What other surprises does the Evening News Cup have in expanding its "circle of friends"? 2024 Xinmin Evening News Summer Middle School Football Tournament kicks off
On the morning of June 30, the launching ceremony of the 2024 39th "Haigang-SAIC" Cup Xinmin Evening News Summer Middle School Football Tournament and National Exchange Tournament was held at the Shanghai Media Group Media Innovation Space. As the image ambassador, Vargas, a first-team player of Shanghai Haigang Football Club, appeared at the launching ceremony of the Evening News Cup.
As the oldest, most well-known and largest amateur football tournament for young people in Shanghai, the Evening News Cup has become the "dream birthplace" for generations of young football enthusiasts in Shanghai to chase the ball and show their style since its first inception in 1986. It has been held for 39 consecutive years.
This year's Evening News Cup will be fully launched in July. The Shanghai Division will launch the "opening match". Junior and senior high school students from all over the city will participate in the preliminary stage of the competition through online registration. This year, the Shanghai Division preliminary competition has set up seven major competition areas - Pudong New Area Division, Huangpu Division, Jing'an Division, Putuo Division, Minhang Division, Songjiang Division and Lingang Division, aiming to concentrate high-quality resources and competition forces to provide participating students with a better competition experience. Among them, the Lingang Division, as a new division that has recently "joined" the Evening News Cup camp, its combination with the Evening News Cup is regarded as an important attempt to strengthen regional culture, sports and various exchanges. Zhu Feng, deputy director of the Commercial and Cultural Tourism Department of the Lingang New Area Management Committee, said: "With the gathering and rapid development of Lingang's popularity, we want to provide a communication and display platform for children who love football by hosting excellent youth football events such as the Evening News Cup, and sow the seeds of football in a new hot land."
Not only has the Shanghai Division expanded its "circle of friends", this year's Evening News Cup has also welcomed new divisions from other provinces and cities to "join". Since 2021, the Evening News Cup has successively entered the Yangtze River Delta region and Xinjiang Kashgar Division, and welcomed the team from Tibet's Shigatse region in last year's national exchange competition. This year, the Jiangsu Nantong Division joined the "Yangtze Division" camp, realizing the linkage of the four regions of Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui. At the launching ceremony, the Evening News Cup "I am in the Yangtze River Delta" publicity and promotion activities were launched simultaneously. At that time, the organizer Xinmin Evening News and its subsidiary Oriental Sports Daily will fully utilize the media's own attributes to explore the football stories in the Yangtze River Delta and spread the positive energy of Chinese youth football while hosting competitions in the three places.
In August, the Evening News Cup National Exchange Competition will be held after the national competition. The champion teams of the six major competition areas will compete on the same field to finally decide the champions of the junior and senior high school national exchange competition. On this basis, this year's national exchange competition will usher in the women's competition for the first time. The women's teams from Kashgar, Xinjiang and Shigatse, Tibet will come to Shanghai to compete with the Shanghai women's football team. At the launching ceremony, the Shanghai Haigang echelon team and the Haigang Tongji women's football team took the stage together to show the new jerseys printed with the local landmarks and characteristics of each competition area in a "jersey show".
In recent years, with the strong support of Shanghai Haigang Football Club, Wu Lei, Oscar, Yan Junling, Wang Shenchao, Li Shenglong and other players have successively served as image ambassadors. They actively appeared in the Evening News Cup and brought the power of role models to Shanghai football youth. This year, under Wu Lei's enthusiastic "invitation", the "baton" of image ambassador was passed to Vargas, the Argentine foreign aid of Haigang Club.
Speaking of Vargas's fate with China and Haigang, it is naturally inseparable from Wu Lei's "matchmaking", and all this can be traced back to the 2020 La Liga. In the early morning of January 5, 2020, Beijing time, in the 19th round of the Spanish Football League, the home team Espanyol relied on Wu Lei's goal at the last moment to tie the giant team Barcelona 2-2. The assist was provided by his teammate Vargas from Argentina. In 2022, Wu Lei returned to his parent team Shanghai Haigang, and soon after, Vargas followed in his footsteps and joined. Regarding this fate, Vargas said: "When we were still playing in Spain, I told Wu Lei that if you return to China one day, I will go with you." As a result, the "Wu-Ba connection" began to appear in domestic competitions.
This year, under the theme of "Invite your good friends to play football together", Wu Lei and Vargas also staged a "Wu-Ba connection" on the platform of the Evening News Cup. Wu Lei "called out" to Vargas through a video, inviting the latter to participate in the Evening News Cup. Vargas gladly "kept the appointment" and followed the local customs, encouraging everyone in Shanghainese.
At the launching ceremony, Vargas received the "Image Ambassador" plaque and said: "I am very happy to be the image ambassador of the Evening News Cup. Coming to the scene today and seeing so many young people who love football, it reminds me of my motherland, where the football atmosphere is as strong as that in Shanghai." At the same time, he also sent a message to the players participating in the Evening News Cup: "You are lucky to have such a good venue and facilities. I hope you can enjoy the happiness brought by football."
With the deep participation of Shanghai Haigang Football Club and its strategic partner SAIC Motor as the co-organizer, the "Haigang-SAIC" Cup Xinmin Evening News Summer Middle School Football Tournament has become more and more popular. It not only deeply implements the integrated development strategy of the Yangtze River Delta, but also, under the guidance of the national "Cultural Xinjiang" strategy, the Evening News Cup actively organizes competitions across the country and gives full play to the public welfare attributes of the event, carrying out public welfare actions such as football classes and equipment delivery in various competition areas, and carrying out a series of football and cultural exchange activities during the national exchange competition.
In the past few years, when the Evening News Cup was held in Kashgar, Xinjiang, it sent love football equipment to local students many times and opened training courses. This year, the Evening News Cup will upgrade the Xinjiang Kashgar charity plan, and Cheng Yaodong, the youth training director of Shanghai Haigang Football Club, will serve as the "charity ambassador" to go to Kashgar to deliver football training courses to the participating teams. The Haigang Club plans to set up a youth training base in Kashgar. According to the Haigang Club, this year's best player of the Evening News Cup will be a member of Haigang's "Young Eagle Plan" and go to the Oriental Green Boat Training Base to receive professional guidance from the Haigang Football Club's youth training coaches. The implementation of a series of public welfare actions will further open up the road to professional football for young people who love football.
As an important part of the event, the student journalist training organized by the Evening News Cup over the years has always been a cradle for Shanghai students to nurture their journalistic ideals. Last year, in addition to going to the Evening News Cup to interview, student journalists also went to the SAIC Pudong Football Stadium to experience the daily life of professional journalists reporting on the top domestic leagues, and interviewed the first-team players of the Harbor Club, Wang Shenchao and Yan Junling, up close. At this year's launching ceremony, outstanding student journalists from previous Evening News Cups shared their previous camp experiences and growth stories, and were awarded the "Student Journalist Corps Recommendation Officer" nameplate, and the new Evening News Cup Student Journalist Corps was officially established. It is worth mentioning that the scale of this year's student journalist corps has been further expanded, and nearly 200 students from 16 districts will participate in it. Through three special classes of news writing, sports photography and video editing, they will learn and improve relevant professional skills and record the excitement of youth sports events.
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