Olympic pride makes no secret of Chinese football debacle

As the Chinese government tried last week to focus attention on the Winter Olympic Games, hundreds of millions of football fans in the country were in mourning. Just days earlier, its men’s national team had been eliminated by Vietnam from qualifying for the 2022 World Cup. The humiliating 3-1 loss means that football-mad China, who last participated in 2002 in a World Cup of the World, will remain a fifth consecutive tournament at home.

The defeat is not limited to the field of play. Since the late 2000s, Xi Jinping has sought to build a Chinese team worthy of a superpower. It’s one of Xi’s most high-profile initiatives, and so far it’s a flop: China’s national team is currently ranked 74th in the world, sandwiched between Montenegro and Iraq.

In China, the pomp and wide coverage of the Winter Games overshadow this conspicuous failure. But after the Olympic flame goes out, the Chinese will be right to wonder why their most powerful leader in generations has failed to create a soccer team worthy of their country’s global status.

In modern China, politics and sports are inseparable. In the 1950s, Mao Zedong pushed his government to develop athletes who could compete against athletes from the West in prestigious events and serve as representatives of China’s growing national strength. In 1984, five years after China’s economic reform and opening-up, the country sent a delegation to the Los Angeles Olympics with the slogan: “Get out of Asia and forward to the world.”

China won gold at those games, the first since 1952, and now regularly competes against the US to top the medal table at the Summer Olympics. At home, these successes, combined with hosting two Olympics in the country, are regularly presented as achievements (and deserved) by an emerging global power.

However, China lacks uniform sporting success, especially in team sports like basketball and soccer. The latter has proven particularly problematic for both sports fans and Chinese officials. Not only is it very popular in China, but it is still the most important sport in the world. And the World Cup, the world’s most prominent individual sporting event, remains China’s most elusive athletic aspiration.

The problems are many, including a lack of youth soccer training opportunities and decades of endemic corruption in the sport. During China’s brief participation in the World Cup in 2002, the team failed to score a single goal, an unfortunate high point for the struggling team.

Failure, like success, is politicized in Chinese sports. Fans have long equated China’s corrupt soccer leagues with the political corruption that has long plagued the government, especially at the local level. A weak national team, from this point of view, is a benchmark for an underperforming nation. In 2013, after a national team loss to a Thai team, Chinese fans caused an uproar, with a prominent government-owned newspaper editorializing: “Increasing national strength in the face of a declining level of football will lead to growing dissatisfaction among a large number of fans.

That dissatisfaction did not go unnoticed. In 2011, then Vice President Xi Jinping had told reporters that there were three dreams for Chinese football: to qualify, host and win the World Cup. In 2014, China’s now top leader began rolling out programs to help fulfill that dream, including a mandatory soccer curriculum in schools, the establishment of 50,000 new soccer academies, and a committee of Communist Party leaders. high-level to oversee the program.

Meanwhile, Chinese real estate and technology companies got the hint and bought teams and stadiums, and imported top international talent. In pursuit of global sporting success, China’s top-tier league sat idle for four months in 2021 so the national team could train and compete for a World Cup spot.

However, they lost. The Chinese fans, accustomed to soccer failure and perhaps expecting it, greeted the defeat against Vietnam with a hurricane of indignation that took the discussion to the top of the trending topics lists on social networks. “Disgraceful” and “humiliating” were some of the most common ways Chinese fans characterized the defeat of a country with an army, economy and population only a fraction of its size. More specifically, many fans called for the government-funded team, one of Xi’s top priorities, to be disbanded and the money returned.

There will be no refunds. But there will be recriminations about the kinds of policy mistakes that led to China’s latest soccer failure.

Suspects, there are many. In December, China banned soccer players from having tattoos, and strongly recommended that those who do have them remove them. The policy is ill-advised: Many, if not most, of the world’s best players have tattoos. But the rule dovetails perfectly with recent crackdowns on entertainment figures deemed poor role models.

Similarly, China’s recent crackdown on civil society has stalled the creation of youth and community soccer teams. Without a base that evolves independently of China’s centralized authority, the Asian powerhouse has little hope of developing, let alone finding, soccer talent.

During February, these discussions and recriminations are relegated in favor of an Olympic spectacle that is captivating and distracting the national audience. But the good feelings aroused by China’s proud staging and growing number of medals won’t last forever.

Come fall and the start of the 2022 World Cup, Chinese fans will ask again: Why aren’t we there? So China’s most powerful leader since Mao will not have an answer.