Chapter 42. China's Electronic Footballer of the Year: FIFA Champion Li Jun, SkylinE

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 四十二 中国电子足球先生 FIFA冠军 李君

First published in the author's Zhihu column on July 14, 2016: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/21482568

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 1, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

Li Jun's public title these days is vice president of Banana Gaming, the company owned by Wang Sicong. He has run the organisation and operation of the LPL and other competitions for five years. He was also the first head of L.ACE, the League of Legends professional club alliance, and personally drafted its charter and regulations, laying the foundations for professional League of Legends competition in China.

What many people do not know is that he holds another title: China's Electronic Footballer of the Year, champion of the FIFA event at the WCG 2003 China national final, and a member of China's WCG world final squads several times.

All of that came later. At the beginning he was simply a football-mad boy who wanted to be a programmer.

Li Jun was born on November 13, 1982, into a working-class family in Zhengzhou, Henan.

His father was a devoted football fan who took the young Li Jun out to kick a ball in the yard behind their home whenever he was free. His mother was good at reasoning with him, and taught him to make plans and organise his time. Under their influence Li Jun did better than average at school, loved playing football, only touched a games console during the summer holidays, and was a thoroughly well-behaved boy.

Then in 1996 his family spent more than ten thousand yuan on a computer for him. (Does that plot sound familiar?)

By then Li Jun loved electronics and had a keen interest in programming. While teaching himself to write code from the newspapers, he came across a football game called FIFA 96, and it happened to be installed at the computer room he often visited, an early form of the internet café.

And with that, the story of an electronics enthusiast growing into a Scorpio programmer came to an end.

The road to electronic football begins

Li Jun copied FIFA 96 home and played against the computer every day, drilling his controls. Before long, beating the computer was no longer enough. Without any English, he worked out how to play two players on one machine, and brought children from the housing compound over to play him, one on the mouse and one on the keyboard.

A childhood spent watching and playing football had given Li Jun a firm grasp of formations, tactics and moves such as the one-two, so it was not long before nobody in the compound could beat him. He went looking for the boys he used to play football with, and still nobody could beat him.

You love what you are good at.

Li Jun realised how much he enjoyed football games, because there was no longer anyone around him who could win.

In 2000, in his final year of secondary school, his family had a 56K connection installed, and he began looking for opponents online. Then two things happened that he has never forgotten.

FIFA enthusiasts in those days gathered on Sina's football forum, arranging matches with one another and connecting by IP address to test their skills.

That was how he came across Crazy, Deng Rong, the FIFA champion of Shanghai. After a good deal of effort he arranged a game of FIFA 2001 against him.

The result was 10 to 0, with Li Jun never getting a foothold.

Li Jun says he still remembers that match, and that his opponent played a 3-4-3. He ground his teeth in fury, but he was not angry at the other man. He had suddenly realised how far behind he was, and accepted the defeat completely.

The second thing was his discovery that the best players in Beijing and Shanghai played nothing like him.

Li Jun's approach had been simple, and modelled on real football: work the one-twos, pass, carry the ball inside, shoot.

The top FIFA players in the big cities did not play that way. Through constant testing and experiment they had worked out that from certain positions, at certain angles, with a certain amount of power, the ball would go in every time.

Most important of all, Li Jun found that the best players around the country formed a closed little circle. They gathered to discuss the techniques they had discovered, and never revealed any of it outside a major tournament.

It was as though someone had quietly located the fatal pressure points on the human body. You could spar with him until you were exhausted without so much as touching him, while one move from him would finish you.

These were advanced techniques that came only from taking the game apart completely. It dawned on Li Jun that this was what the world actually looked like.

He understood now, but the techniques still had to be worked out for himself, and one person plainly was not enough. He needed to create an atmosphere around him, with a group of clever people researching together.

So in 2001, having been admitted to Henan Agricultural University, Li Jun recruited his class monitor, who knew how to build web pages, and set up the first Henan FIFA Alliance website, modelled on the ones in Beijing and Shanghai. Many people came because they had heard of it, and a few became friends for life.

That same year, Li Jun learned from a news report about the WCG, and about the Chinese players Lin Xiaogang and Yan Bo winning the FIFA doubles title at WCG 2001 in South Korea. He saw the pictures of them on the podium draped in the national flag, and read that they had won US$20,000.

Li Jun says that playing games could bring glory to your country, and there was prize money too. How could he not train like a madman? He set himself a goal at once: to compete at WCG 2002.

Excited as he was, Li Jun kept a clear head. He knew he had never played an offline tournament, so this year would be about gathering experience.

