‘Numb’ and ‘humiliated’: Why China’s football dream lies in tatters

China’s national football team hit its lowest ebb on a warm, humid Thursday evening in Saitama.

With a min left on the time and trailing Japan 6-0, Foreign defenders were good asking for the sweet pleasure of the final whistling.

Takefusa Kubo, a Japanese politician, was however unkind. After watching his teammates toys with their opponents for a while, he received a slip on the top of the Chinese field and rammed house Japan’s sixth goal.

The man known as” Japanese Messi” led China to their worst-ever defeat in a World Cup qualifier when the ball soared into the roof of the net.

The 7-0 beating in September- described as “rock-bottom” by a Shanghai-based paper – followed a year-long series of degrading loses which included costs to Oman, Uzbekistan and Hong Kong.

But things were going to get worse.

A week later dozens of players, educators and administrators were arrested for gaming, match-fixing and corruption as part of a two-year spacecraft into corruption in the private activity.

And they continue to fall. On Tuesday, Australia beat China 2-0 in Hangzhou- filling them at the bottom of their World Cup qualifying party.

China had long since had the idea of becoming a sports power.

The nation’s largest population, a growing market and a determined Communist Party led by an avid sports fan, President Xi Jinping. What might be bad?

Evidently, quite a lot.

When Xi came to power in 2012, his passion for the game spurred a push to reform and boost Chinese sports. He once said that his goal was for China to host the World Cup and finally get it. These were his” three wants”.

However, perhaps Xi appeared to have lost the trust ten years later. While making small talk with Thailand’s premier minister on the outside of an international conference in 2023, the Chinese leader was heard saying that China had “got happy” in a new success against Thailand.

According to Mark Dreyer, a Beijing-based sports writer,” When China’s federal puts its head to anything, it really often fails.” ” Look at electric vehicles, look at the Olympics. China is essentially tops in every industry you can think of.

But soccer, it seems, was not live in the hold of the Communist Party.

The Chinese Football Association ( CFA ) must have “legal autonomy,” according to a significant government report from 2015 that said it should be “independent” of the General Administration of Sport ( GAS ).

Yet Xi admitted that if China wanted to succeed, therefore the Party would have to do what it sometimes does: let go.

Beijing, however, refused to let go.

” China’s disappointment in sports has become a national embarrassment and figuring out the grounds has become a regional obsession”, Rowan Simons, writer of Bamboo Goalposts: One Man’s Quest to Teach the People’s Republic of China to Like Football, told the BBC.

” But to me, the factors are very clear, and they reveal a lot about how the nation is run,” he said.

The difficulty, he and another argue, is that China’s one-party position imposes selections from the bottom. This promotes economic development, but it fails to produce good results in team sports competitions.

Although Fifa prohibits state intervention, Chinese football is riddled with political meetings. This is prevalent in China, where the Party controls the majority of people affairs.

The current chairman of the CFA, Song Cai, is also a Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party. A senior government official at the GAS oversees his job.

” Everything has to record upwards to Communist Party leaders. In essence, non-football players are making sport selections, according to Mr. Dreyer. ” Football has to be grassroots-led. The skill starts to flow to the top at the bottom of the tower.

All major sports governments have a “pyramid” of teams. The wealthy professional clubs are at the bottom, supported by a sizable number of aspiring and semi-professional groups, all of whom are battling to advance.

For a tower flourishes on a tradition of playing sports, en masse, for fun. The better the best players may be, the larger the share to pick from.

” If you look at every land where sport is truly successful, the activity has grown naturally as a local activity over the past 100 years”, Mr Simons says. The Chinese professional football team has consistently failed because its tower is turned upside down, according to the report.

The data bear this out: England’s 1.3 million registered participants dwarf China’s fewer-than-100, 000 players. Despite having a community that is 20 periods larger than England’s, this is.

” Children here don’t grow up with a game at their feet. Without that, “you won’t develop wealthy talent,” says Mr. Dreyer.

Top-level sports in Europe and South America traces its roots to streets and parks in every town and village. However, the press started in China in Beijing.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the government set up the country’s earliest skilled group. It led to a few prestigious leagues in big cities, but it also neglected the community.

Keen to please their leaders, representatives in this top-down program certainly opt for a” short-termist” approach that sacrifices real progress over time for rapid changes, Mr Dreyer explains.

Some immigrants who have played in China claim that young players lack a healthy understanding of the game because of the tightly managed program.

A German now playing in China, who did not wish to reveal his name, told the BBC that while many Taiwanese people are “technically good”, they lack “football IQ” at critical moments on the ball.

You don’t see so much creativity and fundamental decision-making in this, the player says. These are things we instinctively learn as children.

This does not imply that China has a deep love for football.

