Timothy Siow 28.10.2012.
China prides itself on its world-class
gymnasts, divers, and table tennis players, but it does not seem capable of putting
together a decent team of eleven footballers. Despite having the most football
fans in the world, China’s national team still languishes at 85th in
the FIFA rankings.
Figure 1 Didier Drogba signs for Shanghai
Shenhua
At 34,
Didier Drogba can already start looking back and reflecting on his career as a
professional footballer. After a rapid, albeit late, rise to prominence, the
Ivorian enjoyed eight seasons at the English Premier League (EPL) club Chelsea
FC where he distinguished himself as one of the EPL’s deadliest strikers,
scoring 157 goals in 341 appearances (Soccernet 2012). In that time, he collected
seven domestic trophies (3 Premier Leagues, 4 FA Cups and 2 League Cups) before
applying the cherry on the cake, scoring the winning penalty as Chelsea claimed
the coveted European Champions League trophy in May of this year (Sky Sports
2012).
Far
from cooling his heels, though, by July Drogba was already undertaking a new project:
helping the sleeping giant, China, develop the world-beating football players it
has craved so badly for so long. At his first press conference after signing a
two-and-a-half year contract with Shanghai Shenhua of the Chinese Super League
(CSL), Drogba declared “I decided to come here because when the club and the
president approached me, I looked at the project and it came with ambitious
ideas. He wants to help football develop in China” (ESPN staff 2012).
Drogba joins
fellow EPL old boys Nicolas Anelka (also of Shenhua, and with whom Drogba
played during his Chelsea days) and Yakubu Aiyegbeni of Guangzhou R&F in
relocating to the Far East. Marcello Lippi, who won the World Cup with Italy in
2006, is another familiar face. He is now coach of Guangzhou Evergrande, the
club that broke the Chinese transfer record twice in quick succession to attain
the Argentine playmaker Dario Conca and Paraguayan marksman Lucas Barrios
(McGowan 2012).
The
former Marseille forward claims “I didn’t come here with the idea of making a
lot of money. I come here because it is a completely different challenge from
what I have seen in Europe before” (ESPN staff 2012). An inescapable fact, though,
is that there is a lot of money on
offer in the CSL for players like Drogba, who will earn a reported US$315,000 a
week (the highest in the CSL) in his two and a half years there (McGowan 2012).
Without the financial incentives in the CSL, it is debatable whether or not these
high-profile players would have even considered the ‘project’ (McGowan 2012).
Drogba
is 100% correct in saying that improving Chinese football will be a challenge. Currently
sitting at 85th place in the FIFA world rankings (FIFA 2012), the
nation has only qualified for the World Cup once – the 2002 competition in
Korea/Japan, which yielded no goals and no points – and has never won a game at
the Olympics (The Economist 2011). Furthermore, unlike other aspects of the
one-party state, Chinese football “is so flagrantly and undeniably terrible and
corrupt that all potshots are allowed” (The Economist 2011). Normal citizens
and the media alike openly deride the team, and a common line is that “there
are two things stopping the Chinese soccer team from going outside Asia to take
part in international games: their left feet and their right feet” (Wong
2008a).
What should
be easier for Drogba is getting the attention of the Chinese public. The nation
is much better at watching and following football than playing it, they are
familiar with Europe’s biggest leagues and the world’s best players. Games at
the 2010 World Cup in South Africa drew average television crowds of 17.5
million viewers in China, more than any other country (FIFA 2010). Many fans of
the game in China routinely stay up late at night to watch the European games.
This includes a man called Jiang Xiaoshan, who died of exhaustion after trying
to watch every game of the 2012 European Championships. As the time difference
meant matches were played in the middle of the night in China, the 26-year-old
went 11 nights without sleep while continuing to go to work during the day
(Moran 2012).
The
most pertinent issue hindering the quality of Chinese football has for a long
time been corruption and match-fixing scandals. In 1994, the state-run teams were
opened up to corporate sponsorship and investment and the new, ‘professional’
CSL was created. The marketisation of Chinese football produced a sudden surge
in the wages Chinese footballers could earn but this, of course, was not evenly
distributed across the league. Clubs owned by less wealthy investors, as a
result, began to fix games so their players could earn more money. Soon,
“gambling syndicates, including the triads, began exerting influence over
investors, referees, coaches and players” (The Economist 2011), and a regime of
corruption evolved and became institutionalised into Chinese football.
This
was allowed to continue unchecked as the Chinese Football Association (CFA), an
arm of the single-party state, was both “deeply involved in [the] fixing [of] matches…
[and] the authority charged with investigating and punishing misconduct” (The
Economist 2011). Furthermore, the director of the CFA also runs the Football
Management Centre, which is responsible for managing the corporate sponsorships.
