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Britain's Prince William said here on Monday that he likes to see more Chinese players in action in the English Premier League (EPL).


During Monday's meeting with President Xi Jinping nike air force 1 saldi , William asked about Xi's interest in football and said he hoped to see more Chinese play in the English first-flight league.


Chinese first landed on EPL in 2002 when Sun Jihai joined Manchester City and Li Tie, now a Chinese national team coach, made it to Everton. They were followed by Dong Fangzhuo and Zheng Zhi, current China captain.


Xi, an avid fan of football, told William that China would like to learn the game from world top teams including England.


China has taken steps to raise its depth and strength in the world's most popular game, including a bold move by the Ministry of Education which has named football a compulsory part of the national curriculum.


China's central reform group, chaired by Xi, approved a sweeping football reform plan last Friday.


The Chinese president said China had cooperated with Britain in football in different ways, including a cooperation deal signed in 2013 between the Chinese Super League and EPL


Xi added that he expected William to continue to promote sports exchange and cooperation between the two countries.


NICOSIA, Feb. 4 (Xinhua) -- A slack recovery in the property market kept property prices down in the fourth quarter of 2014, according to a survey published on Wednesday.


The survey by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) said that while property prices in much of the bailed out eastern Mediterranean island seemed to be bottoming off, they fell more in the capital Nicosia than in other areas.


The end result was a small fall in the fourth quarter and a drop of 8.1 percent at the end of 2014 on a year-on-year basis.


The drop in the third quarter stood at 9.6 percent.


Cyprus' property market slump started in 2009, marking the bursting of an estate bubble created by cheap credit and high foreign demand, mostly by English pensioners and other Europeans after the island's accession to the European Union in 2004.


A subsequent credit squeeze drove demand down as Cyprus was bailed out by the Eurogroup and the International Monetary Fund with a 10-billion-euro loan in 2013 for a three year period.


The bailout was conditional on a restructuring of the banks, which were left with bad loans amounting to 50 percent of the total, mostly secured with devalued estates.


The demise of the banking system is considered by analysts to be more serious than that of the administration, which seems to be doing well in slashing public expenses and securing increased revenue.


The property survey said prices in coastal towns fell much less than in Nicosia, which is the seat of the government. The city lies almost in the middle of the island and does not offer seaside attractions to foreign buyers.


The greatest evolutionary change in professional sports over the past decade has been the introduction of analytics.


In a nutshell, this concept refers to the use of anti-traditional, hyper-specific statistical analyses to build teams and compensate players in a statistically rational manner.


Once upon a time, the field of sports analytics was considered a fringe endeavor. In 1977, a man named Bill James was viewed as a kook who self-published a quirky journal and sold it to a small, loyal, equally kooky group of subscribers.


Today, James works for the Boston Red Sox, a team that has won three World Series titles since 2003. Before the Red Sox hired James, the team had gone 86 years without winning MLB's ultimate prize.


Not surprisingly, James' protégées currently permeate baseball's front offices. Most famously, former Red Sox GM Theo Epstein has recently been charged with the Herculean task of helping the hapless Chicago Cubs (0 for 106 years and counting) win the World Series.


Even more impressive is the impact James' research has had on other sports. Professional football and basketball, specifically, have begun to follow baseball's lead, albeit reluctantly.


Innovative omelets aren't made without breaking more than a few philosophically entrenched eggs. Old school baseball scouts have - both figuratively and literally - spit tobacco onto the concept of Moneyball.


And NBA analyst Charles Barkley, whose bombastic delivery belies his thoughtful rhetorical mind-set, had this to say, "I've always believed analytics was crap."


While Barkley usually contributes a voice of reason to ridiculous public debates, he's probably wrong in this case.


Last week, the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference gave the San Antonio Spurs an award for essentially using analytics to win two of the past three NBA championships. (For whatever it's worth, effective free throw shooting would have made that number three-for-three.)