Drawn by such hopes, parents pay up to about $8,700 a year to send children here, where 24 Spanish coaches oversee training. Students spend 90 minutes a day on drills and also play on weekends. Promising players get scholarships, and children from poorer families get discounts, school officials said.

But even here, the children come to the game later than their European and South American counterparts, and they often lack solid grounding in teamwork and tactics, said Sergio Zarco Diaz, a Spanish coach.

“The kids are getting better, year by year,” he said hopefully.

But the Evergrande approach is too expensive to be widely copied.

Some schools, facing a shortage of coaches and space for fields, have devised their own drills, like soccer gymnastics, in which children stand in lines tossing a ball up, down and around. It may impress visiting officials, but it is scant preparation for the free flow of the game, said Zhang Lu, a widely respected soccer commentator.

“Chinese soccer has failed before through rushing for instant success,” Mr. Zhang said in an interview in Beijing, recalling previous failed efforts to build up the game in the 1980s and 1990s. “The problem is that everyone’s thinking is still deeply set in traditional ideas. Everyone thinks soccer is just about getting results, competition, training, creating stars.”

Mr. Zhang has instead been encouraging schools to focus on fun and broad participation. That approach gives more children a break from the monotony of the classroom and will eventually bring out more future champions than an elitist, top-down approach, he argues.

Some schools are trying his way. On a recent afternoon, the smog that often covers Beijing lifted and the children of Caoqiao Elementary School rushed onto the fields, shouting and squealing with delight.

“This morning soccer had been canceled because of the smog,” said the principal, Lin Yanling. “But at midday I notified the kids that it was back on, and they all went crazy with relief.”