It is enough to take a look at the news coverage of those days, less than a decade ago, when China’s soccer success seemed only a matter of determination and money, to remember how quickly and how deeply the country embraced the world’s most popular sport. as a national project. .
At home and abroad, Chinese President Xi Jinping was photographed kick soccer balls and watching youth matches. State media detailed his lifelong love of the game. Schools were ordered to introduce soccer into their curricula, and billions of dollars were earmarked for the construction of tens of thousands of fields. Major companies rushed to invest in professional equipment, both at home and abroad, and then showered them with imported players — whatever the cost.
There was talk not only of bringing the World Cup to China, but also of producing a pool of players capable of winning it, an ambitious, even audacious goal for a country that had never scored a goal in the tournament.
Now, however, China’s great football dream seems to be over.
The expensive recruits They have gone. The best teams have disappeared with frightening regularity. the national team shows few signs of improvement. And in perhaps the most direct sign of a failed policy, some of the top officials tasked with leading China’s soccer revolution have been arrested between accusations of corruption.
“Hopes were really high,” said Liu Dongfeng, a professor at the Shanghai University of Sport’s school of economics and management. “And that’s why the disappointment is also so great.”
What derailed China’s soccer plan, when previous state-backed bids to dominate Olympic sports had delivered regular glory and scores of medals? A global pandemic and economic downturn didn’t help. Nor is there a lack of truly world-class talent. Then there were the ill-treatment, the rumors of corruption and the persistent national inability to succeed in team sports. Whatever the reasons, the current malaise infecting Chinese football is a major setback to the momentum that accompanied the 2015 launch of China’s 50-point plan for sports.
That program was packed with concrete goals and lofty goals. Perhaps the most striking was a directive to include soccer in the national school curriculum, introducing it to tens of millions of children in one fell swoop, and to establish 50,000 soccer schools in the country by 2025. Eager to support Xi’s ambitions, or Perhaps just as eager to take advantage of an easing of restrictions on buying foreign assets, Chinese investors quickly fire-hose the game.
riding the rocket
Billions of dollars went into acquiring full or partial stakes in European soccer teams. Chinese companies signed up as FIFA sponsors and put their names on the message boards and jerseys of well-known clubs. Back home, some of China’s richest people and companies have invested in teams with an abandon that has transformed the country’s top division, the Super League, into a major player in the global transfer market. Players who would never have considered a career in China suddenly competed there, lured by eye-popping salaries or eight-figure transfer fees their European and South American clubs simply couldn’t afford to pass up.
That sudden increase in spending spooked Chinese regulators, who belatedly imposed industry restrictions to try to prevent it from overheating. Yet even those moves failed to tame the worst excesses, and as the coronavirus pandemic descended in early 2020 and China withdrew within its borders, spectacular failures were common.
Jiangsu Suning FC, a team owned by one of China’s richest men, disappeared in early 2021, just months after winning the Super League title. Other teams followed suit; Guangzhou FC suffered the indignity of relegation after its owner, property developer Evergrande, plunged into its own financial crisis. The best players, complaining about unpaid wages and broken promisesThey packed up, finished their contracts, and headed home.
“From the perspective of each team, if you look at costs and revenue, it was not sustainable at all,” Liu said.
But China was also in retreat on the international stage.
dashed hopes
If there were a single indicator of the high hopes, and ultimate disappointment, of China’s soccer dream, it might be its always-underperforming men’s national team, currently trailing Oman, Uzbekistan and Gabon in the standings. FIFA World Cup, firmly entrenched between mediocre and afterthoughts.
The team’s current ranking is almost exactly the same position it was in when the panel chaired by Xi topped the announced football reform plan eight years ago, and their most recent World Cup qualifying campaign was just another humiliating failure. China finished fifth of six teams in their qualifying group for last year’s tournament in Qatar, a Chinese New Year loss to Vietnam, the low point of a trip marked by repeated humiliations.
The future of the team does not look brighter. “If anything, it’s only going to get worse the way things are now,” said Mark Dreyer, author of a book on China’s efforts to become a sports superpower.
The news is no better off the pitch. FIFA was forced to abandon its plan to hold the inaugural edition of a Extended World Cup for clubs in China after the country imposed some of the world’s strictest coronavirus restrictions. That event, presented in a triumphant press conference in Shanghaiit will now take place in 2025, but it is unlikely to take place in China.
Last year, the Asian Football Federation discarded a multi-million dollar television contract with a Chinese media company after it reneged on its agreements. premier league did the same in 2020breaking a deal that was his most lucrative foreign contract, and now he has signed one for considerably less value.
The money that flowed from Chinese companies to foreign entities in the early years of the boom, and which quickly made China a major source of sponsorship revenue for teams, leagues and federations around the world, has been replaced by money from the Gulf, and in particular from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which now have the profile that China once sought.
At a recent meeting of the Asian soccer governing body, the Chinese candidate for a seat on the FIFA governing council finished last in the vote.
Uncertain future
Among the many successes that China once promised are some claims that cannot be verified. The official in charge of the schools project, for example, once claimed that 30,000 such academies had been opened and that more than 55 million students now played football.
“While most of the world celebrates a project once it’s completed, in China they like to celebrate the announcement, throw out crazy numbers and then people take it for granted,” said Dreyer, who has spent more than a decade following soccer. Chinese. industry.
It’s unclear how many of the schools actually work, and getting an answer may be nearly impossible: The Education Ministry official who made the claims, Wang Dengfeng, He was arrested in February.
His arrest was not the first, nor the last. Li Tie, a former player who coached the national team during part of its failed World Cup campaign, has been arrested on unspecified charges.serious violations of the law” while attending a training seminar in November. Then, in February, the Communist Party’s anti-corruption watchdog issued a cheesy statement saying that Chen Xuyuan, president of the national football federation, faced similar charges.
After Chen’s arrest, Hu Xijin, a retired nationalist editor-in-chief of The Global Times, a Communist Party tabloid, lamented the sorry state of the country’s soccer program on chinese social media. Chinese soccer has burned vast amounts of cash and “completely humiliated the Chinese people” with its scandals, Hu said.
Even before a series of government announcements that pointed out that even highest football officials were under investigation, Hu suggested that Chinese men’s soccer was “rotten to the core”.
His post went viral, with many commentators desperately calling for a comprehensive review of Chinese football. It is unclear if the country, and particularly Xi and the rest of China’s leadership, will rally so publicly behind another effort.
An earlier anti-corruption campaign that included the imprisonment of soccer managers and officials heralded the start of the latest efforts to grow the sport. The latest arrests and detentions, Liu said, could be a sign of the government’s willingness to persevere.
The director of China’s national sports agency, Gao Zhidan, seemed to suggest that recently. At a press event after China’s annual legislative session on March 12, when soccer conspicuous by its absence At a meeting on sports, Gao said he had been “reflecting deeply on the serious problems in the soccer industry” and said his agency would redouble its efforts to build competitive leagues and promote young talent.
What that will look like is unclear. There is still no official start date for the new season, which is expected to be in April with a small number of teams. Among the casualties were Hebei, which had not long ago attracted Argentine stars such as Javier Mascherano and Ezequiel Lavezzi, and Zibo Cuju, a team based in a city once recognized by FIFA as “the cradle of the first forms of soccer”.
A scaled-down league will signal another setback of China’s grand ambitions, when it finally begins. When will that be? Nobody is safe. An official announcement of the league format has not yet been made.
chang che and john liu contributed reporting.
