When the final whistle sounded at Chengdu’s Airport International Conference Centre on 9 February, the strange new spectacle of drone football drew to a close. The East China representative from Weifang Wenhua School — a youth side nicknamed “Cai Jiu Duo Lian” (roughly, “Practice More”) — lifted the trophy amid coloured lights and the steady whir of propellers, sealing the inaugural Geely Holdings · Ablefly National Drone Football Championship.
The tournament, organised by the Chengdu municipal government and the Chinese Society of Aeronautics and hosted by local education and technology bodies, felt less like a one-off youth event than a demonstration of a city’s industrial and civic ambitions. Teams came from across the country; one of the more telling match-ups pitted an all-Chinese squad from the Sichuan Drone Academy — Chengdu Aviation School against a hybrid team from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) that included three Chinese students and three international students from Panama, Chad and Russia.
Training scenes in Chengdu’s flight-control laboratories were as striking as anything on the main stage. In late January, under the hum of rotating propellers, international students ran repeated flight tests, tactical simulations and hardware tweaks with local coaches. The cross-cultural detail was striking: teammates from four countries conducted complex tactical discussions entirely in Chinese, a practical sign of social integration and of the language’s role inside a local tech ecosystem.
On the competition floor the sport looked like an analogue esport: fast-moving first-person-view (FPV) drones darted around a netted goal, pilots’ screens mirroring every aerial twist. The UESTC–Chengdu squad advanced to the round of 64, while the Sichuan Drone Academy side reached the round of 32 — exits that left players disappointed but also visibly hardened. For many participants the tournament was less about immediate victory than about building “human–machine” fluency and gaining time in a nascent competitive circuit.
Chengdu’s embrace of drone football is part of a broader municipal strategy to fuse “technology + sport.” Local authorities and corporate partners such as Geely have tried to build the full value chain for the discipline: policy support, training facilities, talent pipelines and commercial tie‑ups. That comprehensive backing helps explain why teams could access lab-grade flight controllers and sustained winter training, and why an event modest in scale nevertheless attracts attention as an example of institutionalised tech-sport development.
The broader significance extends beyond trophies. Drone football is an emblem of next‑generation recreational technology: it sits at the intersection of consumer drone manufacturing, software engineering, education and city branding. For Chengdu the tournament served as a showcase of civic capability — a way to project an image of a modern, innovation-friendly city that can host international students, nurture specialised skills and seed new industries. For global observers the event suggests where talent, capital and civic ambition are converging in China, and it raises familiar questions about standardisation, safety and dual‑use technologies as recreational drone activity scales up.