Super League titles in a row and became the first Chinese club to win the Asian Champions League in 2013. (In an ill-tempered clash, Guangzhou Evergrande exited the 2014 edition of the competition at the quarter-final stage at the hands of Western Sydney Wanderers, who would go on to win the title in a fairytale run.)

With Lippi stepping back to become the club's technical director, Evergrande has hired another prominent Italian as his replacement – World Cup winning central defender Fabio Cannavaro.

Xu is just one of several mainland billionaires that have invested heavily in Chinese football clubs and youth academies. Shanghai Shenhua made headlines by making former Chelsea players Didier Drogba and Nicolas Anelka among the world's highest paid players in a fleeting and ultimately unsuccessful experiment. Wanda Group chairman Wang Jianlin, also a former owner of a Dalian football club, is funding football scholarships to Spain.

But nothing rivals the scale of Xu's spending, which Liu freely admits is not motivated by financial return.

"In investing huge amounts in establishing this football school, Mr Xu is not thinking about it from a profitability perspective. It's about rejuvenating Chinese football, doing something for the country," Liu says. "I can tell you, this school is a seriously unprofitable, non-for-profit organisation."

At 50,000 yuan ($9850) a year, Evergrande's school fees are by Chinese standards a prohibitive sum, and most of the children are from relatively affluent families. But about one-third of enrolled students – including some 100 Uighur children from the far-western Xinjiang province, are from underprivileged backgrounds and, provided they show enough promise at trials, are fully-sponsored by Evergrande and a Chinese poverty alleviation charity.

It has provided an unlikely opportunity for young winger Yin Ziyu and his family, from an impoverished region of Sichuan province. Having impressed with his primary school team, the 11-year-old was selected for a scholarship during Evergrande's inaugural football trials two years ago.

But football dreams don't necessarily come easy.

His father, Yin Li, says his son was so stressed about performing well he developed anxiety issues and a severe stress-related skin flaking condition.

"He was the number one player at home but when he came here he felt an extremely heavy burden," he says.

Deciding to move to Guangzhou to be with his son, he arrived with 500 yuan in his pocket and now does odd jobs while living in a tiny farmer's shack to be near his son for support.

The father says he reassures his son not to put too much pressure on himself and understand that the odds of turning professional remain minuscule.

"I tell him that no matter if he succeeds or not, he just needs to learn how to be hardworking," Yin Li says. "No matter the outcome, the lessons he learns through football will stand him in good stead."