Chinese football hit a new low on June 23 as the national U-23 squad were beaten 1-3 in Muscat by their Omanian peers and lost 1-4 on aggregate in 2012 London Olympic Games qualifiers. The defeat marks not only the most short-lived U-23 team in the history of Chinese football, but also could make Miroslav Blažević, the acclaimed Croat coach, the most short-serving national team manager since the Communist Revolution after only two competitive matches of coaching.

Chinese U-23 Team Lost in Muscat, Oman

Commentators, pundits and fans voiced their upset and anger on Chinese micro-blogging sites towards the Iranian Mohsen Torky and his linesmen, whose refereeing could be called into question on several occasions, most notably China’s goal called offside in the 93-minute. Miroslav Blažević reportedly called the referee a pickpocket when the team arrived back to their hotel. And almost as always, following Chinese teams’ defeats, the Chinese FA (CFA) was immediately criticized as corrupt and defunct.

With the likes of Nan Yong and Yang Yimin toppled in last year’s crackdown, the CFA formed its new leadership headed by Wei Di, former boss of China’s aquatic sports. Wei and his colleagues, as our ultimate Guo’an supporter B.Cheng noted in a post earlier, made a couple dubious calls leading up to U-23′s failure. But in the 18 months since Wei stepped in, he and his colleagues actually accomplished several things that should be given credit to.

The CFA’s recent accomplishments:

• Ending the ridiculous transfer policy that made players immovable up to 30 months (I’ll explain more about this in a separate post).
• Bringing back the reserve leagues – the attendance is not compulsory for all teams in the leagues as some clubs say they don’t have a budget for players’ traveling cost.
• Bringing back the FA Cup – a tournament seized to exist since 2006.
• Setting up National Youth Football Leagues (青少年足球联赛) -teams competing in this category are still mainly from pro clubs.
• Setting up School Football Test Cities (校园足球城市试点), a project initiated by a few politicians from the State Council, China’s cabinet, and jointly helped by the General Administration of Sport and the Ministry of Education. The CFA has a small office and a handful of people doing the fieldwork and, up until now, there’re  over 2,700 elementary and junior highs in 47 cities around the country signed aboard.

None of these works can offer short-term return to Chinese football, but all are positive for the development of the sport in the long run.  I’m especially amazed by the Test Cities project but if you really think about it, those kids in over 2,700 schools, an enormous players base, a new question emerged – how are you going to engage these boys 10 years from now?

The top priority on the FA’s agenda should be shedding their image as a bunch of officials who sit in their offices all day doing nothing but taking bribes and rigging matches. And if you have this image ingrained in people’s minds, I really don’t see many parents would consider football as a decent option for their kids. In fact, due to the former transfer policy and a lack of an independent players association, the welfare of Chinese footballers have been sandwiched by the FA and their employers all these years.

Take, for example, two Guangzhou Evergrande (广州恒大) players in the reverse team. The two blasted out their discontent about salaries on a micro-blogging site this May, and were fired the day after doing that. This, if put in perspective, is a dictating and irresponsible act from one of the weathest and most influential clubs in Chinese Super League. I wonder where could the two kids go and what other clubs might think after the incident. The FA offered no help to the two boys and didn’t say anything about the case. What they should do is let the players in the leagues feel they are valued and got their back given there is no players union.

The football population has been decreasing sharply all around China in the past decade. According to Shenzhen Evening News, there were 21 privately-run football academies that had 1,290 kids studying and over 70 football clubs with over 5,000 kids back in 2002 in Liaoning Province. The number of registered football academies this year is down to zero.

The hopes remains only if the FA conjures up a way of selecting the best talents from around the country. To achieve that, they need to a) establish a mechanism that can transfer new blood up through the ranks all the way from schools to pro clubs and b) let potential pro players feel that they have a future in this profession. Otherwise, we can expect Chinese football to tumble further.

Photo: Netease

The China Football Association handed out another round of rulings this week, demoting Guangzhou Pharmaceutical and Chengdu Sheffield United from the China Super League after evidence showed the teams had bribed opponents during the 2006 and 2007 seasons. Additionally, Qingdao Hailifeng was disqualified after police said the team’s chairman, Du Yunqi gambled during the end of a game, attempting to manipulate the score so Du could win more money. Both Du and the Hailifeng team captain were arrested. Global Times ran an article earlier this week outlining the new rulings.

The investigations into corruption within the China Football Association have been going on for several months, and include hundreds of players, officials, owners and referees, amounting to one of the largest investigations in recent Chinese sports history. What has not been addressed throughout the fiasco is the football beat reporters’ role in the scandals brought to light.

In a January 2010 China Sports Review article, it was reported Nan Yong, vice president of the China Football Association and Yang Yimin, a senior official in both the China Football Association and the Asian Football Confederation, along with Zhang Jianqiang, China Football Asociation’s head of referees, were detained by the police for interrogation. Newspapers that reported on Nan Yong and Yang Yimin initially were able to pull up instances of corruption, gambling and match-fixing over the span of a decade. The Guangzhou, Chengdu and Qingdao teams just exposed for bribery and match-fixing relate to games played as far back as four years ago.

