China’s Soccer Experiment Was a Flop. Now It May Be Over

[Get Ya Wig Split]

China’s Soccer Experiment Was a Flop. Now It May Be Over.​

China poured billions into its bid to become a major player in the world’s most popular sport. A decade later, it has little to show for that investment.

It takes only a glance at the news coverage from 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, China’s president, Xi Jinping, was pictured kicking soccer balls and watching youth matches. State media detailed his lifelong love of the game. Schools were ordered to introduce soccer into their curriculums, and billions of dollars were earmarked for the construction of tens of thousands of fields. Major companies rushed to invest in professional teams, both at home and abroad, then stocked them with imported players — whatever the cost.

There was talk of bringing the World Cup to China. In Beijing, there was audacious talk of winning it.
Now, though, China’s great soccer dream appears to be over.

The expensive recruits have gone. Top teams have disappeared with alarming regularity. The national team shows little sign of improvement. And in perhaps the most direct sign of a failed policy, some of the top officials charged with leading China’s soccer revolution have been detained amid allegations of corruption.

“The hopes were really high,” said Liu Dongfeng, a professor at the school of economics and management at the Shanghai University of Sport. “And that is also why the disappointment is so big.”

“My biggest hope for Chinese soccer is that its teams become among the world’s best,” China’s leader, Xi Jinping, had declared in 2015.

What derailed China’s soccer plan, when earlier state-backed bids to dominate Olympic sports had delivered regular glory and piles of medals? A global pandemic and an economic downturn didn’t help. Nor did the lack of truly world-class talents. Then there were the bad deals, the whispers of corruption and the nagging national inability to succeed in team sports. Whatever the reasons, the current malaise infecting Chinese soccer is a major reversal from the momentum that accompanied the release in 2015 of China’s 50-point plan for the sport.

That program was packed with concrete targets and lofty goals. Perhaps the most eye-catching was a directive to include soccer in the national school curriculum — introducing it to tens of millions of children in a single stroke — and to set up 50,000 soccer schools in the country by 2025. Eager to support Xi’s ambitions, or perhaps just as eager to take advantage of a loosening of restrictions on the purchase of foreign assets, Chinese investors quickly opened a fire hose of money on the game.

Riding the Rocket​

Billions of dollars went to acquiring whole or partial stakes in European soccer teams. Chinese companies signed up as FIFA sponsors and put their names on the message boards and shirts of well-known clubs. At home, some of China’s richest people and companies invested in teams with an abandon that transformed the country’s top division, the Super League, into a major player in the global transfer market. Players who once would never have considered a career in China were suddenly racing there, lured by eye-popping salaries or eight-figure transfer fees that their European and South American clubs simply couldn’t afford to pass up.

That sudden burst of spending spooked Chinese regulators, who belatedly imposed restraints on the industry to try to stop it from overheating. Yet even those moves failed to tame the worst excesses, and by the time the coronavirus pandemic descended in early 2020, and China retreated inside its borders, spectacular failures were common.

Jiangsu Suning F.C., a team owned by one of China’s richest men, disappeared in early 2021, only months after winning the Super League title. Other teams followed suit; Guangzhou F.C. suffered the indignity of relegation after its big-spending owner, the property developer Evergrande, tumbled into its own financial crisis. Top players, complaining of unpaid salaries and broken promises, packed their bags, ended their contracts and headed home.

“From the perspective of each team, if you look at cost and revenue, it was not sustainable at all,” Liu said.
But China was in retreat on the international stage, too.

Dashed Hopes​

If there were a single indicator of the high hopes, and supreme disappointment, of China’s soccer dream it might be its perpetually underachieving men’s national team, which currently sits below the likes of Oman, Uzbekistan and Gabon in FIFA’s global rankings, firmly entrenched among the mediocre and the afterthoughts.

The team’s current ranking is almost exactly the same position it held when the panel chaired by Xi passed China’s heralded soccer reform plan eight years ago, and its most recent World Cup qualifying campaign was merely another humbling failure. China finished fifth out of six teams in its qualifying pool for last year’s tournament in Qatar, a defeat to Vietnam on Chinese New Year the nadir to a journey marked by repeated humiliations.

