China has become Bayern Munich's most important market as the Bundesliga powerhouse foresee a bright picture for the world's most populous nation that has launched a reform plan on football, said Bayern club chairman Karl Heinz Rummenigge in an interview with Xinhua in Hangzhou on Wednesday.
Bayern announced its cooperation with Tmall Global, an overseas platform and an extension of Alibaba Group's B2C Tmall Business in China, and DHL to launch an official Bayern Munich online flagship store for consumers in China.
It is expected that about 90 million Chinese fans will purchase official fan merchandise from the Bayern club, and for the first time, Chinese fans can order the world's leading football team's official jersey with their favorite player's name.
Rummenigge stressed that China has the greatest potentiality and momentum from the commercial viewpoint and the Bavarian club want to profit from the government-supported football policy.
"Two years ago, we made it clear that we have two main markets: U.S. and China," said Rummenigge, "But China is the most important as the government have launched a football reform plan, which will bring momentum and policy for the sport."
The 59-year-old said Bayern want to help China in developing top-class youth coaches
"The most important thing for a nation to raise their football level is the quality of coaches in youth training, we want to help China in this way," he said.
Rummenigge used German football's rise as an example, saying that after a disastrous EURO 2000, The German Football Association (DFB) decided to reform the sport and build some good youth training academies within the clubs, which showed great effect since 2006, and the German national team benefited from it as they won the 2014 World Cup.
Rummenige is confident in Bayern's youth training system, hailing it more productive and successful than Barcelona's world-famous youth center: La Masia.
"We have a lot of players like Schweinsteiger, Lahm, Muller and Alaba from our youth training system, and some 75 players playing at the top level leagues around Europe grew up from our academy."
"Of course Barca have a few talented top players like Messi, but we trained more excellent players than they did," he added.
