On Monday 17 June 2013, the front page of Nanjing’s Oriental Guardian described the latest defeat of China’s national football (soccer) team as “a dagger deep into the heart of every Chinese football fan”.
The Oriental Guardian’s hyperbolic language was indicative of the visceral response engendered by the embarrassing loss.
The match in question was a friendly against Thailand held at the Olympic Sports Stadium in Hefei, capital of Anhui province. Having lost two home matches against Uzbekistan and Holland earlier in the month, China was expected to perform better against a Thai team composed mostly of young and inexperienced players. Instead, in front of a crowd of around 20,000 fans, Thailand handed China a drubbing of five goals to one.
After the game, a crowd of angry fans besieged the bus of the Chinese team and chanted for the coach to be sacked. They also shouted “Disband the Chinese Football Association!” and “Disband the national team!”
The crowd grew violent and one hundred people were reportedly injured. Over the following two days, the editorials in Oriental Guardian and other newspapers across China voiced despair at the loss, which was seen as a national disgrace.
They pointed out what every Chinese football fan knows all too well; the embarrassing defeat in Hefei was due to a lot more than just a lack of sporting skill. Apart from the corruption and mismanagement that have plagued Chinese football for years, cities lack adequate football facilities, and there are no institutions to nurture talent or encourage grassroots teams that in other countries form the basis of a football culture.
Part of the problem lies in the increasing professionalism of the beautiful game in China.
The first professional national league was set up in 1994, composed of clubs largely run as commercial ventures and with lavish sponsorships from state-owned enterprises. Initially, player salaries were low, but they began to rise as the clubs, buffered by a state-funded safety net, took on more debt. By 1998, the average attendance per game hovered at around 20,000.
By 2000, corruption was so endemic that some sponsors withdrew support in disgust and in 2004 the professional league reorganised itself as the ‘Chinese Super League’.
But the reorganisation did nothing to address the corruption plaguing the game, and it showed: the inaugural season of the Chinese Super League saw the lowest-ever average attendance per game of little more than 10,000 people.
Chinese football seemed to be in a terminal state of decline. This was typified by the national team’s abysmal showing at the 2002 World Cup held in South Korea and Japan (the only World Cup China has ever qualified for). Riding a wave of home support, South Korea, with a population of less than fifty million, went all the way to the semi-finals; China failed to score a single goal.
Two world cups later, and Chinese football is still trying to pick itself back up – and it has turned to one of the world’s icons of the sport.
In March 2013 March, international football superstar David Beckham appeared in Beijing at the invitation of the Chinese Football Association and (at least according to the South China Morning Post) with the financial support of CCTV, as Chinese football’s new “global ambassador”.
His fee was not disclosed, but the one thing Chinese football does not lack is ready cash. Real estate companies have been investing some of the profits they have made during the fifteen-year-long real estate boom in football teams; they own nine of the current sixteen clubs in the Chinese Super League.
The immense financial resources invested in local clubs have improved the prospects for the Chinese Super League to be a viable commercial competitor for global football talent; some of the renowned foreign players and coaches who have since been drawn to China have contributed significantly to rising attendances.
But if football in China is gradually recovering, it is doing so from a life-threatening disease. A long-term strategy is exactly what is needed now for building a sustainable foundation for the development of the game.
Yet what has made the failure of Chinese football so toxic is how it has so conspicuously exposed the effects of corruption, which are usually hidden behind an opaque, bureaucratic machinery. It did so in the form of a professional league largely reduced to a sham due to bribery, betting and match-fixing. Consequently,
China’s national team struggles to compete with even far smaller countries such as Thailand. Many Chinese now perceive football to be a shameful blot on the country’s modern sporting record and national reputation; every defeat just adds more misery to an incessant loss of national face.
Perhaps David Beckham can help. But from the perspective of the irate crowd after the game in Hefei and other long-suffering fans, it might just be better to disband the national team altogether.
Barry van Wyk is a project manager at Danwei media and an associate of the Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW) at the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific.
This is an edited extract from the China Story Yearbook 2013 ‘Civilising China’, to be launched by CIW this Thursday.
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