China's dream of becoming a football superpower lies in tatters
Chinese defenders were probably hoping for the sweet relief of the final
whistle with one minute remaining and a 6-0 deficit against Japan.
Takefusa Kubo of Japan, however, was not feeling philanthropic. After a while
of watching his teammates play with their opponents, he was given a pass on the
Chinese box's edge and scored Japan's eighth goal.
The man nicknamed as "Japanese Messi" sent China to their worst-ever
World Cup qualifying loss when the ball smashed into the net's roof.
After a year of
humiliating losses, including to Oman, Uzbekistan, and Hong Kong, the 7-0
thrashing in September was dubbed "rock-bottom" by a Shanghai-based
tabloid.
But things were going to become worse.
As part of a two-year investigation into corruption in the domestic game,
scores of players, coaches, and officials were arrested a week later on charges
of gambling, match-fixing, and bribery.
And the losses have persisted. Australia's 2-0 victory over China in Hangzhou
on Tuesday solidified their place at the bottom of their World Cup
qualification group.
China had aspirations of becoming a footballing superpower not long ago.
The largest
population in the world, a flourishing economy, and a resolute Communist Party
under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, a passionate football fan. What
might go wrong?
Apparently, a good deal.
Xi Jinping's three wishes
His passion for the
game fuelled a push to reform and enhance Chinese football when Xi took office
in 2012. He once declared that he hoped China would qualify for, host, and
eventually win the World Cup. His "three wishes" were as follows.
However, even Xi appeared to have lost trust ten years later. The Chinese
president was overheard remarking that China had "got lucky" in a
recent triumph over Thailand while chit-chatting with Thailand's prime minister
during an international summit in 2023.
According to
Beijing-based sports writer Mark Dreyer, "China's government very rarely
fails when it sets its mind to something." "Take a look at the
Olympics and electric cars. China is at the top of almost every industry you
can imagine.
However, it appears that football was unable to flourish under the Communist
Party's control.
The Chinese Football Association (CFA) needs "legal autonomy" and
should be "independent" of the General Administration of Sport (GAS),
according to a significant government assessment from 2015.
Even Xi acknowledged
that the Party would need to let go, something it rarely does, if China wished
to prosper.
Beijing, however, refused to let go.
According to Rowan Simons, author of Bamboo Goalposts: One Man's Quest to Teach
the People's Republic of China to Love Football, "China's failure in
football has become a national embarrassment and figuring out the reasons has
become a national obsession," with the BBC.
"But to me, the reasons are pretty clear and they tell you a lot about how
the country is run."
He and others
contend that the issue is that top-down decisions are enforced by China's
one-party regime. This works well for economic expansion, but it doesn't work
well for competitive team sports.
Despite FIFA's ban on state meddling, political appointments are common in
Chinese football. In China, where the Party controls the majority of facets of
public life, this is typical.
Song Cai, the CFA's current president, is a Communist Party deputy secretary.
At the GAS, a senior government official in turn supervises his activities.
"Everything
must be reported to the leaders of the Communist Party. "It basically
means that football decisions are being made by non-football people," Mr.
Dreyer explains. "Football must be led at the grassroots level. The talent
begins to flow up to the top of the pyramid when you start at the bottom.
Leagues are arranged in a "pyramid" in all of the main footballing
nations. The top-tier professional clubs are backed by a sizable number of
amateur and semi-professional teams, all of whose players are striving for
promotion.
The culture of playing football together for enjoyment is what makes such a
pyramid grow. The players at the top will be better if there is a bigger pool
to choose from.
"If you look at
every country where football is really successful, the sport has grown
organically as a grassroots activity over the past 100 years," adds
Simons. "Professional football in China has continually failed because
it's supported by nothing - their pyramid is upside down."
The data supports this: China has less than 100,000 football players, compared
to England's 1.3 million registered players. This is despite the fact that
China has 20 times more people than England.
There isn't a ball at the feet of these kids as they grow up. "You won't
be able to produce elite talent without that," Mr. Dreyer states.
Every town and
village's streets and parks are the birthplaces of elite football in Europe and
South America. But in China, Beijing was where the drive started.
The nation's first professional league wasn't established by the government
until the 1990s. It disregarded the grassroots while establishing a few elite
clubs in big cities.
Mr. Dreyer says that bureaucrats in this top-down structure, eager to please
their superiors, invariably choose a "short-termist" strategy that
forgoes long-term, real progress in favour of short-term solutions.
