Deputy sports minister Xiao Tian (肖天) lost his temper on Thursday when denying the accusation and addressing the fact that a pair of divers with obviously smaller splash did not win.

“You can’t say it had been fxxking fixed, it’s fxxking fake, just because you lost,” Xiao told a news conference on Thursday, which was widely reported by local media.

“How can you only judge a routine by the size of splash? Even a fxxking amateur can make very little splash if only turns over once. Can you give him gold medal?” he added.

Xiao said investigation by the General Administration of Sports (GAS) had shown the accusation was groundless.

“GAS will definitely not tolerate any match fixing. If it happens, we will even take legal action,” said Xiao. “But it is not true.”

And Xinhua:

Li Hua, head of the National Aquatics Sport Administration Center of China, said here on Wednesday that the match-fixing allegations of the diving competitions during the 11th National Games are “irresponsible and groundless.”

Li, also the executive director of the Diving Competitions Committee of the National Games, denies all the allegations in an official statement sent to the media.

“The rumors said all the gold medals had been fixed before the competitions started. I think these rumors are irresponsible and groundless,” said Li.

“All the rules and process on managing the judges during the competitions of the National Games are very strictly followed. Nobody can fix the results of the competitions during such a fiercely competitive National Games,” he said.

And we’ve been paying taxes to fund them all these years…

Previoulsy:

• Olympic Trampoline Champion Hints At Match-fixing in the National Games
• What’s with China’s National Games?

Links and Sources:

• Reuters: China National Games open under shadow of judging scandal
• Xinhua: Top official: Match-fixing allegations “irresponsible and groundless”
• Beijing Evening News via NetEase: Agitated Xiao Tian used bad words (Chinese)

Unsettled 'bad boy' Mao celebrates his last-minute equalizer to give Shanghai Shenhua a 1:1 draw against Qingdao on May 20.

I was overly optimistic towards the future of Chinese football players. Though this year saw a few of them found jobs outside the country, almost all footballers still find their rights trampled by the country’s backward transfer rules.

As the transfer window reopened by Chinese FA on June 25, 121 players from 29 football clubs have been transfer listed and 13 others are listed as available for loan. A majority of them, if not all, are fringe players who haven’t played first-team football for a long time.

China has 42 incipient professional football clubs. Each team, according to CFA, can only sign three Chinese players during the month-long transfer period till July 24. Of the 134 players on the transfer/loan list, together 93 of them are from Chinese Super League and Jia League, China’s top- and second- tier leagues, a trend of offloading players by these clubs. To most of the players, chances of transferring to teams in the two leagues are, if any, very low.

According to CFA’s transfer rules, there’re option preferences a player can state in his transfer request: Super League, Jia League, Yi League (third-tier) or any of them. Of the 134 players, 112 stated that they’re willing to play for any club, a desperation to continue their careers elsewhere.

“It goes without saying that a lot of the listed players will lose jobs after this season,” Han Xu, former captain of Beijing Guo’an FC, told China Sports Review. Han, 35, now works as the manager of a sportswear store at the Worker’s Stadium. “The transfer rules were a product of the past and look out of place now,” said Han.

To avoid an exodus of good players to rich clubs, transfer rules was established by CFA and was put into use since 1998. Different from FIFA’s current Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players, it stipulates a player needs to wait 30 months after his contract runs out at a club to become a free agent, a period of time spanning across three seasons. Anyone failed to do so will not be able to get registered at any other club. To most of Chinese players like Han, their careers have been tied to a club from the beginning to the retirement.

The transfer rules have given unbridled power to football clubs. Up until now, most of the players like Han have signed their season-long contracts once a year. If a player hands in a transfer request to his club and the club wants to keep him. Chances are he can still be transfer listed, but the sky-high price tag will only keep interested buyers away. Thus the player is saved, or, to put it in another way, caged. No one would be stupid enough to wait three seasons at home to become a free agent. How many three seasons does a player have in his career?

“I hope the transfer rules can be changed,” said Xiao Zhanbo, a 35-year-old veteran from Shanghai Shenhua FC in an interview with a Beijing newspaper. “If it continues like this, there will be less and less players in this country where footballers are already in short supply. It’s catastrophic for Chinese football in the long run.”

Xiao, once a regular player in China set-up, is now pursued by a Liaoning-based club in Jia League, but the RMB 4 million transfer fee that Shanghai asked was way more than enough to scare away the interested buyer.

“There’s no free transfer in China and a lot of players had no choice but to retire at an early age. How pathetic it is!” confessed Xiao, who has reportedly argued with the club management over a sum of unpaid bonuses last season. The tough and tenacious north-easterner seemed to have reached a compromise later with his boss, being listed as available for loan on June 25.

