This is the amateur sports fan who has built a football pitch aquarium for his goldfish which he has trained in how to score goals for fun.
Yang Tianxin, 28, is a fan of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi despite not being an avid follower of football, he told Asia Wire.
The native of the city of Jieyang, which is in China’s southern province of Guangdong, also breeds goldfish as a pastime.
He became a trending topic on short-video sharing platform Tik Tok after a clip of his goldfish slowly nudging a football across a goal line was seen over 10 million times.
He and his family’s hobby now includes feeding his fish and watching as they get into goalmouth scrambles and inadvertently score while pushing the miniature football around the glass tank.
The oddly satisfying footage shows Mr Yang having painted an accurate pitch onto the base of his aquarium, which now looks more like a stadium.
Mr Yang and his fish tank 
Mr Yang’s football-playing fish
He said: “I converted my fish tank into a football pitch because I wasn’t satisfied with the aesthetics of the original one.”
The fish ‘teams’ swim past a perfectly drawn centre circle, as well as penalty areas and goal lines.
The aquarium’s grassy ‘pitch’ is made of moss, which his goldfish love to nibble at as they swim around aimlessly.
When asked how Mr Yang encourages his fish to nudge the football around, he said: “I arrange practise times for them. I then reward them with pellets.”
Mr Yang plays music to his fish from large speakers next to the glass tank.
In his garden, he is also keeping several large tanks of smaller goldfish he is breeding for fun.
He added: “I’m breeding fish as a hobby. I wanted to see how goldfish grow.
“I put a lot of time into researching breeding methods.”
On Tik Tok, Mr Yang’s football-playing goldfish continue to trend with hundreds of thousands of likes.
To find out more about the author, editor or agency that supplied this story – please click below.
Story By: John Feng, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Asia Wire Report
The Ananova page is created by and dedicated to professional, independent freelance journalists. It is a place for us to showcase our work. When our news is sold to our media partners, we will include the link here.