While the men’s team, currently ranked 90th in the world, is seen as a constant disappointment, the women’s team, ranked 17th, has been a source of pride for years.

In 2023, a record 53 million people tuned in to watch them play and lose 6-1 to England at the World Cup, and many people in China have referred to them as the “real” guozu or national team.

The men’s Super League boasts the highest average attendance of any league in Asia. Its heyday was fueled by a booming economy and a wave of investment from state-owned enterprises, which was at its height in the 2010s.

But it was short-lived.

More than 40 professional clubs have closed as a result of the pandemic and the country’s economic slump as a result of the state-backed companies ‘ withdrawals. Private companies, too, have proved fickle in their commitment.

Jiangsu FC was purchased by Suning Appliance Group in 2015, which also previously owned the top Italian club Inter Milan. The club went on to win the Super League in 2020. However, Suning announced months later that they would be closing the club so that they could concentrate on their retail operation.

The demise of Guangzhou Evergrande, China’s most successful team ever, is yet another example.

Under the direction of Italian legends like Marcello Lippi and Fabio Cannavaro, they won trophy after trophy under the supervision of property giant Evergrande Group. But as they found glory at home and in Asia, their parent company was overstretching itself in an inflated property market.

With arrears of more than$ 300 billion ( £225 billion ), Evergrande is now the world’s most indebted real estate company and the poster-child of China’s housing crisis.

Its former club – now in the hands of new owners – was expelled from the league in January. After years of splurging, the eight-time champions are still struggling to pay off their debt.

But that is not the only crisis engulfing Chinese football. Another issue was brought on by its rapid growth: corruption.

” I should have followed the right path. In a documentary about 2024, Li Tie, the former head of China’s national men’s team, claims that” I was just doing what was customary at the time.”

In that documentary, Li makes a shocking admission: for years he fixed matches and paid bribes to get certain jobs, including 3m yuan ( £331, 000,$ 418, 500 ) to become the national team coach in 2019.

He wears an all-black outfit and writes,” I’m very sorry,” on a written confession.

China’s national team was made to watch the documentary by state broadcaster CCTV while preparing for last year’s Asian Cup in Qatar.

The first episode of a four-part series on corruption in China,” Continued Efforts, Deepening Progress,” was co-produced by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).

In it, dozens of Chinese officials confess- always to camera- to staggering levels of corruption across a variety of industries.

The authorities showed their serious concern about graft in the sport by airing the football episode first.

Li, who appeared in a World Cup and once played for Premier League side Everton, is the most high-profile figure to have been apprehended last year in an unprecedented slew of anti-corruption arrests in Chinese football.

In December, he was sentenced to 20 years in jail.

Also publicly shamed in the documentary are former CFA chairman Chen Xuyuan and ex-deputy director of the GAS, Du Zhaocai.

One fan told CCTV,” The corruption of these officials has broken our hearts. ” I’m not surprised”, said another.

There was a system of “open bidding” among players for their spot in the squad, according to one former national team player who spoke to a BBC radio documentary about it in 2015 in an anonymous interview.

” I could have won many more caps, but I didn’t have the cash”, he said.

It would take another ten years before corruption in football came into focus. Some suggest this was prompted by China’s intolerably bad performances on the pitch.

Given how other sports are flourishing in the nation, the struggles of China’s men’s football team are all the more concerning.

Decades of investment in infrastructure and training have taken China from a sporting backwater to a medal-winning machine that recently equalled the United States with 40 golds at the Paris Olympics.

However, many of these are individual sports, like weightlifting, swimming, and diving, which require fewer resources and, crucially, less emphasis on community-led grassroots initiatives than a game like football.

They are also less lucrative and, therefore, less vulnerable to corruption and mismanagement.

Officials in China face greater challenges than football problems as the country’s economy recovers from a sustained downturn.

But that is little consolation to fans.

Particularly stung by the loss to Japan. While Japan have gone from strength to strength over the past two decades, China have failed to qualify for a single World Cup.

The Oriental Sports Daily continued to say that when the bitterness hits its peak, all that is left is numbness the day after the loss.

According to Mr Dreyer, Japan’s approach is antithetical to China’s: a long-term vision, a lack of political interference and a commercially savvy club structure.

Even so, he adds,” The fan culture here in China is still remarkably good.” ” They deserve so much more”.

Following Tuesday’s defeat against Australia, both their disappointment and their humor showed.

” It seems like the national team’s performance is as consistent as ever”, wrote one fan on social media. Another joke claimed that if China wants to continue growing economically, its football team must suffer to maintain a balance between “national fortune” and national prosperity.

Perhaps they had resigned themselves to what a popular Chinese journalist had written in his blog after Japan beat China.

He noted that singing odes or telling stories cannot boost football. ” It needs skill, and physical and tactical training. It cannot be accomplished through politics.