Mao Jianqing, Xiao’s teammate, has been having a hard time recently. The 22-year-old promising winger appears to have a drinking problem, and was punished to train with the reverse team by Zhu Jun, the club owner. Zhu is now looking to offload the “bad boy” by a whopping RMB 8 million.

“Which Chinese club would pay 8 million yuan for a player like me? It can’t be a final price,” Mao told Beijing TV as Guo’an, a CSL team in China’s capital, is said to have interest in signing him. “I hope to play for a big club if things work out well. But the club may not let me go to Beijing if I said too much.”

Mao had a point here. Thanks to the decade-old transfer rules, a Chinese football club can, in effect, decide everything about its players. And if you play bad boy with the big bosses, feel free to count your days on the chopping block.

China’s FA promised to obey FIFA’s transfer regulations early this year over Zhou Haibin’s case, yet clearly they’re not ready to put their words into action in its backyard, taking all the transfers in the country as domestic affairs.

Previously:

• Go West! Chinese Footballers Now Can Transfer, Finally
• Pirelli Signs Three-year Sponsorship Deal with Chinese Super League
• Zheng Zhi to Play in The Premiership?

Links and Sources :

• CFA’s Transfer Rules (in Chinese via Netease)
• Liaoning Daily: CSL transfer window reopens (in Chinese via China Interactive Sports)
• Jianghua Times’s interview with Xiao Zhanbo (in Chinese via Titan Sports)
• Gongti Legends: Guoan Making Run at Mao Jianqing
• BTV’s interview with Mao Jianqing (in Chinese via Sina)

Photo:  Sohu

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Supported by the country’s juguo or whole-nation sports regime, China women’s curling team was established in 2001 and is now coached by Canadian Daniel Rafael, who’s also the head coach of China men’s curling team. The five team members, who together crowned Winter Universiade last month in Harbin, are all from Harbin Institute of Sports(哈尔滨体育学院), and have been receiving full-time training mostly in Canada and European countries, a predominant advantage compared with their fellow competitors.

photo: Netease

Previously:

• Harbin Winter Universiade Cold-shouldered by Chinese
• Chinese Women’s Ice Hockey Team Walking On Thin Ice

Related Read:

National Post:  China’s curling success has Canadian angle

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“I won’t watch any of the games, as I don’t play those sports,” said Liu Hongchao, a 25-year-old Beijinger who plays football in his free time. “No one here even watches Universiade, let alone the winter games.” Liu’s view is probably shared by most sports editors in Chinese media, as we couldn’t find coverage of the Winter Universiade on the front covers of all the sports publications and the Internet portals in the country so far. Winter sports seem too far away from most of Chinese people.

“We’re aware of this situation,” Lan Li, the deputy director of Chinese Winter Sports Federation told China Sports Review. “Objectively speaking, winter sports can only be found in some areas in the country. Its media awareness can’t compare with summer sports right now, and we’re not expecting to make a splash by hosting this Winter Universiade. You really have to do this step by step, cultivating the interests of University students is a good start. Things would go a lot more faster if we have some star players like Yao Ming in Basketball.”

After the opening ceremony last night on Feb 18, China defeated Slovak by 5 – 3 in the first ever women’s ice hockey match in Winter Universiade, as the sport was made a compulsory program this year by the International University Sports Federation. “We didn’t have a dream start and made some mistakes in the first period, but players did fight well later and that’s why we won,” said Paul Strople, head coach of the Chinese women team.

“The 18 ice hockey players are the cream of the crop in China. To tell you the truth, we only have about 50 women ice hockey players in the country. People feel weird when we rejected invitations of some overseas youth tournaments. We just don’t have enough players to send there,” Lan confessed. “We built two stadiums in universities in Harbin this time, hopefully more and more students would be interested in winter sports and start playing some games.”

The 2009 World Winter Universiade takes place from Feb. 18 to 28 in Harbin, the capital city of China’s Heilongjiang Province, with events also scheduled in Maorshan and Yabuli.The games will feature over 82 disciplines encompassed in the following 12 sports: Alpine Skiing, Biathlon, Cross Country Skiing, Curling, Figure Skating, Freestyle Skiing, Ice Hockey, Long Track Speed Skating, Nordic Combined, Short Track Speed Skating, Ski Jumping and Snowboarding. According to the organizer, the total investment is about 3.1 billion RMB, roughly $ 453 million USD.

