Yuan Yung-cheng (袁永誠) first made up his mind to become a professional soccer player when he was 10 years old.

On May 27, 2021, that determination turned into reality when Yuan, who was 18 years old at the time, signed a two-year contract with Racing Rioja CF, a pro club in Spain’s Segunda Federacion.

The Segunda Federacion sits two levels below the two top Spanish leagues – La Liga and the Segunda Division – but Yuan has set the goal of playing in the vaunted La Liga within three years.

Just becoming Taiwan’s first home-grown player to get signed to a pro soccer club in Spain was a significant feat, especially given Taiwan’s lack of proficiency in the sport. How did he get there?

To learn, go where resources exist

Soccer was not the first sport Yuan was exposed to. He suffered from allergies from the time he was born, and he took up swimming at a young age on the recommendation of a doctor to develop stamina and improve his physical fitness.

When he started at Shuangfeng Elementary School in New Taipei City, a school known for being surrounded by forests and for its ecological bent and experimental approach to education, Yuan joined the soccer club.

His father Yuan Ching-kuo (袁慶國), a veteran cinematographer and a board director of the Taiwan-based Chinese Society of Cinematographers, said his son was a gamer even in elementary school, and because of him, the school decided to hire a coach and turn the soccer club into a real team. 

At the time, the young Yuan was seen as a soccer star in Taipei, and students would enroll in the school simply because of him. When he entered fifth grade, his interest in soccer intensified and he got in touch with well-known soccer commentator and enthusiast Max Shih (石明謹) to ask him for advice and get the scoop on mastering the 11-man game.

“When he came to see me, I was really surprised, wondering why this 10-year-old kid knew who I was,” said Shih recently, the visit still fresh in his memory. 

Soccer has five-player, eight-player, and 11-player formats, with the 11-player game the sport’s mainstream set-up. Taiwan, however, does not have any sports academies that offer training in this mainstream discipline. Physical fitness curriculums practice different competition formats, making it hard to nurture talented players.

Given this challenging learning environment, Shih was determined to go where better resources existed, a key building block in fulfilling his dream.

Shih encouraged Yuan to try his luck in China, and he received a full scholarship from the R&F Chelsea Soccer School in Guangdong province. After graduating from elementary school, he headed west by himself at the age of 12.

Yuan spent three years in Guangdong, learning, training, and playing matches, and his gift for the game became apparent. Just before he went to high school, he faced a difficult choice. The school in China encouraged him to take Chinese nationality and get specialized training.

Yuan’s dream, however, had him leading Taiwan’s national team into the World Cup. Little did he know at the time that Taiwan’s men’s team had never qualified for a World Cup, but making the national team was still his goal. After thinking about it, he rejected the idea of changing nationalities, which in practice meant giving up further opportunities to develop his game in China. 

Shih then tried to steer him toward Japan, but Yuan believed in “going to the best place possible.” In his mind, that was Spain, known as the soccer power with the strongest youth program in the world, and it didn’t hurt that Spain was where Yuan’s idol Lionel Messi gained fame.

Dealing with loneliness, forced to grow up

(Source: Yuan Yung-cheng)

Flying off to Spain at the age of 15 in early 2018 was harder for Yuan than heading to China. Aside from losing the comfort of having family nearby, he also faced a language barrier and training costs of NT$1 million a year.
 
Yuan Ching-kuo fully supported his son, spending NT$1.8 million a year and mortgaging his home, but Yuan Yung-cheng faced obstacles that money could not overcome: loneliness and wavering self-confidence.

“On the first day, I felt [my level] is very ordinary,” said Yuan Yung-cheng in an interview with CommonWealth Magazine, speaking on his first day in the community school he attended when he first arrived in Spain. His high self-esteem quickly evaporated into a loss of confidence. 

The height, physicality and skills of European players were far superior to those possessed by players of his same age in Taiwan and China, and left Yuan, listed at 1.70 meters tall and 60 kilograms, feeling he had no inherent advantages over others.

While attending school, he played for a local club called Alcobendas. As a rare Asian playing in Spain, he found himself ostracized by his teammates, to the point that none of them passed him the ball in a practice or spoke to him for five days.