In other words, it is a “‘one office, two signs’ situation, which characterises
much of the economic and political system” (The Editors 2010).
Corruption
has been so widespread in Chinese football that in 2009, Nan Yong and Xie
Yalong, two former directors of the Chinese Football Administrative Centre were
found to have accepted US$190,000 worth of bribes (Century 2012) and sentenced
to ten-and-a-half years’ jail (McGowan 2012). On top of this, former national
team members Shen Si was given six years, and Qi Hong, Jiang Jin, and Li Ming
five-and-a-half (McGowan 2012). Lu Jun, ‘the Golden Whistle’, who was
previously known to be the best and cleanest referee in the country was also
jailed for participating in match-fixing (Osnos 2012) and in total, “more than 50 former players,
coaches, referees and other officials have been convicted of corruption” so far
(Barboza 2012). In 2001, a similar, though less extensive, bust-up of
corruption in Chinese football was conducted (The Economist 2011).
The marquee
signings have gone some way already to rebuilding the reputation of the CSL.
With Drogba and Anelka, the average attendance of Shenhua’s games has risen
from 15,000 to 25,000 (Century 2012) and across the board, “attendance is up
almost 15% so far this season – the highest in Asia” (Duerden 2012). However,
that Liu Jun, the general manager of Jiangsu Sainty (currently second in the
table) had to deny allegations of match fixing in their recent 1-1 draw against
15th-placed Shanghai Shenxin (Tang 2012a), reminds us that there is
still much to be improved on done. Put simply, the football-loving country must
be encouraged to play the game, and those
who do must be motivated to play it well.
The inflated
wages and patronage system have long contributed to an environment that does
not pressure Chinese ‘professional’ footballers to improve their game. As Evergrande’s
South Korean manager Lee Jang-soo puts it, Chinese football is “mainly about
connections, not hard work” (The Economist 2011). This is evident as Nan Yong
once “confessed that players could buy spots on the national team for 100,000
yuan” (The Economist 2011). While observers like Ma Dexing, “the editor in
chief of Titan Sports online, China’s largest sports Web portal” (Century
2012), believe expensive foreign imports like Drogba are “upping the level of
the entire league because everyone is vying to be better than [them]” (Century
2012), “the best players at Evergrande, the nation’s top club, are [still] mostly
foreigners earning millions of dollars a year” (The Economist 2011).
The
number of Chinese youngsters playing the game has steadily declined in the past
couple of decades. From 1990 to 2000 more than 600,000 teenagers in China were
playing organised football but this has steadily declined. From 2000 to 2005
there were roughly 180,000 participants in this age group and today, estimates
are that there are only 100,000 (The Economist 2011). An even more startling
statistic is that China has “fewer than 10,000 registered under-12 players”
while “Japan, the Asian champion, with a population a tenth of the size of
China, has more than 300,000” (Duerden 2012).
Parents
“don’t want their kids associated with something which has got such a poor
record and high profile in terms of corruption”, says Simon Chadwick, a sport
business strategy professor at Coventry University in England (McGowan 2012).
Parents also generally consider education to be the “lone path to upward
mobility” (The Economist 2011) and see sports as a distraction as China’s
academic system is particularly strenuous. The most accepted measure of
inequality is the Gini coefficient, where higher scores reflect higher levels
inequality. China’s rose from 41.5 in 2007 to 48 in 2009 (comparable to the
United States, which is known for its inequality) (CIA, date unknown), illustrating
that concern over social and economic mobility is a very serious factor in the
decline of participation in football in China.
Evergrande
recently built a football school in partnership with Spanish giants Real Madrid
in an attempt to kick-start a reinvigoration process. Placing their first-team
coach Marcello Lippi in charge of the school, they anticipated that up to 3,000
students (aged 7-12) would enrol at the school in the first year and spent more
than US$15.9 million scouring 65,106 primary schools around the country for
prospective students. Disappointingly, only 1086 students have enrolled so far (Tang
2012b).
Additionally,
the CFA “institute[d] the China School Football program in 2009 to promote
grassroots football nationwide, receiving FIFA’s Development Award for doing
so” (Lamb 2012; Simpson 2009). The program was sponsored by the Dalian Wanda
Holdings Company, who contributed US$77 million to reach out to over a million
children in 44 cities (Lamb 2012). They brought in Tom Byer, a former
professional footballer held in high-esteem for his success as a youth football
coach in Japan, to spearhead the program. Byer’s T3 company provides coaching
services for youth players and their coaches, helps develop specific programs
and curriculum for youth development, and assists in producing and providing
media and training-enhancing software (Lamb 2012).