Previously:

• Chinese Women’s Ice Hockey Team Walking On Thin Ice

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The new CSL season will be kicked off on March 21, with Shanghai Shenhua, Shandong Luneng and Beijing Guoan are among the favorites. While the defending champion Shandon Luneng lost their midfield general Zhou Haibin to PSV Eindhoven, Shanghai Shenhua spent over $ 8 ml USD in the transfer market this winter, snatching Mark Milligan from Newcastle United Jets in Australia’s A-League and another two players from FC MTZ-RIPO, a team in Belarusian Premier League. The Beijing Guo’an FC, or Imperial Guard, received a RMB 20 million yuan (roughly $ 2.92 million USD) boost from Beijing Municipal Bureau of Sport (BMBS) this January, and Li Weimiao, head of the Beijing Municipal Football Administrative Center, the football governing body under BMBS, became vice president of Guo’an Club.

There’s been rumors that the decision makers at General Administration of Sport in China (GASC) has been discussing whether to nationalize Chinese football by getting back clubs’ ownerships. “This could be the first step of GASC’s nationalization plan,” said Nan Fang, a former Beijing Guo’an midfielder to China Sports Review, “If they do it, they’re probably going to cross the river by feeling the stones.” Nan, co-founder and coach of Beijing Langyue Football School, attributes the futility of Chinese football to bad environment, namely fixed games and bribes in the league. “You can’t whiz everything back into the 80s. Things changed.” Aside from help fund a friendly match with world champion club Manchester Utd, BMBS will also help Guo’an develop youth players in the government-funded sports schools. “This would bring more young talents into the pool,” Nan noted. “I think the problem is whether they have enough good coaches there.”

China’s FA is currently in talks with Nike for a sponsorship deal. The sportswear manufacturer is reportedly to have prepared a 10-year-long contract for the clubs, with each club in the 2009 season could get equipments worth of RMB 5 ml and another RMB 1.5 ml fund. A lot money for some, the deal might not sound very riveting to big clubs like Beijing Guo’an, who is currently sponsored by Adidas.

Previously:

• Chinese to Enjoy English Premier League for Free?
• Go West! Chinese Footballers Now Can Transfer, Finally
• China May Juguo Its Professional Football League
  

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This Chinese New Year must have been a magical experience for Zhou Haibin (周海滨), a 23-year-old midfielder, who now finds himself joyfully as a PSV Eindhoven player. Before joining the Dutch side as a free transfer, the Chinese footballer has been playing at Shandong Luneng FC for 10 years.

While Zhou’s move was cheered by some, it definitely left Shandong Luneng FC and Chinese Football Association stunned. The Shandong club, who clumsily appealed to CFA trying to keep the player, was disappointed greatly after the association released a statement last week about their stand. Below’s our translation:

1. Some of CFA’s regulations on transfer and registration are different from FIFA’s. As a member of FIFA, CFA should obey FIFA’s regulations.

2. It’s a good thing for Chinese footballers to play in a high-level league overseas. As an important way to improve the development of Chinese football, we encourage more domestic players to play overseas.

3. CFA will speed up researching, improve its regulations on transfer and registration to better meet the needs of the development of Chinese football.

In China, if a player wants to be transfer-listed, he needs to let the club know in advance even if his contract already runs out. CFA rules state that a club have the ownership of its player up to 30 months from the last time he represented the team, which means Zhou’s ownership would remain at Shandong team untill 2011. 

However, according to FIFA’ Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players released last year, a professional shall only be free to conclude a contract with another club if his contract with his present club has expired or is due to expire within six months, which means a player like Zhou Haibin is entitled to sign for another team. Zhou is not the only one who discovered this new land, though. Feng Xiaoting (冯潇霆), same age as Zhou, received three offers from South Korea’s K-League teams, and completed the move to Daegu FC from Dalian Shide FC last month.

“Ninety percent of free agents in Chinese Super League would follow Feng Xiaoting and Zhou Haibin. Best of them can go to Europe, others can go to South Korea, Japan or the US, and the rest stay home,” wrote Xue Yong, Assistant Professor at Suffolk University and author of Conspicuous Soccer (《炫耀的足球》), in his blog. Mr. Xue half-jokingly titled his comment on the transfer news as Serfs Emancipation in Chinese Football.

Indeed, with AFC introduced its 3 plus 1 rule last year, which states that each team playing in the Asian Champions League is allowed to field four foreign players, one of whom must be from an Asian country, there will definitely be more opportunities for Chinese footballers. Gao Lin (郜林), a regular player in the Chinese setup who now plays at Shanghai Shenhua FC, is reportedly not willing to discuss a new contract with the team, and seeking out opportunities in European leagues. 

