Imagine if, along with everything else, the US presidency gave Donald Trump the power to change the rules of his favorite sport.
That would not be so different from the scenario facing professional soccer in China, where the highest officials in the land have made the game a national project.
China threw the vast power of the state behind soccer in 2015, when Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the game’s most powerful fan, announced a plan to transform the nation into a world beater at the sport he played as a student.
Illustration: Yusha
China’s top teams responded by spending hundreds of millions of US dollars to hire foreign stars like Brazilian striker Hulk and Argentinian forward Carlos Tevez in hopes a higher level of play would trickle down to the national team and help build world-class leagues overnight.
However, a sudden spate of policy reversals mandating that young Chinese players fill starting lineups has undermined the value of those investments and put club owners in a quandary over what kind of teams they will be able to field.
It has also forced many close to the sport to openly question whether bureaucrats really know what is best for the beautiful game.
“The government should respect the rules of the market instead of over-regulating,” said Tony Xia (夏建統), the Chinese businessman who made headlines last year when he purchased the English soccer club Aston Villa.
Xia spoke two weeks ago in an interview at a soccer conference in Beijing, where top officials from several teams railed against the rules changes handed down in January, and then again last month.
Soccer’s earliest incarnation was invented in China more than 2,000 years ago as a military training exercise — players kicked a leather ball at a goal while fending off attackers without using their hands — but ancient history has not translated into a winning tradition in the modern game.
The country has been to the World Cup only once in the tournament’s 84 years, in 2002, when the team went winless — and goalless — in all three of its matches.
The national men’s team recently placed 82rd in the FIFA rankings, just ahead of the Faroe Islands, a remote archipelago with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants.
Hopes for a berth in next year’s World Cup were all but dashed this week, when China gave up a goal in the final minute of a qualifying match to finish with a 2-2 draw against a team fielded by war-torn Syria.
However, since 2015 when Xi announced his grand plan to win respectability for China in international soccer, the nation has poured the kind of energy into the sport once reserved for winning Olympic medals in individual competitions like gymnastics, swimming and diving.
Soccer has become part of compulsory education in elementary and secondary schools. Tens of thousands of soccer fields are being built. China Evergrande Group, the real-estate giant, spent a reported US$185 million to build the world’s biggest soccer school, a sprawling campus that looks like a concrete replica of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School surrounded by 50 practice pitches — a four-story tall replica of the FIFA World Cup trophy at the school’s entrance had to be torn down because of trademark issues.
Meanwhile, the nation’s biggest teams answered Xi’s call with an investment binge, offering out-sized salaries to South American and European players to jump-start their programs.
In January, the Brazilian-born midfielder known as Oscar, a reserve on the UK’s Premier League champion Chelsea, became one of the sport’s highest paid players, signing with Shanghai SIPG for US$25.5 million a year.
All told, teams in the Chinese Super League, the country’s top division, last year paid more than US$450 million to foreign players, passing France to become the world’s fifth-biggest spender.
That is when the government started telling team officials how to run their clubs.
In January, the Chinese General Administration of Sport issued a statement telling teams to stop “irresponsible spending.”
The Chinese Football Association followed up with a requirement that teams include at least one Chinese player under the age of 23 in their starting lineups, and coaches would only be able to start three imported stars — not four, as the old rules stipulated.
Then, just as teams were adjusting to the new regime, the rules changed again.
The football association last month said coaches would have to field at least one homegrown player under 23 for every foreigner in their lineups — another tweak designed to make sure China’s pro leagues feature Chinese players.
As if that were not enough, teams were told they would be slapped with a new luxury tax: For every dollar spent on an imported star, clubs might have to pay equally into a government fund designed to promote China’s soccer program — effectively doubling the price of overseas talent, and casting a long shadow over soccer’s trading season, which officially opens today.
Shanghai SIPG training development head Mads Davidsen was among sport officials at the soccer conference who objected to what he described as government meddling.
It “will no doubt lower the level of the game,” he said.
The new rules, Davidsen said, could end up subverting the government’s own goals, because China’s up-and-coming stars cannot develop without competing against the best possible players.
Representatives from the general administration and the China Football Association declined to comment.
Xia, the Aston Villa club owner who this year also agreed to buy a Hollywood film production studio, said state intervention is likely to backfire, as it did in the stock market where officials took heavy-handed steps to stop routs in 2015 and last year, only making matters worse.
“It’s like the government is playing whack-a-mole,” he said. “What we need are guidelines, not new rules every time the situation changes.”
One unintended consequence of the government’s moves is to be higher prices for younger players, who are suddenly in much greater demand, said Gong Lei (宮磊), president of Chongqing Dangdai Lifan Football Club, a team less flush with cash than some.
“Small and medium-sized clubs will feel especially difficult in dealing with this,” said Gong, who played for China at the 1985 Youth World Cup.
Gong said his club is in negotiation to buy several minor-league teams in France and Belgium to develop a training program for its own athletes.
Li Yidong (李義東), chairman of China Sports Media Ltd, which paid the equivalent of US$1.2 billion for five years of the broadcast rights to the league’s games, said he wants to renegotiate his contract with the football association because the quality of the product he bought is likely to be diminished.
“It is not what we paid for,” he said in an interview two weeks ago at his Beijing office.
With escalating US-China competition and mutual distrust, the trend of supply chain “friend shoring” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fragmentation of the world into rival geopolitical blocs, many analysts and policymakers worry the world is retreating into a new cold war — a world of trade bifurcation, protectionism and deglobalization. The world is in a new cold war, said Robin Niblett, former director of the London-based think tank Chatham House. Niblett said he sees the US and China slowly reaching a modus vivendi, but it might take time. The two great powers appear to be “reversing carefully
As China steps up a campaign to diplomatically isolate and squeeze Taiwan, it has become more imperative than ever that Taipei play a greater role internationally with the support of the democratic world. To help safeguard its autonomous status, Taiwan needs to go beyond bolstering its defenses with weapons like anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles. With the help of its international backers, it must also expand its diplomatic footprint globally. But are Taiwan’s foreign friends willing to translate their rhetoric into action by helping Taipei carve out more international space for itself? Beating back China’s effort to turn Taiwan into an international pariah
Typhoon Krathon made landfall in southwestern Taiwan last week, bringing strong winds, heavy rain and flooding, cutting power to more than 170,000 homes and water supply to more than 400,000 homes, and leading to more than 600 injuries and four deaths. Due to the typhoon, schools and offices across the nation were ordered to close for two to four days, stirring up familiar controversies over whether local governments’ decisions to call typhoon days were appropriate. The typhoon’s center made landfall in Kaohsiung’s Siaogang District (小港) at noon on Thursday, but it weakened into a tropical depression early on Friday, and its structure
Since the end of the Cold War, the US-China espionage battle has arguably become the largest on Earth. Spying on China is vital for the US, as China’s growing military and technological capabilities pose direct challenges to its interests, especially in defending Taiwan and maintaining security in the Indo-Pacific. Intelligence gathering helps the US counter Chinese aggression, stay ahead of threats and safeguard not only its own security, but also the stability of global trade routes. Unchecked Chinese expansion could destabilize the region and have far-reaching global consequences. In recent years, spying on China has become increasingly difficult for the US
RSS