THE Godfather of Gold Coast rugby league is on a mission to wake the sleeping dragon.

And we’re not talking St George Illawarra.

Paul Broughton, co-founder of the Gold Coast Titans, is launching an ambitious project to unearth the next NRL superstar — in China.

As Australia braces for a raid from America’s NFL in the wake of Jarryd Hayne’s amazing arrival at the San Francisco 49ers, Broughton believes our own talent scouts can also head overseas to find untapped potential.

Broughton will next month head to the country of 1.3 billion people to headhunt athletes to bring back to the NRL.

He said he already had NRL clubs ready to take on the Chinese athletes as project players, possibly as soon as next year.

“Whether they are sprinters, or wrestlers, or rugby players or village farm boys doesn’t matter,” Broughton said. If we see something special in them, that could be enough. It only takes one player to get the ball rolling and in a country of 1.3 billion people, anything is possible.”

Under the plan, players would spend up to two years training in the professional environment of an NRL franchise before either kicking on, or taking their skills back to form part of a Chinese national program.

Broughton has founded the China Australia Sports Exchange (CASE) and will launch the project in Shanghai next month.

A nationwide search will then take place to hand-pick Chinese athletes who could potentially succeed in a Hayne-style code switch to rugby league.

He hopes to bring a handful of players back to Australian clubs within six months.

media_camera If Jarryd Hayne can switch to NFL, can the NRL find a new star in China?

The ambitious plan is not without precedent.

Disney movie Million Dollar Arm is based on the story of American sports agent JB Bernstein, who held a reality television competition in India to unearth baseball pitchers.

That ultimately led to two players being signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates in the Major Leagues. It is that sort of potential that excites Broughton, a league icon who coached Balmain and Newtown in the old NSWRL.

Griffith University’s Gold Coast Confucious Club has also been involved in the project, undertaking the painstaking task of translating the CASE vision in to Mandarin.

Showing just how foreign the concept is to Chinese, there is no term for rugby league in Mandarin.

However, Broughton hopes to capitalise on the growing popularity of football codes in China.

Rugby union has a profile courtesy of the Hong Kong Sevens, while significantly, the national army has also launched its own rugby program.

It is expected money will be poured into rugby in a bid to have the national team qualify for the 2019 World Cup, to be held in nearby Japan.

Broughton hopes to trump that by convincing officials to hold an Auckland Nines-style league tournament in Shanghai a year before union’s Asian showpiece.

He has already held talks with the NRL about the plan. While he hopes to secure funding to help finance the venture, he is prepared to forge ahead regardless.

“Will it be easy? Heck no,” he said.

“Otherwise it would have been done before. But it will only take one player to make it and then it could really open the floodgates. Can you imagine it?”