And when his coach announced after a practice that the next day would be a rest day, nobody translated the message for Yuan, who did not understand Spanish. He showed up for practice and waited until dark before realizing it had been canceled, and ended up taking the hour-long bus ride back to the dorm in silence.

Yuan said he was willing to deal with loneliness to achieve his dream, but actually having to live through it still hurt. Rather than complaining to his parents, he called Shih, sobbing as he vented his frustrations. 

“A 15-year-old child being ostracized at school. What could he do?” recalled Shih.

Despite the hardships, living alone was also a chance to grow. In Spain, when he was training with the Youth C team of La Liga team Getafe FC, the broker that helped arrange his overseas training program went bust, invalidating his documents and pushing him to the verge of illegal alien status. 

His visa situation was eventually resolved, but the experience forced him to grow up and steeled his resolve to play professionally to prove he could make it on his own.

The answer to his woes was simple: “be stronger.” Only by making it impossible for teammates to ignore him or keep the ball from him and performing well enough to draw the attention of scouts would he have the chance to hold his head high again.

Staying disciplined, working hard every day

Yuan remained incredibly disciplined, training more than 10 hours a week and playing matches on weekends, giving himself little time to catch his breath. His training routine was extremely taxing. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Spain in March 2020, the country closed down, and Yuan returned to Taiwan to train on his own and later joined the Taiwan Steel football club. Despite working out with the club for the better part of six months, he only played one match. The stint opened his eyes to the fact that he was not afraid of working hard, but “was very afraid of hardship without reward.” If he wanted to get stronger, discipline was essential, and he drew inspiration from NBA legend Kobe Bryant.

“Kobe said getting up early could steel your will, so I changed when I trained from the afternoon to 5 in the morning,” Yuan said.

By having the courage to leave Taiwan and developing training professionally in China and Spain and building the skills needed to compete, Yuan finally got himself noticed.

(Source: Yuan Yung-cheng)

In November 2020, he made the youth side of Segunda Federacion club UP Langreo and gained match experience. Two months later, he was invited to join the Youth A side of Paterna FC, a club in Valencia, Spain’s third-largest city, that plays in the sixth-tier Regional Preferente. He positioned himself to get a lucrative contract with the parent club if he performed well.

But his big step was the move to Racing Rioja CF. Created in 2018, the club has steadily risen up the Spanish soccer ranks, starting in the Regional Preferente league, then gaining promotion to the Tercera Division (Third Division) in 2020-2021 and to the Segunda Federacion the following year. The last move represented a seismic shift for the club, going from amateur to professional status.

Before the end of the 2020-2021 season, Racing Rioja CF invited Yuan for a tryout, and within five days signed him to a two-year contract. It had been following Yuan’s progress for well over a year before taking him on.

Yuan cried when he got the news, seeing the contract as nothing short of a miracle.

Since then, however, he has had a hard time getting on the field. He played for the Racing Rioja B team in the 2021-2022 season, and then in September 2022, he decided to leave Racing Rioja and join UD Gran Tarajal, a third division team in the Canary Islands. 

“The main consideration was playing time. At UD Gran Tarajal, there will be more of a chance to show what I can do. To get closer to the goal of playing in La Liga, you have to amass real match experience, but good performances will be noticed,’ he was quoted as saying by local media Nownews. 

Acknowledging that his size is a disadvantage, he has done weight training to strengthen himself and worked on improving his skills, especially dribbling and shooting with his left foot, to make up for his lack of size, he said in the Nownews conversation.

Unfortunately for Yuan, his new team is floundering in the standings, remaining just above the relegation slots, and the Taiwanese has seen little match action during the club’s first 14 games of the season.

How long Yuan will continue to have opportunities to prove himself in Spain remains to be seen. Based on more recent events, the young Yuan, who turned 20 on Nov. 12, 2022, still struggles to make his mark.

Having already come as far as he has could be considered miraculous, but now the focus is on getting experience and moving up the professional ladder in Spain’s soccer world. Taiwan will be watching.

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Translated by Luke Sabatier
Uploaded by Ian Huang