When FIFA 2002 came out he drew up a complete plan and trained specifically for the event. As the tournament approached, the first item in the plan was to steal 300 yuan from his father. Zhengzhou had no regional qualifier, and he had worked out that the nearest one he could reach was Xi'an, which meant covering at least three or four days of food and lodging.

Li Jun says it was the first time he had gone to an unfamiliar city on his own, and the first time he had played offline.

In his first match, when the referee said begin, he could barely breathe, and the muscles in his face would not stop twitching.

Li Jun says the pressure that day was enormous. If he had lost that first match, none of what followed might have happened.

In the end he finished second in the Xi'an regional. First place went to a semi-professional player who had come up from Guangdong to take a qualifying spot, and both of them earned a place at the national final in Beijing.

Worth mentioning: at the Xi'an regional, Li Jun ran into a fellow Henan native, SKY, who was still playing StarCraft then. SKY's moment clearly had not yet arrived. He lost in the group stage and was so distraught that he nearly threw himself off the second floor of the internet café. That is another story, and readers can find it in the chapter "When Li Xiaofeng Became Sky".

Back to the main thread. Li Jun did reach Beijing and the WCG 2002 China national final, but he knew his tournament experience was thin and the gap between him and the country's best was wide. This WCG was about seeing the world, so when he went out in the quarter-finals he was not surprised.

Li Jun says the champion that year was Chen Di from the Beijing regional. Watching the tall, good-looking Chen Di stand up on the podium, he was sick with envy down below.

The biggest lesson Li Jun took away from WCG 2002 was this: the game could not be won on execution alone. He needed to work out stronger techniques, techniques that nobody else knew.

FIFA had one distinctive feature, though. It received a large-scale version update every year.

Unlike other games, where a new version meant a patch, a new FIFA changed everything except the fact that it was about football. The engine, the systems, the scoring techniques, all of it amounted to a new game, which meant the knowledge you had built up last year was worthless this year. With every version, everyone started from the same line.

That is how Li Jun acquired the habit of starting again from zero every time.

In 2003, FIFA released a new generation of its engine and the exploration began afresh. Players in Shanghai, Hunan and Guangdong found their way in quickly and became the strongest regions. All of those places were on China Telecom lines, while Henan was on China Netcom, so in order to train with the best players Li Jun had to do everything he could to find internet cafés in Zhengzhou running on Telecom lines.

In an age of few games websites and slow newspaper guides, getting information first was difficult. Fortunately he had the players of the Henan FIFA Alliance, and everyone was racing against the clock to research the new version.

Li Jun did the same. Every day he tested every position on the pitch, every formation and every degree of power to see what it did to his scoring. He was even hunting for that crucial tactic in his sleep.

Remarkably, it was in a dream that he noticed the positions of several scoring spots seemed to follow a pattern. So he took a pair of compasses, put the point on the goal, and joined those spots up.

Then he woke, and it was excitement that woke him.

When he actually drew that semicircle with a pair of compasses, he found that a shot from any point along the arc had a very high chance of going in.

A door to a new world had opened.

Li Jun was not content with that. Different players had different attributes, so he kept trying every kind of player, every amount of power and every angle, which came to hundreds of permutations. He practised obsessively until he had mastered every possibility.

Once he had worked it out, he did not show it off to outsiders. He stuck to the plan and hid the technique away, going to the internet café to train every weekend as though nothing had happened, without leaving a trace.

Li Jun says there was nothing else for it. Every player was saving his best move, designing his routines, as people would put it now, and waiting to use them in the WCG final.

In 2003, because of SARS, the WCG qualifiers were played online. To be certain his connection would hold, Li Jun risked his health travelling to a friend's home in Baoji to make his preparations. It went smoothly and he took the Xi'an regional title.

The Li Jun of that year was no longer the newcomer who had lost 10 to 0. He was among the top three on the national FIFA websites, and full of ambition.

At the WCG China national final in Beijing, Li Jun met Chen Di in the semi-finals. A year earlier, in the same arena, the sight of a tall and handsome Chen Di collecting his trophy had felt out of reach, and now, in the blink of an eye, the defending champion was his opponent.

The organisers attached a great deal of importance to this match, or rather to Chen Di, and put it on the main stage.

What Li Jun says weighed on him even more was that Beijing was Chen Di's home ground. Almost nobody in the crowd knew him, and all of them were cheering for Chen Di. There were no noise-cancelling headsets then, and the noise put him under enormous pressure. He understands it perfectly now, but at the time he played with a chest full of anger.