Traditionally, China has enjoyed far more success in women’s soccer. It was an early pioneer in the women’s game, hosted FIFA’s first women’s world championship in 1991 and reached the final eight years later. But while China will make its third straight trip to the Women’s World Cup this year, it has not advanced past the quarterfinals since 1999 and will not be a pick of most experts to contend for the trophy.

The men’s team’s future looks even less bright. “If anything, they’re only going to get worse the way things are right now,” said Mark Dreyer, the author of a book on China’s efforts to become a sporting superpower.

China’s men’s team has never won a game or even scored a goal at the World Cup

The news is no better off the field. FIFA was forced to abandon its plan to hold the inaugural edition of an expanded World Cup for clubs in China after the country imposed some of the world’s strictest coronavirus restrictions. That event, unveiled at a triumphant news conference in Shanghai, will now be held in 2025, but it is unlikely to take place in China.

Last year, the Asian soccer federation scrapped a multibillion-dollar television contract with a Chinese media company after it failed to fulfill its agreements. The Premier League did the same in 2020, tearing up a deal that was its most lucrative overseas contract, and has now signed one worth considerably less.

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 income for teams, leagues and federations around the world, has been replaced by money from the Gulf, and particularly from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which now have the profile that China once sought.

At a recent meeting of Asian soccer’s governing body, the Chinese candidate running for a seat on FIFA’s governing council finished last in the voting.

Uncertain Future​

Among the many successes 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 were now playing soccer.

“While most of the world celebrates a project once it is completed, in China they like to celebrate the announcement, throw out crazy numbers and then people accept that as given,” said Dreyer, who has spent more than a decade following the Chinese soccer industry.

China invested in soccer schools and soccer fields but never created a pipeline of players.

It is unclear how many of the schools are actually functioning, and getting an answer may be all but impossible: The education ministry official who made the claims, Wang Dengfeng, was arrested in February.

His detention was not the first, or the last. Li Tie, a former player who coached the national team during part of its failed World Cup campaign, was arrested over unspecified “serious violations of law” while attending a coaching seminar in November. Then, in February, the Communist Party’s antigraft watchdog issued a curt statement in which it said Chen Xuyuan, the president of the national soccer federation, was facing similar accusations.

After Chen’s arrest, Hu Xijin, a nationalist and retired chief editor of The Global Times, a Communist Party tabloid, lamented the sorry state of the country’s soccer program on Chinese social media. Chinese soccer had burned copious amounts of cash and “completely humiliated the Chinese people” with its scandals, Hu said.

Even before a series of government announcements noting that even more high-ranking soccer officials were under investigation, Hu suggested that Chinese men’s soccer was “rotten to the core.”

His post went viral, with many commenters calling desperately for a complete overhaul of Chinese soccer. Whether the country, and particularly Xi and the rest of China’s leadership, will rally so publicly behind another effort is unclear.

A previous anticorruption drive that included the jailing of soccer administrators and officials presaged the start of the latest efforts to grow the sport. The latest arrests and detentions, Liu said, might be a sign of the government’s willingness to persevere.

The director of China’s national sports agency, Gao Zhidan, appeared to suggest just that recently. At a press event after China’s annual legislative session on March 12, when soccer was conspicuous by its absence at a meeting on sports, Gao said he had been “deeply reflecting on the serious problems in the soccer industry” and declared that his agency would redouble its efforts at building competitive leagues and promoting young talent.

What that will look like remains unclear. There is still no official start date for the new season, which is expected to be in April with a reduced number of teams. Among the casualties was Hebei, which not so long ago had lured Argentine stars like Javier Mascherano and Ezequiel Lavezzi, and Zibo Cuju, a team based in a city once recognized by FIFA as “the cradle of the earliest forms of football.”

A downsized league will signal yet another rollback of Chinese grand ambitions, whenever it eventually begins. When will that be? No one is certain. An official announcement of the league format has yet to be made.

China’s Soccer Experiment Was a Flop. Now It May Be Over.

China poured billions into its bid to become a major player in the world’s most popular sport. A decade later, it has little to show for that investment.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Skull and Bones]

Some diets and lifestyle can never produce better soccer players, our subcontinent is an example.

 

[Menace2Society]

Strange, Japan and South Korea can put in a good effort in the world cups. I don't understand why China can't step up.

