Corruption, real estate and health crises: the descent into hell of Chinese football

Chinese fans during the friendly match between New Zealand and China, March 26, 2023 in Wellington. AFP - MARTY MELVILLE

Text by: Zhifan Liu Follow

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Beijing on Monday (April 3rd) appointed a seven-member team to take over the Chinese Football Association. The president and vice-president of the institution are accused of corruption as the local championship struggles to recover from the real estate crisis and the Covid-19 epidemic.

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The list of leaders under investigation for corruption continues to grow every week. Du Zhaocai is the latest. The vice president of the Chinese Football Association (CFA) joins his former superior, Chen Xuyuan, who is accused of "serious violations of the law", a vague and catch-all motive to signify that he has fallen into the nets of the anti-corruption campaign that affects the Chinese football world.

Before him, in November 2022, it was Li Tie, then coach of the national team, who fell for the same reason. The news had caused a stir in the country, as the former Everton midfielder is considered one of the best footballers in the history of the country. In total, nearly a dozen leaders of the Chinese federation are under similar investigation.

39 clubs have disappeared since 2020

At the same time, the Chinese Super League (CSL), the local league, continues to lose feathers. Since 2020 and the spread of the coronavirus epidemic, 39 Chinese professional clubs have disappeared, like Jiangsu Suning FC, which closed in February 2021. Just a few months earlier, the club owned by Chinese e-commerce giant Suning – also majority owner of Inter Milan in Italy – won the Chinese championship. Football has not escaped the paralysis that has affected the country, locked into its strict zero-Covid policy. For nearly three years, CSL meetings were held behind closed doors and in sanitary bubbles.

Guangzhou City announce operation suspension on Wednesday evening after failing to get permission to play in the 2023 Chinese football league. The announcement was issued at 6:23 pm. It symbolizes the date when the club started operation in Guangzhou: June 23, 2011. pic.twitter.com/GHv1uMnDi6

— Titan Sports Plus (@titan_plus) March 30, 2023

At the end of March, eight clubs were banned from professional football leagues by national bodies for unpaid wages or "financial irregularities" Among these teams, two of them ceased operations: Shaanxi Chang'an Athletic FC and Guangzhou City FC. The latter is financed by R&F Properties, a real estate developer. Long robust, the sector has been one of the great moneymakers of Chinese football, but real estate has collapsed, left millions of homeowners on the sidelines and weighed down the Chinese economy.

► Read also: China: in the wake of the fall of the real estate giant Evergrande, the economy falters

Symbol of the end of the golden age of this union between real estate and football, Guangzhou FC, the other city of Guangzhou, was relegated last year to the second national level. Once called Guangzhou Evergrande, after the huge real estate conglomerate, the team coached by Fabio Cannavaro or Marcello Lippi – respectively captain and coach of world champion Italy in 2006 – dominated the CSL with eight titles in the 2010s and two Asian Champions Leagues. As a sign of the real estate developer's ambitions, Evergrande had launched, before the epidemic, the construction of its own stadium for a value of $ 1.8 billion. Riddled with debt, the company had to cancel the project after two years of work.

Making China a football superpower

The 2010s will go down as the golden period of Chinese football, where money flows. According to FIFA, the Chinese Super League spent two billion dollars on transfers over the period. In the 2016 transfer window alone, Chinese clubs squandered $450 million. This is the time when Ezequiel Lavezzi, Alex Teixeira or Hulk tread the Chinese lawns, looking for a golden contract. But the leaders ended up turning off the tap and whistling the end of recess.

Because these crazy expenses are not compatible with the vision of Xi Jinping – a self-proclaimed football fan – and the plan launched by the country's top authorities in 2016, namely to organize and win the football World Cup by 2050. A crazy bet when the national team has played only one World Cup in 2002 in South Korea and Japan for a record of three defeats and no goals scored. Above all, the plan was to make China a superpower of football, like what has become the second world power economically. The initial effort was to focus on training the footballers of tomorrow in football schools.

Six years after China's ambitions, the national team still missed qualifying for the World Cup in Qatar, much to the despair of Chinese fans. Faced with so many misadventures, the government seems to want to change its tune. From now on, each professional club is obliged to develop a women's section to be able to line up in the professional championship. That's good: women have a much better reputation in the country than their male counterparts and a much more extensive track record: eight Asian championship titles, a World Cup final and a silver medal at the Olympic Games. And the Steel Roses, their nickname, will be there for the women's world championship in New Zealand this summer.

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• China
• Football
• Corruption