So the moment he finally beat Chen Di, he slammed the controller down. It felt wonderful to get it out of his system.

He went on to take the title comfortably, with 30,000 yuan in prize money and a computer worth another 30,000. He peeled the sticker off the oversized cheque he was handed at the ceremony, rolled it up and tucked it into his bag, planning to take it home and put it on the wall. A memory for life.

He did not even make it home before he was frightened half to death.

The moment he stepped off the train, he saw an enormous banner that read:

A warm welcome to Li Jun, head of the Henan FIFA Alliance, WCG FIFA champion!

The people from Shangdu Information Port, the local portal site, had come to the station to meet him.

After that, the Zhengzhou Evening News and other local media gave his title extensive coverage, and relatives and friends came round to congratulate the family. The whole thing felt like a dream.

Li Jun was 21 that year. He says the win gave him confidence, and even overconfidence. He arrived at the world final in South Korea in high spirits and set on the title, forgetting that he was still a newcomer with no experience of international competition at all.

But a tournament at that level is won on major event experience and prepared routines.

Li Jun was outplayed. He was knocked out in the semi-finals by a German player, and midway through the match he suddenly found that none of his moves worked any more, as though his opponent had studied him inside out. He panicked.

One thing here is worth spelling out. That German player went on to win the title, and the runner-up was German too, a twin brother of the champion. They looked so alike that identity documents were of no use in telling them apart.

Li Jun realised later that the younger twin who had been sitting behind him in the practice room that day may not have been the younger twin his documents said he was.

A loss is a loss, of course, and Li Jun paid the price for his youthful arrogance and carelessness. He burst into tears as he walked out of the arena, and then noticed that someone else beside him was crying too. It was Volcano, the South Korean player who had just been knocked out by the younger German twin. Fellow sufferers indeed. The boy was crying even harder than he was, so Li Jun went over and spent a long while comforting him in awkward, simple English.

Li Jun says nobody could have guessed at the time that a year later this Korean boy, the one crying harder than he was, would win the WCG 2004 world title, retire immediately afterwards and disappear into the crowd.

For all its regrets, 2003 was a glorious year for Li Jun. He won every FIFA tournament in the country and earned more than 200,000 yuan, the money he later used to buy a flat.

The most important thing that happened that year, though, was a telephone call, one that may have changed his life.

At the end of 2003, Li Jun took a call from someone who introduced himself as Lion.KinG.

Baffled, he asked who Lion.KinG was.

The man said his name was Pei Le.

Li Jun was more confused than ever. Peile? The name sounds exactly like the Chinese for taking a loss. Who would be called that? Then he asked what the man wanted.

Pei Le, KinG, said he was building a professional team in Beijing and wanted Li Jun to play professionally.

Li Jun had no idea what he meant. The FIFA circle in Henan was small and closed, and he had never given a thought to the professionalisation of esports, so he asked what playing professionally meant.

KinG: it means we pay you a salary to play in tournaments, and all you have to do is carry our team tag.

Li Jun almost called the police on the spot, convinced he had run into a con man. How could anything be that good?

So he told Pei Le: write down what you have just said, put an official seal on it and send it to me.

KinG: ...

And so Li Jun came to Beijing and joined the newly founded YolinY club, the forerunner of WE. Its players at the time included Su Hao and SKY in Warcraft III, and CQ2000 and Ma Tianyuan in StarCraft.

Everything seemed to be moving in the right direction.

In November 2003, esports became an official national sport, and the FIFA discipline was practically the favourite child of Esports World, the CCTV5 programme. Li Jun's experience of major FIFA tournaments kept growing, his name kept spreading, and he had joined the strongest professional club of the day.

In 2004, at a China, South Korea and Germany FIFA challenge match, at the height of the era when Chinese football genuinely feared playing South Korea, Li Jun beat his Korean opponent 12 to 0. The media covered it heavily, under headlines such as "Chinese dragon crushes the Taegeuk tiger".

Li Jun says that was probably the peak of his professional career.

Because what came next, later in 2004, was probably the darkest moment in the history of Chinese esports.

On April 12, SARFT issued its ban on the broadcast of games programmes, took Esports World off the air, and threw the ambitious plans for the CEG league into disarray.

Li Jun watched it happen. With no broadcast outlet left, the great ship CEG, carrying the YolinY club that was by then the CEG Shaanxi representative team, was slowly going down.

FIFA had always been a niche discipline in China, and after Warcraft III rose, FIFA events grew scarcer and scarcer. All that was left, Li Jun thought to himself, was the WCG.

The thought turned out to be prophetic.