Related Reads:

• Xue Yong: Serfs Emancipation in Chinese Football (Chinese)
• AFC: Zhou move sparks ‘Bosman’ talk

Photo: PSV Media

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1. Juguo Rules the Games 

51 golds, 21 silvers and 28 bronzes, a total 100 medals. China for the first time surpassed the US in the number of golds won most golds in an Olympic Games by sticking to its juguo or whole-nation sports regime. People at the General Administration of Sport of China, the governing body of China’s sports, had since been discussing about proliferating their successful juguo model into a more popular sport, football.

2. Lin Miaoke, Blackout and the Opening Ceremony

The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games will be long remembered not only by its pyrotechnics and drum show, but also a girl named Lin Miaoke, who lip-synced when singing ‘Ode to the Motherland.’  “The reason was for the national interest,” said Chen Qigang, the musical director of the opening ceremony in a radio interview. Chen added that the decision of doing lip-syncing was made at the highest level. It goes without saying that whoever knew about this decision before the ceremony were cool about it, even the parents of Lin Miaoke and Yang Peiyi, the real singer, for whatever reasons that I can’t understand. 

Chen’s so-called ‘national interest’ did scare me, along with the blackout struck our community in Beijing on August 8, 15 minutes after the show began. I saw my neighbors helplessly talking to one other in the alley and guiltily drove to my friend’s. No one told us we were to have a blackout, and no one even came to us to explain what had happened after August 8. A Caijing article later showed that at least 15 pathetic residential communities in Chaoyang District had blackout that night, together contributing to the ‘national interest’ unknowingly. The lip-syncing girl at least had a shot of rejecting doing good to the ‘national interest,’ we didn’t. And that’s only in Beijing, the capital city.

3. Age Of Chinese Women Gymnasts Questioned

Chinese women gymnasts, He Kexin and Jiang Yuyuan, were questioned about their ages after winning golds at the Games. It all began with Stryde’s hack of Chinese websites. All evidence disappeared, ID cards and passports provided. Sorry American girls, you did really well in the games but Chinese did better, if not in the indoor stadium. 

4. Yi Jianlian and CBA Age Scandals

Ages of 22 CBA players were found to have been changed their ages before the new season in the new yearbook issued by CBA, the governing body of Chinese basketball. The association then told media that there’re actually 26 players changed their ages, submitting all the info to FIBA and acting like they had no idea about the situation before. Early this December, a reporter at the Chinese-language version of Sports Illustrated found evidence suggesting that Yi Jianlian, New Jersey Nets forward, is 3 years older than he claimed to be.

5. Horse Gambling in Wuhan

Some 3 million jobs and 100 billion Chinese yuan annual sales sound so enticing that gambling, after nearly 60-year ban in China, reappeared in a different form of packaging. And looks like it will be welcomed even more by the government under the current economic circumstances. 

6. China Bowl Canceled by NFL Again

From Hongda’s withdrawal from Formula One to MLB and NFL’s job cuts, sports industry was so much struck by the slumping economy this winter. China bowl was once again canceled by NFL and New England Patriots closed its office in Beijing.

7. Li Ning Lit the Olympic Flame

Li Ning’s lighting of the Olympic cauldron at the closing ceremony is no doubt the biggest ambush marketing in Olympic history. Although not an official Olympic sponsor, the Chinese sportswear manufacturer must have sold more sneakers thanks to the incomparable publicity it enjoyed at the ceremony. Li Ning penned a contract with Los Angeles Clippers’ Baron Davis this November, a branding move that can be translated as ‘we don’t care much about the North American market.’

8. Fenglu Club Vs. CBA

It’s sad after so much preparation and promises and Fenglu still hadn’t gotten what they wanted, a seat at Chinese Basketball Association, China’s top basketball league. “Geographical balance” might be the weirdest explanation one can ever think of, and unfortunately that’s all CBA could offer for the club.

9. Liu Xiang’s Last Minute Withdrawal         

For millions of Chinese fans, Liu Xiang is simply a source of national pride, the same complex Chinese people had towards China women’s national volleyball team in the 1980s, after claiming five straight major titles. Liu’s last minute withdrawal at the Beijing Games were widely sympathized by fans except for the anger from the scalpers. Liu, 110-meter hurdler, had been covered almost everyday by Chinese media after winning gold in 2004 Athens Olympics. Some said he was hurt not by injury, but the overzealous Chinese media.