China
receiving the FIFA Development Award for the School Football initiative has
been derided by fans that point out that the program has only just begun and
barely proven its durability or effectiveness (Simpson 2009). As Rowan Simons, a
director of Club Football, points out: “It is easy to get lots of kids to play
football once to meet a central target. But how many will still be involved
next year?” (Simpson 2009). One other fact highlighted by Simons is that the
program was spread out across 44 cities, and the total funding was “not enough
to build one new football pitch in each city” (Simpson 2009).
It is
not that China is uninterested in or incapable of developing world-class sportspeople
and their performances at Olympic Games are evidence to this. It is that football
represents a different challenge altogether. While “many of the Olympic sports
are minority sports [and] it’s possible [for China] to manufacture world
champions in those sports… Football is the world’s most popular game and the
competition is fierce” (Associated Press 2008). The blueprint that delivers so
many gold medals for China seems to be hindering their development of a
world-beating football team.
Based
on the ‘Soviet model’, China strives to identify potential talent early to put
them through highly specialised and intensive programs as soon as possible. Long
limbed children, for example, are funnelled into sports like athletics, rowing,
swimming, diving or gymnastics programs while still very young.
Football,
however, is less discriminatory when it comes to physical attributes. As Craig
Foster, a football analyst-cum-journalist and former Socceroo, puts it, “while
the physical demands of [football] are extreme, technique with the ball always
prevails over physicality. Other [sports], meanwhile, have a minimum physical
and athletic requirement of size and strength, rather than skill” (Foster
2009). Think of the ‘stocky’ Diego Maradona, or Lionel Messi, who required
extensive and expensive treatment for a growth-hormone deficiency he was
diagnosed with at age 11 (White 2009) (The Economist 2011) – they are
considered two of the game’s greatest exponents.
Additionally,
those who are not earmarked as potential athletes go into the education system
as “regular students [who] are often explicitly forbidden from playing sports
until they reach university, supposedly because it will harm their studies”
(Century 2012), which effectively dashes the chances of China uncovering
players in the calibre of Didier Drogba, who was not brought up in an academy
system and did not start training professionally every day until he was in his
late teens (McCarra 2006).
Another
example is Edison Arantes do Nascimento, or as he is better known, Pelé. Pelé grew
up poor on the outskirts of São Paulo in Brazil and the first games he played were
with socks stuffed with newspaper or grapefruits as improvised footballs (Fish
& Pelé 1977). Arguably, his raw talent, passion and will to improve,
combined with an environment that encouraged experimentation were crucial in helping
him become one of the most prolific-ever strikers in history.
It is
clear that Drogba’s and Pelé’s are the types of narratives Chinese football is
missing out on as it perseveres with its centralised training system and this
is where the razzle-dazzle of the Drogbas and the Anelkas gets rendered into
the background and the problems become political (Lamb 2012). The system, after
all, is a product of China’s political structure.
A group
of editors at the New York Times (NYT) (2010) have suggested that “perhaps the
Chinese government fears that small soccer clubs could become a ‘bottom-up’
social movement that would challenge the Communist Party”. That is, if the
state were to permit the formation of non-state clubs, loyalties could
potentially migrate from the state’s sports bureaucracies to these clubs and
networks of parents, teachers, coaches and parents-as-coaches working together
could be formed (The Editors 2010). The fact is that “government-paid coaches,
minders and state-of-the-art facilities all allow for great control over the
training and guidance of athletes” (The Editors 2010).
Xu
Guoqi, a professor of East Asian history at Kalamazoo College, warns that “if
Chinese continue to be obsessed” with the Real Madrids and Manchester Uniteds
of world football, they will want China to start developing world-class
footballers too (Wong 2008b). He says, “they’ll definitely demand something
dramatic, something political or involving rule of law [to make it happen]... It
will start with sports, and then it will move onto something bigger” (Wong
2008b).
Funds are
being poured into attracting established foreign talent to rid China’s domestic
competition of the corruption and match-fixing of its recent past and more fans
are filling up the stadiums or tuning in on their televisions. The money is
even beginning to target youth development as participation has steadily fallen
over the years. But stars and money can only take Chinese football so far as the
population’s struggles for social and economic mobility and the shortcomings of
China’s education and sports systems seem to be the real issues holding the
Middle Kingdom back.
Didier
Drogba says he’s serious about improving Chinese football, but his intentions
will come to nothing as long as the politics remain as they are. As “a
mid-level functionary in China’s state security apparatus” has put it: “You
know all those problems with society that you like to blame on China’s
political system? Well it really is like that with football” (The Economist
2011).
References:
Fish,
RL & Pelé (1977), ‘Chapter 2’, My
Life and The Beautiful Game: The Autobiography of Pelé, Doubleday &
Company Inc., Garden City, New York