 

[PAKISTANFOREVER]

China’s Soccer Experiment Was a Flop. Now It May Be Over.​

China poured billions into its bid to become a major player in the world’s most popular sport. A decade later, it has little to show for that investment.

It takes only a glance at the news coverage from 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, China’s president, Xi Jinping, was pictured kicking soccer balls and watching youth matches. State media detailed his lifelong love of the game. Schools were ordered to introduce soccer into their curriculums, and billions of dollars were earmarked for the construction of tens of thousands of fields. Major companies rushed to invest in professional teams, both at home and abroad, then stocked them with imported players — whatever the cost.

There was talk of bringing the World Cup to China. In Beijing, there was audacious talk of winning it.
Now, though, China’s great soccer dream appears to be over.

The expensive recruits have gone. Top teams have disappeared with alarming regularity. The national team shows little sign of improvement. And in perhaps the most direct sign of a failed policy, some of the top officials charged with leading China’s soccer revolution have been detained amid allegations of corruption.

“The hopes were really high,” said Liu Dongfeng, a professor at the school of economics and management at the Shanghai University of Sport. “And that is also why the disappointment is so big.”

“My biggest hope for Chinese soccer is that its teams become among the world’s best,” China’s leader, Xi Jinping, had declared in 2015.

What derailed China’s soccer plan, when earlier state-backed bids to dominate Olympic sports had delivered regular glory and piles of medals? A global pandemic and an economic downturn didn’t help. Nor did the lack of truly world-class talents. Then there were the bad deals, the whispers of corruption and the nagging national inability to succeed in team sports. Whatever the reasons, the current malaise infecting Chinese soccer is a major reversal from the momentum that accompanied the release in 2015 of China’s 50-point plan for the sport.

That program was packed with concrete targets and lofty goals. Perhaps the most eye-catching was a directive to include soccer in the national school curriculum — introducing it to tens of millions of children in a single stroke — and to set up 50,000 soccer schools in the country by 2025. Eager to support Xi’s ambitions, or perhaps just as eager to take advantage of a loosening of restrictions on the purchase of foreign assets, Chinese investors quickly opened a fire hose of money on the game.

Riding the Rocket​

Billions of dollars went to acquiring whole or partial stakes in European soccer teams. Chinese companies signed up as FIFA sponsors and put their names on the message boards and shirts of well-known clubs. At home, some of China’s richest people and companies invested in teams with an abandon that transformed the country’s top division, the Super League, into a major player in the global transfer market. Players who once would never have considered a career in China were suddenly racing there, lured by eye-popping salaries or eight-figure transfer fees that their European and South American clubs simply couldn’t afford to pass up.

That sudden burst of spending spooked Chinese regulators, who belatedly imposed restraints on the industry to try to stop it from overheating. Yet even those moves failed to tame the worst excesses, and by the time the coronavirus pandemic descended in early 2020, and China retreated inside its borders, spectacular failures were common.

Jiangsu Suning F.C., a team owned by one of China’s richest men, disappeared in early 2021, only months after winning the Super League title. Other teams followed suit; Guangzhou F.C. suffered the indignity of relegation after its big-spending owner, the property developer Evergrande, tumbled into its own financial crisis. Top players, complaining of unpaid salaries and broken promises, packed their bags, ended their contracts and headed home.

“From the perspective of each team, if you look at cost and revenue, it was not sustainable at all,” Liu said.
But China was in retreat on the international stage, too.

Dashed Hopes​

If there were a single indicator of the high hopes, and supreme disappointment, of China’s soccer dream it might be its perpetually underachieving men’s national team, which currently sits below the likes of Oman, Uzbekistan and Gabon in FIFA’s global rankings, firmly entrenched among the mediocre and the afterthoughts.

The team’s current ranking is almost exactly the same position it held when the panel chaired by Xi passed China’s heralded soccer reform plan eight years ago, and its most recent World Cup qualifying campaign was merely another humbling failure. China finished fifth out of six teams in its qualifying pool for last year’s tournament in Qatar, a defeat to Vietnam on Chinese New Year the nadir to a journey marked by repeated humiliations.

Traditionally, China has enjoyed far more success in women’s soccer. It was an early pioneer in the women’s game, hosted FIFA’s first women’s world championship in 1991 and reached the final eight years later. But while China will make its third straight trip to the Women’s World Cup this year, it has not advanced past the quarterfinals since 1999 and will not be a pick of most experts to contend for the trophy.

