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While expanding abroad to bind with football powerhouses and rooting into county-level high school playgrounds, BYD's philanthropic focus has expanded from the few football geniuses on overseas stages to every young boy with a football dream on the ball fields in county towns. The dual-track path broadens the enterprise's public welfare value.
Recently, BYD and the Dongrun Public Welfare Foundation completed signing in Beijing, officially reaching a strategic cooperation. BYD will invest resources to support the Dongrun Cup National Youth High School Football Championship project. This cooperation further extends BYD's layout in youth football from past elite overseas exchanges to ordinary county-level high school campuses in China, forming a dual-path approach of expanding overseas horizons combined with popularizing grassroots campus football domestically.
Many people's impression of BYD and football mostly stays on overseas stages. In the past few years, BYD successively conducted commercial cooperation with several top European clubs including Manchester City, Inter Milan, and Paris Saint-Germain. BYD brand appearances also appeared multiple times at the UEFA European Championship and Copa America venues. Previously, the "BYD Derby" between Manchester City and Inter Milan gained significant exposure on overseas social media platforms. Leveraging the football IP, BYD achieved brand communication in the overseas market and helped new energy vehicle products open markets in multiple European and Latin American countries.
However, exposure in the overseas football world is only one side of BYD's football layout. While using international football IPs for global communication externally, internally BYD has always been doing the implementation work for youth football. The Dongrun Cup project is a new implementation carrier for this idea.
The Dongrun Public Welfare Foundation is a national 5A-level non-public foundation under the supervision of the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Its rural education public welfare has been conducted for over ten years. The implementation network covers 31 provinces and 324 counties nationwide, establishing a mature grassroots youth assistance execution system. The Dongrun Cup competition is positioned for regular high school students, not professional sports school echelon competitions. This session of the Dongrun Cup covers more than 20 provinces (regions, municipalities) nationwide, with a total of 352 schools participating. More than 4,000 players and coaches benefited; the final stage gathered 20 high school teams from 20 provinces for centralized competition.
The main participants in the competition are high school students from ordinary county-level middle schools, from ordinary school teams in Xinjiang, Yunnan, Shaanxi, Jiangxi, and other places. These students are not football prospects already selected by club echelons. The reality is that there are many county-level high schools in China where students love football, but they have long faced several common problems: lack of a systematic school league platform within the school, insufficient supply of equipment such as footballs and protective gear for daily training; grassroots school football coaches lack external training channels; even if students have the passion to play, they lack formal cross-regional match opportunities.
The original operation mode of this Dongrun Cup project is not just organizing football matches. The project is simultaneously equipped with grassroots football coach public welfare training and sports equipment donations; all incentive grants generated from the competition are directly allocated to the corresponding schools for the construction of the school team, funds do not flow to individuals, specifically filling the resource gap of grassroots campus football. BYD's cooperation this time is to intervene in the implementation links of provincial divisional leagues and the national final, providing resource guarantees to build fair indoor and outdoor competitive stages for county-level high school teams.
Looking at the timeline of BYD's past youth football projects, this partnership with the Dongrun Cup belongs to the extension of the existing public welfare segment, not a new project starting from scratch.
Starting from 2024, BYD has cumulatively organized more than 200 instances of domestic youth football players going abroad, visiting multiple countries including Germany, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, and Japan, entering local top football club bases for training exchanges; at the same time, arranged for these domestic adolescents to watch the UEFA European Championship and World Cup international tournaments live. Among them was a campus football team from Ili, Xinjiang, which fully went to Japan to participate in overseas exchanges, while also completing football equipment and material donations.
In addition to the official youth visitation projects organized, BYD also mobilized the car owner volunteer network to participate in grassroots football public welfare. Guizhou Yuanbao Women's Football Team is a representative case among them. Car owner volunteers went to schools offline to conduct public welfare classes, completed sports material donations synchronously, and continuously followed up on the daily training of the mountain women's football team. Previously, relevant projects of BYD youth football had cooperation partners including "Little Chinese Footballers" and "Auditioning the Future", with assistance covering county-level campuses and private youth clubs in many places such as Ili, Xinjiang; Ningshan, Shaanxi; Xingren, Pu'an, Yuanbao, Guizhou.
Changes here can be seen before and after: Early projects were more inclined towards "elite elevation", selecting a batch of youth with sports foundations to send out to see the world and compete with overseas echelons; while this Dongrun Cup cooperation shifted focus to a wider group of ordinary high school students. In other words, BYD's youth football thinking no longer only focuses on the few talented players with opportunities to go towards professionalization paths, taking into account both overseas horizon enhancement for elite prospects and popularizing campus football for ordinary in-school students. Part of the youth go out to experience international stages; ordinary high school students staying in county high schools in China can also have formal provincial and national campus leagues.
Enterprises doing football public welfare easily fall into a misconception: prioritizing resources to focus on the few talented players favored for traffic value, which looks good in traffic volume, but has limited effect on improving the overall campus football soil. County-level high schools are exactly the most important foundation of China's football population. A large number of ordinary high school students play football not to become professional players, the value of playing football lies in physical exercise and teamwork, implementing the core of integration of sports and education. Kong Dongmei's statement at the signing scene also mentioned that the goal of the Dongrun Cup is not limited to selecting competitive talent, but also attaches importance to the role of football in shaping adolescent personalities.
Li Yunfei mentioned a sentence at the signing scene: "We cannot play on the field for them, but we can bring them to the field." The core of this sentence is that the enterprise does not directly intervene in team training and selection. What the enterprise provides are external conditions: competition platforms, coach training resources, sports equipment. Ultimately, the main body playing on the field remains the students of various middle schools and grassroots coaches. BYD itself does not operate youth training clubs. All resources are sunk to the middle schools through Dongrun Public Welfare Foundation's existing county-level implementation network, relying on the foundation's original grassroots assistance system to complete implementation.
BYD's own public welfare segment is also not a short-term temporary project. As early as 2010, BYD established its own charitable foundation and continued to carry out education assistance, disaster relief, and related work; at the enterprise's 30th anniversary, BYD externally established a total of 3 billion yuan education charity fund. The project has been implemented in 127 universities nationwide, cumulatively rewarding and assisting more than 6,000 university students. In the past, the focus of public welfare was more on higher education, while this cooperation with Dongrun Public Welfare is extending public welfare resources downward to the sports education segment of county-level high schools.
On one side is the overseas market, using football powerhouse IPs like Manchester City, Inter, and Paris Saint-Germain, combined with large-scale events like the UEFA European Championship and Copa America, to assist the overseas dissemination of BYD Han, Tang, Seal and other new energy models, opening up overseas consumer cognition; on the other side, turning back to domestic, investing enterprise resources into the football fields of county towns middle schools. The two business lines are not conflicting. Overseas football marketing serves whole vehicle product overseas expansion; after the enterprise obtains operating revenue from the overseas market, it then takes part of the resources to flow back and nourish domestic local youth sports, forming a closed loop of commercial business and public welfare projects.
From the disclosed cooperation content, after this strategic cooperation is implemented, BYD's past overseas youth exchange projects will continue to run. A part of the prospects will continue to retain channels to go abroad and train with overseas clubs; the Dongrun Cup takes in off-campus players from county-level ordinary high schools, expanding the participation base of campus football. A path that balances elevation and popularization has taken shape: a few talented youth look outwards to see the world; more ordinary county-level high school students have a national football event stage right at their doorstep.
