深圳市青少年足球精英聯賽開幕 構建全新U系列體系 The 2019 Shenzhen Elite Youth Football League (SEYL) season kicked off at Shenzhen Stadium on September 10. Shenzhen Second Foreign Languages School beat Shenzhen Middle School 2-0 at the curtain raiser of the season. This SEYL season was lit up with an opening ceremony that included displays of freestyle football tricks and skills staged by players from Xiasha Primary School and from the under-8 to under-10 teams. SEYL is the upper-echelon edition of the Shenzhen Youth Football Tournament, which has been held in the city for over a decade. The most recent edition of the tournament took place this April with 12 groups of young players selected from sports schools at professional and amateur levels, football academies, and youth clubs competing to win in a total of 345 matches. Teams that finished at the top of the tournament table qualified for the SEYL. The 2019 SEYL season will see participation by 2,306 young players from 106 teams in 14 groups. The league will present a new match system covering wider age groups in which the men’s games will be played at every age level from under-8 to under-17, and the women’s games will be played at five age levels, namely, under-9, under-11, under-13, under-15 and under-17. Besides standard 11-on-11 games, young players specialized in eight-on-eight and five-on-five games will also showcase their football flair in the league games. Stadiums with top-quality football pitches and supporting facilities by domestic youth league standards, such as Shenzhen Stadium, Shenzhen Bay Sports Center and Bao’an Stadium, will host several of the league’s key games. (Wang Haolan) | 