I was recently asked whether the illicit behavior taking place in the China Football League was a failure of Chinese newspapers to act as a watchdog for the sport. I responded by asking that given the enormity of the investigations, their scope and the more than 10-year time frame we’re looking at, the question should really be which news organizations were NOT involved in some way with the corruption? This investigation is so sweeping and comprehensive it would not be surprising to find out most journalists were privy to information that would have gotten league officials and team owners in trouble. And if that were the case, it would mean journalists had an incentive going for them to not report the problems within the league.

I am not naming names. I am not implicating anyone or organization with this article. In fact, I have no actual proof that journalists are guilty of anything. For all I know, they very well could have had no knowledge of the corruption, gambling and match fixing. But in this instance, where the top officials have been detained, where teams are being handed severe penalties, where the whole league is being looked at from top to bottom, I have to imagine reporters, photographers and editors around China knew at least some of the information way before the scandal broke. And by “way before” I mean years before.

So why was the corruption not exposed earlier? Did reporters really have no knowledge? Or were they told not to report the truth? Were they bribed as well? Were they handed shut up money just like the reporters that kept quiet after the Hebei mining disaster? Was it to their advantage not to say anything in order to keep reporting on football? And were the newsroom editors just as oblivious?

Should the China Football Association decide to impose more penalties and fines during the investigation — and we’re far from the end — it will not be complete unless the league sits down with media organizations and talks with those that covered the sport.

— Zachary Franklin

When Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger visited Beijing last summer, there was one question in his mind. At a press conference, he asked the moderator, Huang Jianxiang, a well-known local football commentator, why China, with so many people, lacked a first-rate football team.

The question was laughed off by the commentator, who replied that it was because “We never had a coach like you.”

But coaching isn’t the core problem in Chinese football. The recent crackdown on match-fixing and underground gambling tells one that the beautiful game has rotten to the core in China.

In the past three months, more than 100 players, club owners and officials have been entangled in the investigation and last week both Nan Yong, vice president of the Chinese Football Association (FA) and Yang Yimin, a senior official in both the FA and the Asian Football Confederation, along with Zhang Jianqiang, FA’s head of referees, were detained by the police for interrogation.

Without waiting for formal charges, the three, who had each served in the FA for over 18 years, were soon ousted by the General Administration of Sport (GAS), the top governing body of sports in the country.

The news came as little surprise to many Chinese sports journalists. Instead of assuming their role as watchdogs by exposing wrongdoing in the sporting industry, they are now reveling in their knowledge of match-fixing scandals.

They’re making appearances in talk shows or shilling new books, enlightening the public about the severity of the scandals and how there’re still “big fishes” out there to be caught. But rarely did these stories that they supposedly knew all along make the headlines of their papers or TV programs.

At the end of 2007, CCTV-5, China’s main sports channel, did a program evaluating the work done by Xie Yalong, then FA president. After the program gave Xie low marks, the FA began snubbing interview requests from journalists representing the channel. The message from officials couldn’t have been clearer, and the media, eager to keep their access, understood it well.

Besides media indifference, the absence of law enforcement and tacit condoning of corruption by GAS are all causes of the ignominious practices in football. Evidence suggests that bribery and match-fixing prevail in the Chinese sporting world.

The current investigation in football was made possible only after top government officials decided that they wanted to “raise the level of Chinese football.” What is happening in football industry could well mirror other aspects of Chinese sport.

Last year, after Ma Yanping, an acclaimed diving coach, exposed that the finals of diving competition of last year’s 11th National Games had been rigged by Zhou Jihong, head of China’s national diving team and deputy director of the National Aquatics Sport Administration Center, officials from GAS soon came into Zhou’s defense. The police were nowhere to be seen.

Asked about the scandal by a reporter, Zhou, who helped China get 7 out of 8 gold medals with her strikingly young-looking diving team at the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, retorted, “Which media organization do you work for?”

When addressing the same topic, Xiao Tian, deputy director of GAS said at a press conference that “you can’t say it had been fucking fixed, it’s fucking fake, just because you lost.”

In a post-match interview at the 11th National Games, He Wenna, China’s first trampoline Olympic champion, said that she knew who would win the finals long ago. There was no follow-up investigation and He was later criticized at a GAS meeting for her words.

The same happened at the judo, basketball and football matches of the National Games.

More recently, in the run-up to 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games and Asian Para Games, members of the Guangzhou People’s Congress Standing Committee complained about a lack of information from the organizing committee on the sources and destinations of the funds for the two Games.

It’s reported that the Games cost 200 billion yuan ($29.28 billion) but no official figures have been released so far. Some worry that the lack of information on such a scale of government spending has already led to waste and embezzlement of taxpayers’ money.

It’s interesting to see how this heavy-handed investigation in football will play out, as the results might even shock those who started it.

Sport has long been regarded as a source of national pride in China. But when pride conflicts with laws and ethics and you hesitate, even for a moment, the battle against corruption is already lost.

Related reading:

• CS Moniter: Is China finally tackling its soccer corruption scourge?
• South China Morning Post: Another day, another raft of soccer scandals (subscription req’ed)
• Gongti Legends: Is it all worth it?
• Global Times: Fair play is sadly missing from Chinese sporting world