The WCG 2004 world final was in San Francisco. Li Jun qualified without difficulty, but ran into the tightened visa policy that followed the September 11 attacks in the United States, and the entire Chinese delegation was refused.

Suddenly there were no tournaments left to play, and every plan Li Jun had made fell apart.

At the end of 2004, Li Jun, who had always planned everything carefully, could not sit still. He could not accept that kind of aimless waiting, and after a serious conversation with Pei Le he decided to go out and try something new.

In 2005, after half a year of moving around and making a living wherever he could, Li Jun met Yaomo, Zhang Zhexi, at the WCG world final in Singapore. Yaomo was there as the director of the GamesTV channel's first live Chinese video broadcast of the WCG, and he was a passionate football gamer as well. The two got on well, and after returning to China Li Jun was invited to join GamesTV, the forerunner of Youxi Fengyun, as a television programme director.

Looking back now at the FIFA discipline in the years that followed, German players won the title repeatedly after 2004, while China never reached the top.

Li Jun puts that down to the sheer number of tournaments in Europe: the ESL FIFA league, the IEM league, and above all FIWC, the FIFA Interactive World Cup, run jointly by EA and FIFA, whose world champion each year gets to meet the FIFA World Player of the Year, players like Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

On top of that, network speeds across Europe were extremely fast. Even Italy, the slowest, had a ping of 34. FIFA is very demanding of the network, and the complicated state of the Chinese network made even domestic exchanges difficult.

As for competition, the WCG was almost the only FIFA tournament of any size left in China. Because of the content approval process, every new FIFA version reached China more than six months behind other countries. Later, as FIFA tilted towards consoles, EA simply gave up on a Chinese market where consoles were still banned, and even moved its tournaments to Hong Kong. Some people kept going to Hong Kong to compete, but it was a drop in the ocean, and it meant that FIFA in mainland China was cut off from its supply.

Li Jun says that even now, FIFA Online 3 is still running on the FIFA 2013 engine and cannot keep pace with the standalone versions. For all these reasons, Chinese FIFA enthusiasts have been left behind the times.

All of this leaves Li Jun deeply sorry, and helpless.

He says that this year, in order to play the forthcoming FIFA 17 and be able to practise with the best players abroad, he went to considerable trouble to apply for one of China Telecom's premium international lines. That service is no longer being sold, which means the channels for exchange may have narrowed again.

Back to the story. In October 2012, Li Jun, by then married with a child and running his own company in Zhengzhou, took another call from Pei Le, inviting him to come out of retirement. Wang Sicong had set up an esports alliance, and he wanted Li Jun to take charge of the League of Legends side.

Li Jun had no idea what he meant, and asked who Wang Sicong was.

KinG: ...

When Li Jun arrived in Shanghai to take over the League of Legends professional club alliance, he was facing something close to a blank sheet. The particular history of Chinese esports had produced a distinctive internet structure, and ways of working entirely unlike those inside the state system.

Around 2011, Chinese esports began to grow quickly, but no order had been established. Clubs lived under something close to the law of the dark forest, with nothing but suspicion between them and no rules at all. They grabbed resources at the slightest opportunity, played dirty tricks, and wasted a great deal of energy on infighting.

Li Jun proposed following the practice of FIFA, the international football federation, and drew up the alliance's various measures. The transfer window everyone is familiar with today, and the charters of the various competitions, were all drafted under his leadership.

The arrival of the alliance gave an esports scene that nobody had been governing a set of rules, but it also trod on a great many interests.

Li Jun once dealt with a club that had poached a player in breach of the rules, and received a telephone call from a gangster. The caller threatened not only his personal safety but also read out the address of his family in Zhengzhou, and told him to think about what he was going to do.

The episode affected Li Jun deeply. He had never imagined that his position and his work could put his family's safety at risk.

Li Jun says Chinese esports is genuinely unusual. There is no comparable case ahead of us to follow directly, just as every year brings a completely new FIFA game. Every step is breaking new ground. There are certainly plenty of things that are still not right, but we believe that as we accumulate experience through exploration, the process will get faster and better.

The 2016 LPL spring split was the first time Riot Games, Tencent and Banana Gaming ran the LPL together, and only someone who has organised an event can understand how complicated the communication and execution in between were.

The successful end of the spring split left Li Jun elated. The whole team had carried a great deal of pressure that year, and things were finally on track. But his years as a professional FIFA player have taught him that however glorious the past was, it is only a memory. Next year is always a new challenge and a new beginning.

Li Jun, SkylinE, China's Electronic Footballer of the Year and FIFA champion.