According to some foreigners who have played in China, young players have
little opportunity to naturally grasp the game because of the system's strict
controls.
While many Chinese
players are "technically good," a European who is presently playing
in China and did not want to be identified told the BBC that they lack
"football IQ" at key points on the pitch.
"Creativity and basic decision-making, which we learn instinctively as a
kid, you don't see so much here," the player responds.
'I'm very sorry': A dream shattered
This does not imply
that Chinese people do not have a strong passion for football.
The women's team, currently rated 17th in the world, has long been a source of
pride, while the men's squad, currently ranked 90th, is viewed as a continual
letdown.
In 2023, a record 53 million people saw them play, and they lost 6-1 to England
at the World Cup. Many in China have referred to them as the "real"
guozu, or national team.
Of all the leagues in Asia, the men's Super League has the greatest average
attendance. At its height in the 2010s, it was drawing well-known international
players thanks to a surge in state-owned company investment and a booming
economy.
However, it didn't
last long.
More than 40 professional clubs have shut down since the pandemic and the
ensuing economic downturn in China, as state-backed businesses began to
withdraw their investments. Private corporations, too, have been fickle in
their loyalty.
The Suning Appliance Group, which had owned Inter Milan, the top Italian team,
acquired Jiangsu FC in 2015. The team later won the 2020 Super League. However,
months later, Suning announced that they were closing the club in order to
concentrate on their retail ventures.
Another example is the downfall of China's most successful team ever, Guangzhou
Evergrande.
Under the direction
of Italian legends Marcello Lippi and Fabio Cannavaro, they won trophy after
trophy while being backed by the massive real estate company Evergrande Group.
However, their parent business was overstretching itself in an overheated real
estate market as they found success both domestically and in Asia.
Evergrande is currently the world's most indebted property corporation and the
poster-child for China's real estate crisis, with arrears of more than $300bn
(£225bn).
Its previous team, which is currently owned by new people, was kicked out of
the league in January. The eight-time winners are still having trouble paying
off their debt after years of overspending.
However, Chinese
football is facing other crises as well. Another issue brought about by its
quick ascent was corruption.
"I ought to have gone the proper route. In a 2024 documentary, Li Tie, the
former manager of China's national men's team, states, "I was just doing
what was customary at the time."
Li makes a startling revelation in the documentary: he paid bribes and rigged
games for years in order to obtain key positions, including 3 million yuan
(£331,000, $418,500) to coach the national team in 2019.
He signs a written confession with an inky fingerprint while wearing all-black:
"I'm very sorry."
While training for
the Asian Cup in Qatar last year, state broadcaster CCTV forced China's
national squad to watch the documentary.
Continued Efforts, Deepening Progress, a four-part series on corruption in
China, began with the primetime expose, which was co-produced by the Central
Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).
Numerous Chinese officials admit to egregious levels of corruption across a
range of industries in China, always in front of the camera.
The authorities made it clear that they were gravely concerned about corruption
in the sport by screening the football episode first.
The most well-known
person to be arrested last year in an unprecedented wave of anti-corruption
arrests in Chinese football is Li, who played for Everton in the Premier League
and participated in a World Cup.
He received a 20-year prison sentence in December.
In the documentary, former GAS deputy director Du Zhaocai and former CFA
chairman Chen Xuyuan are also publically humiliated.
One admirer told CCTV, "The corruption of these officials has broken our
hearts." "I'm not surprised," someone other added.
In an anonymous interview with a BBC radio documentary in 2015, an ex-national
team player said that there was "open bidding" among players for
their place in the squad, which was echoed in the documentary.
"I could have
won many more caps, but I didn't have the cash," he stated.
Ten more years would pass before football corruption became widely known. Some
claim that China's unbelievably poor on-field performances served as the
catalyst for this.
Given how other sports are thriving in China, the men's football team's
difficulties are all the more apparent.
China has transformed from a sporting backwater to a medal-winning machine that
just tied the United States with 40 golds at the Paris Olympics thanks to
decades of investment in infrastructure and training.
However, compared to
a game like football, many of these are individual sports—weightlifting,
swimming, and diving—that need fewer resources and, more importantly, place
less emphasis on grassroots, community-led initiatives.
Additionally, they are less profitable, making them less susceptible to
corruption and poor administration.
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