China Loves Its Soccer. Its Team? Don’t Ask.
Chinese soccer fans before China played Belgium on Sunday. The fans' support has not been reflected in the results of the men's national and Olympic teams.
QINHUANGDAO, China — The kick in the groin was the low point of the Olympic Games for hundreds of millions of Chinese sports fans.
It came 52 minutes into the China-Belgium men’s soccer match Sunday when a Chinese player, Tan Wangsong, having just missed the ball, swung his foot straight into the private parts of a Belgian player, Sébastien Pocognoli, leaving him writhing in pain on the field. The kick resulted in the game’s first red card and automatic ejection. The second, 12 minutes later, was charged to the Chinese team captain, Zheng Zhi, for elbowing an opposing player.
As usual, jokes about the Chinese team fanned across the Internet: “The Chinese team just won two red medals.” “Our soccer team won the gold medal in martial arts.” “China has had a weird year, with a freak snowstorm, the Tibetan riots and an earthquake, but the performance of our soccer team shows that some things never change.”
In its quest for sports supremacy, China is placing its hopes for winning the medal count on a panoply of athletes honed to near perfection in sports like gymnastics, diving, rowing, table tennis and hurdling. It has shown its athletic prowess by climbing atop the medals table in the opening days of competition. The nation, though, demands much less of its men’s soccer team.
After a 3-0 loss to Brazil in this coastal city, the team exited the Summer Games with exactly what its legions of exhausted fans expected — no victories in three games.
Soccer may be the sport the Chinese care about above all else, but it is also the one that most frustrates and disappoints them. The men's national and Olympic teams are the objects of scorn, shame and much hand-wringing.
For Chinese men proud of international sports stars like Yao Ming in basketball and the hurdler Liu Xiang, the soccer team endures as the ultimate symbol of humiliation. After the Chinese women’s soccer team beat Argentina, 2-0, on Tuesday, its coach, Shang Ruihua, said, “Our strikers did such a great job that I even told them they should start playing for our men’s team now.”
After the men lost to Brazil, angry fans outside the stadium held a miniprotest that broke up when the riot police arrived.
“We play soccer like the Brazilians play Ping-Pong,” Li Weifeng, 30, the new team captain, said with a deflated voice afterward.
Many Chinese would say that is an insult to Brazilian table tennis players.
“It’s so beyond an embarrassment that it almost seems like a comedy,” a popular soccer columnist, Li Chengpeng, said in an interview before the match. “We’ve cried our tears dry, and now it’s time for us to enjoy the big show, because you never know how our team is going to lose this time.”
Soccer presents the biggest conundrum for the Chinese sports machine — the country has the money, the population and the fan base to put together a world-class team, yet has not succeeded. The men’s national team has been to the World Cup only once, when Japan and South Korea were the hosts in 2002, but it failed to score a goal in three games. In 2004, Chinese fans nearly rioted in Beijing when China lost the Asian Cup final to Japan, 3-1. The latest embarrassment came in June, when the team lost to Iraq in a World Cup qualifying match, 2-1. China was later eliminated from qualifying for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
Chinese leaders generally try to silence widespread criticism of national symbols, but with men’s soccer, the government allows people to vent.
Everyone piles on, including state news media like CCTV and Xinhua, celebrity sports bloggers, even other athletes and coaches. Fans also openly deride the head of the government-run Chinese Football Association, Xie Yalong, a former senior official from Shaanxi Province. “Xie Yalong must resign!” became a loud chant at the last two Olympic matches, and Xie was seen leaving the Belgium match early.
Many Chinese sports analysts and scholars point to endemic corruption within the association as one cause of the sport’s ills. The association started the current league system in 1994, and soccer became the first sport to achieve commercial success in China, with sponsors pouring in millions of dollars.
Xu Guoqi, a professor of East Asian history at Kalamazoo College and the author of a new book on China and the Olympics, said Chinese soccer would improve only after the rule of law is established in China. He said disappointment with soccer could lead to the next “major revolution” in China. And he was not joking.
“Without rule of law, corruption will get involved, and nobody is responsible to anyone,” said Xu, who wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post last month lamenting the state of Chinese soccer. “If Chinese continue to be obsessed with soccer, they’ll definitely demand something dramatic, something political or involving rule of law. It will start with sports, and then it will move onto something bigger.”
Big money is part of the problem, he said, with most Chinese male soccer players making annual salaries of more than one million yuan, or $146,000, in a country where the average citizen’s income is less than $3,000. It goes to their heads, he said.
The Chinese news media often report on the flashy lives that many soccer players lead. Players have been caught with drugs and prostitutes. Such behavior is not that unusual for international soccer stars, but is out of the norm for Chinese athletes.
Women’s players in China are much more grounded, Xu said, perhaps because their salaries are a fraction of the men’s. The women’s national team, nicknamed the Iron Roses, has seen relative success, reaching the World Cup final in 1999, when it lost to the United States in a penalty-kick shootout.
Lu You, who anchors a soccer show on CCTV, also said outsized incomes and high expectations had crippled men’s soccer.
“If they win, we treat them as heroes,” she said. “If they lose, we say, ‘Go to hell.’ ”
Other factors could be hobbling men’s soccer, experts said. Perhaps too few children are being encouraged to play. Also, the state system of training athletes works well in sports in which individuals excel — table tennis or gymnastics, for example — but falls short in soccer because of the cost of sustaining a team, some experts said.
Li, the columnist, said the government could easily invest $12 million to train a table tennis player, but the resources needed to properly develop a soccer team are beyond the means of the state. A market-based system has to be put in place, he said.
“It represents the most outdated management system that still exists in this country,” he said. “You can’t run a soccer team the same way you train table tennis players, which is exactly what they’re doing right now.”
Against Brazil, Chinese fans tried to leave their ambivalence at home. They came with red-painted faces, draped in flags and wearing red headbands that said, “China must win!” The 33,000-seat stadium was nearly full.
The sheer love among Chinese for soccer was demonstrated by the loud welcome they gave the Brazilian players, especially Ronaldinho.
The cheers went up again when Diego scored the first goal of the night for Brazil. “I love their technique,” said Cui Wei, 30, a high school teacher who had driven five hours to see the match. “It’s gentle and soft.”
She added, “They enjoy playing soccer, while the Chinese view it as a fight.”
After Brazil scored twice more in the second half, fans chanted for the resignation of Xie, the head of the soccer association. The fans began trickling home before the game ended.
Li, the Chinese captain, faced dozens of disappointed Chinese reporters after the game.
“The Chinese people have intense wishes for a strong Chinese team, but we need more tolerance and time,” he said. “Like you, we also want to improve, to make a change.”
His dejected look said that perhaps he had taken to heart a common assessment of the team by Chinese fans: “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.”
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