The men’s team’s future looks even less bright. “If anything, they’re only going to get worse the way things are right now,” said Mark Dreyer, the author of a book on China’s efforts to become a sporting superpower.

China’s men’s team has never won a game or even scored a goal at the World Cup

The news is no better off the field. FIFA was forced to abandon its plan to hold the inaugural edition of an expanded World Cup for clubs in China after the country imposed some of the world’s strictest coronavirus restrictions. That event, unveiled at a triumphant news conference in Shanghai, will now be held in 2025, but it is unlikely to take place in China.

Last year, the Asian soccer federation scrapped a multibillion-dollar television contract with a Chinese media company after it failed to fulfill its agreements. The Premier League did the same in 2020, tearing up a deal that was its most lucrative overseas contract, and has now signed one worth considerably less.

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 income for teams, leagues and federations around the world, has been replaced by money from the Gulf, and particularly from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which now have the profile that China once sought.

At a recent meeting of Asian soccer’s governing body, the Chinese candidate running for a seat on FIFA’s governing council finished last in the voting.

Uncertain Future​

Among the many successes 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 were now playing soccer.

“While most of the world celebrates a project once it is completed, in China they like to celebrate the announcement, throw out crazy numbers and then people accept that as given,” said Dreyer, who has spent more than a decade following the Chinese soccer industry.

China invested in soccer schools and soccer fields but never created a pipeline of players.

It is unclear how many of the schools are actually functioning, and getting an answer may be all but impossible: The education ministry official who made the claims, Wang Dengfeng, was arrested in February.

His detention was not the first, or the last. Li Tie, a former player who coached the national team during part of its failed World Cup campaign, was arrested over unspecified “serious violations of law” while attending a coaching seminar in November. Then, in February, the Communist Party’s antigraft watchdog issued a curt statement in which it said Chen Xuyuan, the president of the national soccer federation, was facing similar accusations.

After Chen’s arrest, Hu Xijin, a nationalist and retired chief editor of The Global Times, a Communist Party tabloid, lamented the sorry state of the country’s soccer program on Chinese social media. Chinese soccer had burned copious amounts of cash and “completely humiliated the Chinese people” with its scandals, Hu said.

Even before a series of government announcements noting that even more high-ranking soccer officials were under investigation, Hu suggested that Chinese men’s soccer was “rotten to the core.”

His post went viral, with many commenters calling desperately for a complete overhaul of Chinese soccer. Whether the country, and particularly Xi and the rest of China’s leadership, will rally so publicly behind another effort is unclear.

A previous anticorruption drive that included the jailing of soccer administrators and officials presaged the start of the latest efforts to grow the sport. The latest arrests and detentions, Liu said, might be a sign of the government’s willingness to persevere.

The director of China’s national sports agency, Gao Zhidan, appeared to suggest just that recently. At a press event after China’s annual legislative session on March 12, when soccer was conspicuous by its absence at a meeting on sports, Gao said he had been “deeply reflecting on the serious problems in the soccer industry” and declared that his agency would redouble its efforts at building competitive leagues and promoting young talent.

What that will look like remains unclear. There is still no official start date for the new season, which is expected to be in April with a reduced number of teams. Among the casualties was Hebei, which not so long ago had lured Argentine stars like Javier Mascherano and Ezequiel Lavezzi, and Zibo Cuju, a team based in a city once recognized by FIFA as “the cradle of the earliest forms of football.”

A downsized league will signal yet another rollback of Chinese grand ambitions, whenever it eventually begins. When will that be? No one is certain. An official announcement of the league format has yet to be made.

China’s Soccer Experiment Was a Flop. Now It May Be Over.

China poured billions into its bid to become a major player in the world’s most popular sport. A decade later, it has little to show for that investment.

www.nytimes.com

Just a small blip. Just as how China has become the world's first non-white superpower in over 700 years, China will become a one of the world's best football teams. It may take a few decades, but they will get there.

 

[gambit]

Chinese players should have been equipped with DSI. That would have guaranteed wins.

 

[MH.Yang]

Strange, Japan and South Korea can put in a good effort in the world cups. I don't understand why China can't step up.