10. Chinese Football Out for 2010 World Cup

Chinese football fans could not be downhearted more this year. The national men’s football team was eliminated in the 2010 World Cup Qualifiers this June and lost whatever match they could lose in the rest of the year. Yesterday on December 30, Wei Shaohui, the manager of the men’s team and an official at Chinese Football Association, apologized in a press conference for the poor performance of the team with his theory about potency, “we’ll be potent again when the performance gets better.”

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China Sports Review previously told you about the age scandal over Chinese basketball and football players. Li Zhigang, a reporter from the Chinese version of Sports Illustrated (体育画报), posted an article on his blog yesterday about the investigation over Yi Jianlian‘s age. Yi, now playing at the New Jersey Nets, entered NBA in 2007/2008 season. For those of you who’re not familiar with the story of his age, below are some excerpts from Wikipedia:

“The only one I need to get now is the Olympic gold medal – I’ve done everything else in amateur boxing,” Katie Taylor, 22, told the Irish Times after returning home from the 5th AIBA Women’s World Boxing Championships in Ningbo, China’s Zhejiang Province. “It is my dream to be an Olympic champion so hopefully my dreams can come true in four years time.” The Irish boxer is a hundred percent not the only one who’s stoked by this Olympic dream. The recent Championships wrapped up in Ningbo saw China top the medal tally with 5 golds, 2 silvers and 4 bronzes, with another two boxers finishing at fifth place.

“Women boxing will definitely go Olympic, it’s just a matter of time,” Chang Jianping (常建平), AIBA vice-president and president of the Chinese Boxing Association (CBA, 中国拳击协会) told the Beijing News. Rumor has it that it’s possible the International Olympic Committee will set 4 to 6 golds for grabs in women boxing fours years later in London, if not as many as 11 golds in mens’. “Should the sport goes Olympic, its development here just can not be stopped,” Chang noted. Yes, with this promising women boxing team, the made-in-China Olympic machine would generate more power in the next Olympic Games, and the generous GASC will of course throw more Renminbi into the CBA without thinking twice.

“I am here to achieve things,” said Tian Dong (田东), a coach of the women’s team. “I’ve told director Bao, my superior, at the beginning that I would do this even without salary. But I guarantee you it’s definitely worth it if you offer me RMB 1 million (roughly $145,260 USD) per year for the post. You tell me if it’s worth it if you trade 1 million yuan for an Olympic gold medal.”

Sources and Reads:

• The New York Times: China’s Pride: A 24-Karat Olympic Machine
• The Guardian: AIBA calls for women’s boxing at London 2012
• The Irish Times: Taylor sets sights on gold as Olympics committee weighs up women’s boxing

Photo: People Daily

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Beijing Youth Daily (北京青年报) yesterday published an impressive article about the future of China’s professional football league. The General Administration of Sport of China (GASC) and the Chinese Football Association (CFA) are currently considering taking back the ownership of football clubs from companies to local sports bureaus, a move clearly trying to put Chinese football under its controversial juguo or whole-nation sports regime. Below are some excerpts:

The establishment of professional football league made companies the owners of respective clubs. It bore some fruits to Chinese football but some defects as well. The professional league made all bosses of the teams put all of their energy into the first teams only, while neglecting the development of young talents of Chinese footabll. Moreover, the GASC and the CFA are left with little control over the clubs during the struggle of interests between them and club owners, a good example would be Wuhan Guanggu’s withdrawal from the Chinese Super League early this summer.

The GASC has held a couple of meetings after the Beijing Games discussing the problems of Chinese footabll. They come to the conclusion that the disastrous situation of Chinese football is brought on by poor management of football clubs. We haven’t seen the advantages of juguo sports regime from this department to date.

The GASC is preparing to take back to ownership of football clubs to local football associations and sports bureaus, making them the beneficiaries during club transactions and the main shareholders of clubs. Meanwhile, Companies can only become ad sponsors and cannot go into the management of the clubs.

Should the doomed Chinese football be juguoed as athletics, the GASC ideally would infuse a huge amount of capital into local sports bureaus to keep those youth teams, if they exist, up and running. But seriously, is Chinese football to cross the river by feeling the stones or go into the caves?  The Chinese men’s national football team has so far disqualified from whatever tournaments they attended and this probably made the smart guys at the GASC felt they got nothing to lose.

The Chinese football league was established in 1994.  The Chinese Super League, the top tier pro league, has given us enough shenanigans this year from club withdrawals to on-field fightings, and is banned by China Central Television, China’s main TV station, from broadcasting.

Source:

• Beijing Youth Daily: The GASC to take back football club ownerships (Chinese)
• BBC: China TV bans top football league

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