Football museums of China and UK announce partnership

Photo taken on Oct. 23, 2015 shows the certificate which honored Linzi as the cradle of the earlist form of football by FIFA. [Zhu Zheng/Xinhua]

China's Linzi Football Museum announced a partnership with the National Football Museum in Manchester, England on Friday.

The two museums would work together to promote their shared objectives of communicating football culture to a world-wide audience.

The partnership was initially suggested by the British side and was met with an enthusiastic response from the Chinese side. Over the following months, the two museums would cooperate on special projects, cultural communications and learning agendas.

"We are delighted to be working more closely with the Linzi Football Museum. We have always acknowledged that China was the birthplace of football and we very much look forward to sharing our knowledge to benefit both organizations and their respective audiences," said Dr Kevin Moore, Director of the National Football Museum.

Cuju, the ancient form of modern football game, was a very popular game in China's Spring and Autumn Period (770 BC - 476 BC) in Linzi, the capital of the Qi State (479 AD-502 AD), with a history of more than 2,300 years. The city's Linzi district, the birth place of Cuju, has been officially recognized by FIFA in 2004 as the origin of football.

"England is the home of Association football and this marks a new era for exchange between eastern and western football cultures; a chance to share the game's amazing ancient and modern history with even more people," said Ma Guoqing, director of the Linzi Football Museum.

The National Football Museum was built in Preston in 2001, and was relocated in Manchester in 2012. It looks after a collection of over 140,000 items on the history of Association football, including the FIFA Collection. Its mission is to explain how and why football became "the people's game and why England is the home of Association football, the world's most popular sport.

The partnership between the museums would include the exchange of special items and organization of new exhibitions as well as academic and research exchanges and learning projects that would bring together kids in China and England.

The National Football Museum would give Linzi Football Museum an ancient football of Victorian Times as a gift, according to Ma.