China yesterday jailed former English Premier League star and China men’s national coach Li Tie for 20 years for bribery, snaring one of the country’s greatest soccer figures in a sweeping government crackdown on corruption in sport.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has waged an unrelenting campaign against deep-seated official corruption since coming to power more than a decade ago.
Anti-graft authorities took aim at the sport industry in 2022 and have announced a string of convictions for former soccer administrators this week.
Photo: AFP
In the highest-profile case to date, a court in Hubei Province yesterday said that Li had been sentenced to “fixed-term imprisonment of 20 years” after being found guilty of a string of offences relating to giving and receiving bribes.
The 47-year-old is one of China’s biggest soccer names, serving as national team coach from January 2020 to December 2021, after racking up nearly 100 international caps and playing as a midfielder for Premier League side Everton.
However, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said he used his status as China’s coach to extract nearly 51 million yuan (US$7 million) in bribes in return for selecting players for the national team or helping them sign for clubs.
Li also “asked others to help him” become the national coach in 2019 and handed the unnamed people one million yuan the following year, CCTV said.
During his tenure at now-defunct Chinese Super League (CSL) side Wuhan Zall, Li also colluded with club chiefs to hand out bribes in an effort to secure the national team job, the broadcaster said.
It also said that Li and his previous clubs had paid the equivalent of millions of US dollars in bribes to seal player transfers and fix match results stretching back to 2015.
A photograph of Li published by CCTV showed the sportsman in the court dock, wearing a black hooded sweater and flanked by two police officers.
China’s legal system is tightly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and courts have a near-100 percent conviction rate in criminal cases.
Li’s conviction seemed certain after he pleaded guilty earlier this year to accepting more than US$10 million in bribes.
He was also featured in a documentary aired by CCTV in January about widespread corruption in Chinese soccer.
CCTV occasionally airs confessions by criminal suspects before they have appeared in court, a practice widely condemned by rights groups.
In the program, Li said he had arranged nearly US$421,000 in bribes to secure the head coach position and helped fix CSL matches.
“I’m very sorry. I should have kept my head to the ground and followed the right path,” Li said during the show.
“There were certain things that at the time were common practices in soccer,” he said.
Chinese authorities have announced a spate of corruption convictions this week.
Du Zhaocai, the former deputy head of China’s General Administration of Sport, was sentenced to 14 years and fined 4 million yuan for taking bribes, Chinese state media reported yesyerday.
On Wednesday last week, Liu Yi, who was secretary-general of the Chinese Football Association (CFA), was handed an 11-year sentence and fined 3.6 million yuan for taking bribes.
The same day, Tan Hai, former head of the CFA’s referees management office, was given six-and-a-half years and a 200,000 yuan fine for the same crime.
On Tuesday last week, Qi Jun, the CFA’s former chief of strategic planning, was sentenced to seven years and slapped with a 600,000 yuan penalty.
Xi is a self-proclaimed soccer fan who wants China to host and win the FIFA World Cup one day, but the men’s national team has long failed to impress.
China is 90th in the FIFA World Rankings, one place above the tiny Caribbean island of Curacao.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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