China's football reform is actually just commercializing the previous professional football system.

It has made football a profitable commodity, but it will not only strengthen China's football level, but also weaken it.

It will happen sooner or later that the Chinese football team loses to the Vietnamese team. There is a clear standard that Vietnam has 50000 registered professional football players, while China only has 8000 registered professional football players.

Why is that? Because Chinese football has become a commodity. Your child must spend a lot of money to learn to play football. The cost of learning football in China is much higher than other sports.

China has a population of 1.4 billion, but so many people can only become spectators of the competition, with only 8000 people truly able to participate.

The commercialization reform of Chinese football has indeed failed. The Chinese Football League has made a lot of money, but it has lowered the overall level of Chinese football.

And those non commercial sports have all achieved good development, and China can already compete for first place in the Olympics.

 

[S10]

Good, the shit team hasn't been good for a quarter century despite massive amount of public and private money tossed at them. In fact they've gotten worse over the years.

 

[MH.Yang]

Greatest football players are born, not trained, it is a completely different sport than the rest of sports.

China is proof that talent in football is born. Typically among the poor, since there is more of poor than rich.

Messi was born a great football player. His coaches did not train him to be the best. He arrived a child prodigy. When they are youths, they stand out in being able to play with people years older and get the better of them. This is how you know you have a skilled player for your national team. When they are 10 years old and playing against 14 or 15 year olds and outperforming them. This is born talent.

If you have drive, you can be trained to play professionally, if you are no prodigy. Though you have to work twice as hard as players born as footballers. You have to have passion and love of the sport to succeed.

In fact, this failure was caused by a disagreement between China's education and sports departments.

Commercializing football, similar to the NBA in USA, can actually improve the level of football, but we must also establish a college football league and establish a sufficient number of young football player training systems.

The Chinese sports department understands this truth and they also want to do so. But China's education department does not allow it. The strategy of the Chinese education department is to focus on STEAM education, and they cannot tolerate the birth of football stars among high school or college students.

So China's sports department can only let commercial training institutions build a training system for young football players. This has led to a very high cost of learning football, which only a few families can afford.

The lack of a sufficient number of young football players almost doomed the failure of Chinese football reform.

 

[chinasun]

Chinese football cannot count on players with only low education. Chinese football should calm down and face up to the gap. One is to send students to football powerhouses to study football, but also to Japan and South Korea, and to attract foreign coaches to coach in China. The hope of Chinese football should also be Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Tibet and other pastoral areas. As long as it persists for 10 years, Chinese football can definitely catch up with South Korea and Japan.

 

[kankan326]

As I said, China sucks at football because China has a fair and universal public education system. Parents know betting on normal class education for their kids is the best choice with lowest career risk.

 

[beijingwalker]

Chinese soccer team used to be one of the strongest in Asia, beating Japanese hands down, commercialization of this sport killed it. It's indeed a failed experiment.

 

[patero]

The reason why the Chinese football team underperforms is the same reason China underperforms in all team sports, they are overcoached and do not learn how to think for themselves on the field. That same inability to adapt quickly and adjust without direction from coaches/superiors is evident in the PLA, the communist top down model emphasizing centralized decision making has proven to be inflexible and ineffective on the battlefield (the Russia army with its soviet era doctrine is currently demonstrating this) as well as the sporting field.

 

[StraightEdge]

It's football, not soccer.

 

[beijingwalker]

The reason why the Chinese football team underperforms is the same reason China underperforms in all team sports, they are overcoached and do not learn how to think for themselves on the field. That same inability to adapt quickly and adjust without direction from coaches/superiors is evident in the PLA, the communist top down model emphasizing centralized decision making has proven to be inflexible and ineffective on the battlefield (the Russia army with its soviet era doctrine is currently demonstrating this) as well as the sporting field.

Other than soccer, China does fairly well in almost all other team sports at least in Asia. Chinese basketball and volleyball teams are Asian champions, Sports are sports, if you talk about military sports, Chinese PLA team actually is the best in the world. and you have to associate Chinese soccer team with PLA? In you logic, Argentina army should be the best in the world. US and Chinese army could get nowhere close to top 30, lol..

 

[beijingwalker]

Chinese volleyball team, Asian Champion 2022